Discuss: Exodus

I doubt this is “the most successful antipoverty program in the world,” as Bowden suggests, unless we conceptualize poverty in bare numeric form.  From having lived in El Salvador, I have seen how money from U.S. relatives can both sustain individuals and completely distort any local economy that might have existed.  I think we need more open boarders, a reform of economic laws, and also need to work together as nations to develop economies that are locally sustaining – and which don’t require the uprooting of workers from their families, cultures, and biomes.

Once again, Charles Bowden demonstrates himself as one of the finest writers on earth/human relations around. Whether you agree or disagree with his perspective, you can’t ignore the fact his writings are so much needed: vital, firey, and ultimately hugely eloquent and skilled. My hat is off to Bowden again!

I read the article and felt sadness for the great suffering. The other side of the coin is that the The reliance on undocumented worker in the construction on the Gulf Coast has created another under class.  Our government housed the Katrina victims in small trailer in State Parks while allowing the construction boss to hire the illegal immigrants.  If somehow our government has employed a work program for the Katrina victims, they could have developed skill to move out of proverty and into to productive lives. I agree with the writer that all poor people suffer at the hands of the agenda of the rich.

I see this massive migration as only partially a problem created by Nafta. There is an agricultural water crisis throughout southern Mexico and Central America.

Migrants flood north towards the economy undamaged by the type of environmental destruction that has savaged the ‘drought corridor’ between El Salvador and Guatemala, while Mexicans flee the lack of water and farmland by moving as their overwhelming choice first into the urban centers of Mexico and as their second choice north to the United States. The aquifers of Mexico are nearing exhaustion and soon will not be able to supply both their booming urban population and their agricultural industry.

Some sources I’ve read say that there is a 1:1 ratio between legal and illegal migrants in the United States at any moment. Since there are about 18 million legal Mexican migrants, there should be about 36 million Mexicans right now in America. Mexico’s population is about 100 million, so over 1/3 of that country is currently in the U.S. working and sending money home.

It will not stop there either. During the coming century, climatic change will dessicate much of Central America AND Mexico and their populations will move northwards into the United States and Canada as the habitability of these countries decreases. This is the reasoning behind the ‘secure fence act’ of 2006. But the idea that this invasion can be stopped at a fence is really naive. In Latin communities the exodus to the United States is sometimes called ‘La Reconquista’. Going to the U.S. to work, is very much part of growing up in Mexico. There are many popular songs about migration by norteno bands like ‘Los Tigres del Norte’. One song ‘Three Times a Wetback’ is really an anthem for the burgeoning migrant nation within America. These economic, political and environmental ‘refugees’ will continue to come in large waves, even if they have to fly in small planes or take boats. There is nowhere else for them to go.

Both pieces are very powerfully written examples of ORION’s exemplary standards of craft. My compliments.

I struggle each and every day with this very issue. I live in and teach school in the tiny rural migrant farming community of Aguila, AZ. (I have lived in AZ for over 40 years as an adult). Our small school (approx. 170 students K-8) is 98% Hispanic. We can only guess at how many are “illegal” as it is against the law to ask. We do know who is migrant and who isn’t and most are. We are a Title I school which means we provide a free breakfast/lunch program and all free school materials. Many of our students were born in the USA to families of illegal migrants. Our tax dollars pay for their health care. WIC (tax dollars) provides for many of the needs of the new baby and young children.

I am well aware of the poverty and suffering for I see it every day. On the other hand I sit through numerous meetings with parents, many who have been in this country for decades. They refuse to learn English even when it means that doing so would greatly help their own children and even though it is provided free of charge right here in Aguila by a man who is Hispanic and bilingual. They take their children out of school to go shopping , to go to the doctor, to go anywhere so the child can translate for them.

One of the above responses brought up the water crisis in MX and Central America. There is a huge water crisis throughout the entire desert SW of the USA. Another response mentioned the care given to victims of Katrina and suggested that if we could provide for them why not provide the same for the migrants? We do provide for the migrants. Thousands of our tax dollars - probably millions - are going directly to their aid while they pay no taxes because they are undocumented workers. Much of the money they make goes back to their families in MX or Central Am. This is a very noble thing for them to do but it is doing nothing to help support the US tax base which in turn helps to support them.

I am in no way denouncing anything Bowden had to say in his powerfully written essay. Charles Bowden is an excellent writer and one who has been on the front lines of this issue for a very long time. He sees things from a perspective different than my own. We need to find humane ways to solve this massive problem. Here in AZ the crime rampant and it is mostly Hispanics who are arrested for these crimes. Whether this is entirely true and fair I have no way of knowing. I do know that these people risk their lives to come to this country and once here continue to live in poverty and despair. Many turn to drugs and other forms of violence to ease their pain and suffering or perhaps to strike out in frustration at the entire system. I am also aware that none of our candidates have any answers. I do not believe that the massive wall we are building at a cost of billions of US tax dollars is going to do anything to alleviate the problem. The wall is nothing more than a monstrous bandaid. I have no answers - I wish I did. I try to do what I can to teach these children but I am frustrated everyday by the lack of participation and lack of support given us by the families of these children. I have 4th graders who were born in this country and educated in this country who still are unable to read and comprehend beyond a 1st or 2nd grade level because the only place they hear English is for a few hours a day here in this school. Aguila is a Hispanic community and as such they speak only Spanish. What this means for the educators is the ADE (AZ Dept. of Ed.) breathes down our backs at all times asking why we aren’t doing a better job and threatening to take our jobs if we can’t educate these children at grade level. We are in the middle of a catch-22 and there is no end in sight.

At the risk of touching the third rail of polite discussion, I would point out that this topic is but one of numerous examples globally where the problem is population. There is no shortage of food, fuel, water, fertile land, or anything else: rather there is a huge surplus of people.

Of course, this cuts to religion, culture, and other topics not to be brought up at parties, like sex and politics. But it is nonetheless true and avoiding the topic will not make it go away. It makes it worse.

If there is to be a future for our species, two conditions are necessary albeit not sufficient.

1. Population reduction, then stabilisation at a level where we can live in stasis with the rest of the biosphere. The number I have encountered often is 2 billion maximun.

2. A regime of energy capture that does not involve use of fossil solar input. It will be founded on current solar input—including wind and rain—or perhaps other means such as fusion.

We have to understand that we are the only species that has ever existed, and likely ever will, that reproduces in inverse proportion to our ability to care for our young. Collectively, if this deviant behavior is not overcome, we will have a short tenure here and, unfortunately, we will be the agents of another major significant event for many other species as well.

How sad, since it is unnecessary.

Gabriel, I agree with you 100%. I have brought up the issue of population before in such discussions and been soundly blasted. Thank you for bringing it up here. At this point zero population (un)growth is not even enough and unfortunately that is not going to happen. People are simply not going to stop procreating.

Hi;

Below is the link to the very good article titled “Exodus” in the July/August 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.  It was sent to me by a friend on Tuesday, June 24th.

“Exodus”, by Charles Bowden and Julian Cordona, is an article on the latest wave of migration over the Mexican border

Paragraphs sixteen through eighteen read as follows:
“There are three things that must be faced on the line. The federal agents are being corrupted by the money of drug smuggling and people smuggling. The flow of people is far greater than acknowledged (there is a village just across the wire from the Buenos Aires that handles between 600,000 and 800,000 migrants a year—and it is one little dot on the map of a border almost 1,900 miles long). And finally, this is not a bunch of workers simply coming north to toil a few months; this is an exodus of men, women, and children from nations that cannot feed them or clothe them or educate them. This is the true face of the global economy and it is killing the land all along the border, ground already savaged by a change in the weather as global warming proceeds.

Think of a giant ecological shift. Streams of one species, Homo sapiens, are moving into the United States in order to survive. The land they cross is pulverized, just as once the great herds of bison thundered across the plains and left trampled earth in their wake. Nothing can alter these facts so long as jobs exist in the United States. No level of terror—not the agents, nor the rapes, the murders, the painful deaths from thirst in the desert—nothing will deter a person who has no future in his homeland and can hear a fine future whispering to him just across the wire. Any successful effort to make migrants unemployable and to deport them will result in the explosion of Mexico, a meltdown that would make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

What we are witnessing is the most successful antipoverty program in the world—past or present. What we are witnessing is a movement as relentless as the migration of plants and animals as they flee the new infernos of global warming. What we are witnessing is a response by governments that is as dishonest and pointless as the fabled campaign to contain African bees. We are witnessing the future, and for all living things, the future is the only place to go.”

To me these three paragraphs hit the high points of the immigration crisis from Latin America into the USA.  They are:

(1) Globalization promoted by corrupt capitalist controlled governments.

(2) Mass extreme poverty in the Latin American working class resulting from globalization that only profits the capitalists and their corporations.

(3) Mass extreme poverty in the Latin American working class resulting from global climate change.

(4) The prospect of violent revolutions in Latin America that could conceivably topple corrupt pro-capitalist regimes, and in the process end NAFTA and CAFTA, if their impoverished and desperate working class cannot emigrate to the USA.

John P. Stoltenberg, P.E.
N8362 State Highway 67
P.O. Box 596
Elkhart Lake, WI
53020-0596
920-876-2184
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http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3040