the US should place a value of $1.17M per additional birth

We don't have the coal, we don't have the oil, we don't have the copper, the steel, the yadda yadda. Earth overshoot day was apparently last month. Less births is almost literally the only humane way I can think of to improve on that situation. That or cheap energy; the situation is hopeful on that front but we don't need to purposefully goose the birth rate since maybe something will go wrong with plan A.

It's getting better. Not as fast as it could or should, but it's getting better!!

2) Have even lawyers like you dropped the 'fewer' vs 'less' distinction? I would have thought that you were old and conservative enough that 'less Bangladeshis' would be to grating to write. :)

Most of my adult family members immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia as adults. They are still Bangladeshis. If you imported 50 million of them, and allowed them to vote and participate in civic institutions, you would turn Canada or Australia into Bangladesh.

You need both

That strategy is going to fail from simple math. Birthrates are dropping everywhere, and IIRC world fertility is at replacement or maybe even a little bit below it today. Immigrants have be born somewhere, and if that policy works at all, it will only amount to exporting the problem to places even less equipped to deal with it.

Do liberals really want to do what it takes to implement the immigration strategy (e.g. hold down Africa and keep it really poor, so its birthrates remain high and Western countries [and China, and India!] can raid it for population forever)?

I would guess that many are actually making a living fixing tv's in a nairobi slum, or conjuring their own pantheon in a south american jungle, etc, etc.

What is an actual reality is that more and more physical work is actually being completed by fewer and fewer people.

In my lifetime I've seen first hand, since the 1970s, mining and agriculture expand production dramatically with smaller work forces being required through the multiplying magic of SBFM (Seriously Big Flippin' Machines) - Haulpacks, Tractors, Ships, Trucking, Trains, have grown is size; blast patterns for fracturing rock have increased their field sizes, continuous conveyors moving 100s of tonnes per hour have multiplied in parallel.

As for fruit picking, maybe look at orchard automation - there are many examples of tight geometric spacings for trees that are robo-mowed to supress weeds and harvested by laying down ground sheets and using hydralic tree shakers to bring down and gather up fruit, etc.

Maybe watch more Landline - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline_(TV_series)

The companies go after the jobs that are culturally hip to go after. I initially wrote something here trying to describe which jobs should really be automated but it was so vague I now think we are clueless until we try.

You could [say] hardcode the asshole employee manager and he/it would no doubt be worse than the human asshole in more aspects than one but he/it would also have many advantages that we cant pretend to enumerate without doing the experiment.

Who is to say we cant feed the world if we build enough autonomous chicken farm guard bots with high speed solar powered egg drones?

Who is to say what a 60/hour web dev can do with the help of some robots?

Many countries are starting to see a critical lack of farmers, fishermen, hunters, and other people working in agriculture. Healthcare is also starting to suffer.

The robot automation will happen, probably either in our or the next generation's lifetimes, because there just aren't enough workers either due to lack of will (poor pay) or lack of literal humans.

As I see things, it's a fact that, 1.) Immigration exists and is good, and 2.) it doesn't take very many years of education to turn someone from a disadvantaged background into a scientifically savvy modern person. If the author of this article merely forgot that, then that's quite an oversight. But you're right, it was uncharitable of me to assume he didn't forget, and actually thinks that either 1) or 2) are false. So I retract my cynicism and replace it with constructive criticism.

Don't think of it as a craze. Think of it more like, America just had a president that referred to many poor countries as "shitholes" and tried to block immigration from them. And as someone who has people they care deeply about who are immigrants from those countries, I have an increased sensitivity to certain dogwhistles which *absolutely* are being blown by some people. If I accidentally hear that dog whistle where the person only meant to discuss wealth, I hope you can understand why.