President Obama decreed that Haitian citizens living here illegally would get a pass for the time being. A news item about this in the Washington Post brought proponents and opponents of illegal immigration out of the wood work. One proponent made the standard arguments, quoting from the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, along with the "we're a nation of immigrants" stuff. If you have friends/relatives/workmates making these big-hearted arguments, you might find my rebuttal useful. Here it is [the graph shows US population growth BTW]:
joeyangel1 rebutted those opposed to letting hundreds of thousands of illegals stay by quoting the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty ("give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free)", then invoked the standard leftist arguments that we're a nation of immigrants and that anyone who objects to illegal immigration ought to go back to where they came from themselves.
Well, that's somewhere between fatuous and insane.
Point 1--the Emma Lazarus poem:
Lazarus wrote her poem in 1883. She was campaigning on behalf of fellow Jews in Russia who were being attacked by Russian pogroms.
In 1883 the world's population was around 1.6 billion. America's population was around 58 million.
The world's population has quadrupled since then, and America's--without adding appreciably to its territory--has quintupled.
So yeah, in Lazarus' day America needed immigrants. Now, with five times as many people...it doesn't. Unless they have skills or investment capital we need.
Unless you're invoking our compassion.
Many Haitian are starving today, and they certainly need our help. Many are also deserving people.
Um, according to United Nations estimates, ONE BILLION PEOPLE are starving today. They live in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia. Starving Haitians aren't starving any more or less than any of these other one billion people.
So by your logic, we are morally obligated to take them all in.
That gets you an America with the same demographics as India, which has a middle class about the size of our entire current population--plus a billion starving, illiterate peasants with no job skills other than manual labor.
So quoting Lazarus may make you feel good about what a wonderful, compassionate guy you are, but trying to apply that poem to the radically different situation today is ridiculous. And I seriously doubt you'd actually vote to let those one billion worthy souls move here. If that's true you're a hypocrite as well.
Point 2: "we're a nation of immigrants." I'm not an immigrant. I was born in California, and I've lived here all my life.
If by "nation of immigrants" you mean ancestry, every single nation on Earth is a nation of immigrants except for Kenya/Tanzania and thereabouts, where the human race evolved.
By your logic we'd all have to move back there. Or if you just mean people who displaced other people--and not counting the Neanderthals as people--everyone in Europe today except for the Celts, Basques and Sami, pretty much, would have to move back to central Asia. Mexicans of Aztec ancestry would have to move back to what is now the United States. Navahoes would have to cede much of their territory to Hopi. The Japanese would have to cede Japan to the Ainu, except for those with Ainu blood--which is most of them.
For that matter, I'm 3/32 Cherokee. So 3/32 of me gets to stay? Which 3/32?
I have to assume people make arguments like these because they were never trained to actually think.
Point 3: Applying your logic to the Dominican Republic:
The Haitians occupy 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola. The other 2/3 comprise the Dominican Republic. It's easy to tell which is which if you fly over the island. Haiti is the part with no trees that's turning into a desert.
Now by your logic, the 10 million Dominicans should let the 10 million Haitians walk over the border. Dominica has plenty of trees the Haitians could chop down for firewood, and only 1/3 the population density of Haiti.
So--you're the president of the Dominican Republic. Here come the Haitians, heading for your border, desperate. Your nation isn't destitute but it ain't rich. Taking in all the Haitians will with 100% certainty destroy your country. And BTW they speak a different language and have a different culture.
What would you, with your big compassionate heart....do?
Conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks wrote a column on Haiti. Well, of course. Everyone's writing a column on Haiti. Liberals want to provide succor. Conservatives tut-tut about Haiti's dysfunctionality. Here's my comment on Brooks' column:
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The underlying tragedy is overpopulation. Just look at Haiti's stats.
In 1950 Haiti's population was 3.1 million. Last year it was 9.8 million. Haiti's population has tripled in 50 years. Tripled. And Haiti has the highest birthrate in the New World.
Odd that Mr. Brooks failed to note this as a possible contribution to Haiti's desperate state--which was desperate before the quake.
The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has the same population size living on twice as much land, and Dominican average income is six times that of Haiti. The Dominican Republic is lush and verdant, as Haiti once was. But the Haitians have cut down 98% of the Haiti's once-abundant forests. The uncovered land has lost much of its topsoil, turning much of Haiti into semi-desert.
Of course it didn't help that France demanded and got crippling reparations for over a century after independence. But that doesn't explain why it has been consistently one of worst-managed countries on Earth. Note that there are 800,000 Haitians living illegally in the Dominican Republican, but no Dominican in his right mind would move to Haiti.
If Haiti still had a population of 3 million instead of nearly 10, this quake wouldn't have toppled Haiti into the abyss.
China's one child policy, constantly decried by American politicians both left and right, had kept China from mass starvation. Haiti, dominated by a church that forbids any form of birth control device, including condoms, is what China might have become without that policy. The Dominican Republican has an equal percentage of adherents of the same medieval religion, so obviously other factors contribute to the stark difference between the two societies. Neither is indigenous BTW. European diseases killed off most of the native Tainos long, long ago.
Note that over the last 50 years Haiti's people have greatly reduced the island's ability to support them. Hence the constant efforts of Haitians to move into Dominica and do to it what they've done to their own country, as well as constant efforts to move anywhere else they can get to.
So aid efforts will be fruitless in the long run unless they're tied to Haiti adopting China's one child policy, along with providing free abortions to anyone of any age--no questions asked--and free sterilization as well. Americans with tender sensibilities will flutter their hands at the barbarity of such infringements on people's rights.
They haven't seen Haiti. One of the downsides of our comfortable middle class existence here is that most of us have never gone to sleep hungry, or not in a bed (unless we've chosen to go camping). I've traveled fairly extensively in the third world, and I've seen what overpopulation does to the land, to the sea, to the people. It creates misery and it turns forest into farmland into desert and the fishermen's nets come up nearly empty.
The stats I've quoted are easy to verify. If you think something less draconian than harsh population reduction will work in Haiti--propose away. But you will realize, somewhere in your mind, that the gentler measures you're proposing won't work--and you're only proposing them to make yourself feel good.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. Haiti's worst enemies are those who help them stay the same. In the mental health world such people are called enablers.
Brooks is right about Haiti's society being dysfunctional--and one that's bad for 95% of its inhabitants. But Brooks quails from the measures it would take to fix Haiti. And of course the Democratic establishment will do no better than Republicans like Brooks.
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