Does City Council have courage to stop growth?

The Feb. 4 edition of the Times-Call is Exhibit A in the quest to understand why we see sprouting apartments in Longmont. Prairie Mountain Media (owners of the Times-Call and the Boulder Camera) and our city and state governments fully support the conditions which have led us to this. Let me be clear: This is all about immigration which provides cheap labor to a wealthy class. Immigration causes many Americans to work two or three jobs and they can barely afford an apartment on their depressed wages.

Japan has extremely restricted immigration, and it has a large middle class. Its population is slightly shrinking, and this means that everyone has housing. Prairie Mountain Media (Times-Call) uses emotional hot buttons to get us to support immigration (Feb. 4 front page article), but we see no articles from them or the Associated Press on the economic impoverishment of Americans caused by immigration.

Matthew Popkin, recently appointed to the City Council, wrongly assumes that growth is inevitable. Stop all immigration, and we won’t need more apartments. This is not xenophobia, this is Econ 101, supply and demand. Immigration on H-1B visas also depresses the wages of engineers, and we see that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, will “go to war” to preserve H1-B visas. My fellow engineers, Elon Musk is not your friend.

Can Popkin and the Longmont City Council do anything about this? Of course they can. They can stop all housing construction. Let the growth go elsewhere and expose the immigration policies of Gov. Polis and our sanctuary cities.

Does the Longmont City Council and Matthew Popkin have the political courage to stop growth? Or do they serve the wealthy class with their open borders and their rental profits from mushrooming apartments?

— Michael McNeil, Mead