Gumballs vs Starfish: Two Views of Immigration

Over the years, I’ve had many people share a video with me that claims to use gumballs to illustrate the problem with allowing large numbers of immigrants into America.  I watched the video several years ago and wrote out some thoughts to share with a friend.  I’ve shared basically that same response many times since then, and I’ve finally gotten smart enough to copy and paste it into a blog article.  Here is my response to the video Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs featuring Roy Beck and produced by NumbersUSA:

I watched the video and I noted that it makes the same faulty assumption that is touted by socialists around the world. As Beck was speaking about the vast number of people who were desperately poor, I kept asking myself why the size of that number was significant, and Beck answered that question when he mentioned the effect that allowing immigrants into our nation has on the amount of resources available to the poor who are already in America. This admission reveals that Beck is basing his view of immigration on the socialistic philosophy that the amount of wealth available to the people of any society is limited to a fixed amount.

Socialists view the wealth of a nation as a finite pie that is cut into various sized pieces. According to their philosophy, I can only increase my portion of the pie if a portion belonging to someone else is made smaller. If this view of wealth is true, then allowing more and more immigrants into our nation will prove to be very bad for our economy since adding more people will mean that the pie has to be cut into a larger number of portions; and every time the number of portions increases, an equivalent number of already existing portions must decrease.

This philosophy was proven false many years ago by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations, and it has been demonstrated to be false by capitalist scholars many times since. The wealth of a nation is not a finite pie that is divided up into more and more portions as the population increases. The wealth of a nation is more like a body of water that overflows its banks and becomes larger as more individuals are added to the population already present. According to the capitalist view, every time the number of drops of water increases, the amount of water available to the nation also increases.

The difference between these two views is that socialists view people as takers whereas capitalists view people as contributors. On the socialist view, an increase in the number of takers is a bad thing, but on the capitalist view, an increase in the number of contributors is a good thing. The claims Beck made in this video only make sense from a socialist view of the economy. If an increase in the population means that there are more takers among whom our small pie of wealth must be divided, then it is critically important that we stop the flow of immigrants into our nation. However, if an increase in the population means that there are more drops of water in our ever growing pool of wealth, then there is no economic reason to stop the flow of immigrants into our society.

I tend to think that the capitalist view is correct. The wealth of a nation is not a finite pie that must be divided into ever smaller pieces as the population increases. Instead, the wealth of a nation is a pool that grows ever larger as more and more people are added to it. I think that the fact that people want to come to our nation is a good thing. As we add more and more people to our pool of wealth, our wealth will increase, and we will be able to accomplish more with that wealth. As we welcome the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses, we gain rest, wealth, and purpose for both them and ourselves. And as we open the land of liberty to those chained in sin, we increase our opportunity lead them down the path to true freedom in Jesus Christ. Instead of closing our borders to southern immigrants, I think that we should throw the doors wide open and welcome as many as are willing to come in.
 
There is another response that I’ve occasionally shared with people who reference the gumball video.  Instead of sharing my own thoughts, I will sometimes point people to another video entitled The Starfish Story.  Comparing this video to the gumball video reveals a sharp contrast between the socialist view of immigration and what should be the Christian view.  Take a moment to watch The Starfish Story here, and then keep reading below the video for an explosive expose of the organization who produced the gumball video.

The gumball video was produced by the organization NumbersUSA.  Did you know that the man who founded Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA also founded the Society for Genetic Education which was a eugenics society? John Tanton was an open eugenicist who founded his various immigration organizations with the express goal "to slow the economic growth of the developed nations, rather than stimulate it." Tanton argued that:
 
Immigration may be good for the vast majority of the migrants themselves. They find new economic opportunities and in the special case of refugees, new freedoms. It emerges, however, that their migration in the main runs counter to the real interest of both the countries of origin and the recipient countries, and the world as a whole.
 
The harm that Tanton saw in immigration was the potential dilution of white blood with that of the lesser races.  I realize that most of the Christians who have shared the gumball video with me do not share Tanton’s motivations, but they are unwittingly advancing his philosophy by propagating the socialist and eugenic views of his organization.  We need to be careful as Christians to base even our political and economic views on the Word of God so that we avoid the philosophical traps of this world.