July 4th Reflection

Happy July Fourth! My wish is that all Americans want a free country today and tomorrow. Russ has been watching the UK elections and the results are still not final.

As we spent so many years living in the UK we hold it fondly in our hearts, but are glad we don’t live there now. Russ mentioned that since Brexit there has been no foreign investment in the country. Without immigrants the economy has not grown and they don’t have the tax base they need to keep up services.

The idea that natives wanted to keep “others” out of their small island and return to some fictionalized time has been a failure. There are not enough workers to do the low end jobs that keep a country running. Without immigrants there are not enough lorry drivers, farm workers, health care aids, dish washers, construction workers, line cooks, meat packers, rubbish collectors, outdoor maintenance people, house cleaners and the list goes on and on. Without those immigrants working jobs and paying taxes there will not be enough in the coffers to cover health care and retirements for pensioners. We would do well to learn from their mistakes.

Undoing Brexit is much harder than enacting it was. Even if the UK loosened immigration it is hard to attract the right people to come to your country after you have treated them badly and thrown them out earlier. It may be too late for us to learn from that mistake.

Isolationist policies have never paid off. The greatest times of growth are when there have been free and fair trade. We need others to buy our goods and to get that to happen we also have to be open. What British goods are we buying right now? We need to learn from them.

An uneducated electorate often chooses short sighted, short term choices to things they are unhappy with. Being staunchly proud of being uneducated does not serve anyone in the long run. Educate yourself on how countries with isolationist policies are doing. Then decide if that is the way you would like your country to go.

It will be too late to change when we don’t have workers doing the jobs we need. It will be too late when Social Security is underfunded because we don’t have immigrant workers paying into the system. It will be too late when you want a home health care aid to come take care of you because you can’t take care of yourself, and none are to be found.

On this Independence Day remember we were founded by immigrants. None of the founding fathers were native Americans of more than a couple generations. Unless you are 100% Native American you too are a descendant of an immigrant. Never forget that.