America belongs to immigrants because immigrants make the nation more powerful, says a former Wall Street Journal writer who is now working for the New York Times.

Immigrants produce more babies, work harder, create more jobs, and have more ideas, claims the revealing column by immigration-advocate Bret Stephens:

I speak of Americans whose families have been in this country for a few generations. Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning… Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be — when “we” had just come off the boat… I’m the child of immigrants and grew up abroad, I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers — the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it’s precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh. That used to be a cliché, but in the Age of [President Donald] Trump it needs to be explained all over again. We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out.

Stephens’ article includes several apples-to-orange statistical flubs, plus grotesque generalizations, and regurgitated business-funded agitprop. For example, Stephens says the United States “is a country of immigrants” even though roughly 84 percent of people living in the United States were born in the United States — despite the elite-backed huge influx of immigrants over the last few decades. Similarly, Stephens treats immigrants as a uniform mass, as if he believes that migrating MS-13 gang members are as beneficial as are freedom-seeking inventors.

But the article’s main feature is the progressive view that people — Americans, foreigners, gang-bangers, whatever — should be selected by the all-powerful State to serve the State’s high-IQ progressive leadership class in D.C. and Wall Street.

That view is shared by former President Barack Obama, who told supporters in November 2014 that:

Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration. If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks’ — even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.

That government-first view allows Stephens to ignore the Declaration of Independence which declared that people’s rights came from a higher source than government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The elitist view also allows Stephens to welcome mass immigration because — not despite, but because — it hugely distorts the nation’s economy in favor of elite business leaders and major cities.

Mass immigration spikes profits and stock values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees, drives up real estate prices, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and sidelines marginalized Americans and their families. Mass immigration also imposes the social “diversity” which helps Stephens and his allies as they claim a Darwinian right to fragment, divide and rule Americans without any rude interference by the voters on November 8, 2016.

In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 campaign on a promise to put Americans first. He told his inauguration listeners that he would hold to a policy of “Buy American, Hire American,” he has started enforcing immigration laws and is pushing for a “merit-based” immigration plan that would raise the productivity and wealth of Americans.

Read the New York Times column here.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com