So much of TV commentary concerns news-of-the-day trivia that it’s nice occasionally to have reflections on the Big Picture. Tucker Carlson did just that during his opening monologue on Thursday about the ways that immigration anarchy is changing America’s future — and not for the better.

In particular, extreme population growth fueled by foreigners (what’s happening now) will change the culture, since the newbies come only for the dollars, not to become Americans.

Assimilation is generally expected by citizens of new residents, but the topic is little discussed by the current crop of Democrats vying for a White House slot. In fact some, like Julian Castro, embrace invasion via open borders even though traditional citizens once took pride in America as a “nation of laws.” Now, the left demands Diversity above all else, more than any other value.

The United States used to value educated immigrants who could help with the work that needed done. Instead, we are now helpless to stop a million uneducated Hondurans and other Central Americans from illegally entering the country this year. They will supply cheap, simple labor for a while to insatiable business owners, but that will end soon when the smart machines take their jobs, as described on this blog for years and observed by Tucker in his remarks.

Experts agree: fundamental technological change is coming to all sorts of workplaces, and official Washington would be wise to pay attention.

You could slide over to 3:05 minutes in the video below to avoid a couple nonsense clips from AOC delivered from the floor for some odd reason:

TUCKER CARLSON (3:05): Negativity. That’s what the activist left now calls disagreement. They are not interested at all in what anyone outside their tiny little world has to say. Every day, you see Democratic presidential candidates endorsing some new policy that has pretty much zero public support, but it sounds like something woke baristas in Brooklyn would be excited about.

Banning ICE, ignoring federal immigration law, giving amnesty to millions. Decriminalizing illegal border crossings which is to say totally open borders. Anyone can come. When they get here, give them free stuff. Nobody really wants any of this even most of the people saying know, it wouldn’t work.

The public would revolt if you tried it. If half of Guatemala moved here tomorrow, which is exactly what would happen, it wouldn’t help anyone. This is all fantasy.

Countries have borders. That’s what makes them countries. Someday, the AOC moment will pass. It’s too stupid to continue. And at that point, sober Democrats will wake up and rejoin the adult conversation and progress. What do we want from our immigration system?

Well, here are some of the questions they should have to answer when that happens. First and most obvious, how many immigrants should we admit every year? What’s the ideal number? We currently take a little over a million every year, legally. Should we double that to over two million? How about 10 million immigrants a year? How about 20 million? Is there any number that’s too high? And if so, why?

While we are at it, what’s the ideal population of the United States? Immigration effects population size more than any other factor. We’re at about 325 million people in the United States today and that’s a lot.

Our highways are crumbling, many of our cities are painfully overcrowded. How big should we get? Four hundred million? Six hundred million? A billion people? And if you are pushing to increase the size of our population and they are, what’s your plan for keeping our natural environment pristine?

Crowded countries are polluted. Every single one of them. Tell us why we should want that here? What sort of skills and education should we look for in immigrants? Not all immigrants are the same? Some start wildly successful companies. Many others go on food stamps. They are not interchangeable widgets, they are human beings. Who should we prefer? What’s the ideal level of education an immigrant to this country should have?

Big business doesn’t want you to ask this question, they like their immigrants low-skilled and cheap. Ocasio-Cortez does, too. But what happens when technology kills their jobs? And it will. All the major Democrats running for president take money from the technology barons, many of them support self-driving cars. So what do you do with hundreds of thousands of unemployment immigrant cab drivers? Do they all go on welfare?

And speaking of, what sort of government services are immigrants entitled to exactly? Democrats promise universal healthcare. Do immigrants get that, too? Who pays for it? How many immigrants can our system support? Do we have enough doctors and nurses and hospitals to treat the number of immigrants we want to admit? Same question for schools.

The real answer is, of course, nobody knows. Because as of today, we have no idea how many immigrants live illegally in the United States. Shouldn’t we find out before we make more plans? And once we do find out, what do we do with them? Who gets deported? Anyone? Or do all of them get to stay? What if the real number of people living here illegally is north of 25 million? And that’s entirely possible. That’s bigger than the population of 48 out of 50 states. It’s enough to change this country completely and forever.

Do all of them get citizenship and voting rights? What about gun rights? And do they immediately start paying into the Reparations for Slavery Fund that Democrats are now promoting? How do you explain that to them? Can we watch that conversation?

And finally what about America’s ideals? Democrats are always talking about values when the subject of immigration comes up. They quote from the poem on the Statue of Liberty and tell you about their grandparents.

Well, previous waves of immigrants were asked to buy into this country’s most basic ideals — religious pluralism, free speech, political freedom, equality under the law. Our schools made them learn English and tried to instill patriotism. We called it assimilation. We thought it was critical to our social cohesion. Are we still for that? Do we still think we have values to impart or do we imagine that huge groups of people with nothing in common can share the same country without fighting each other?

It’s an important question — maybe the most important question of all. We never hear anyone ask it. Anyone who dares ask it is banned from Twitter. Instead, you hear the endless drone of self-righteous children barking about racism. That’s not enough. The decisions we make today about immigration are irreversible. It will help determine the health of the country we leave to our grandchildren. We should be a lot more serious than we are.