On the way home today, while listening to the gabble of outrage over the separation of children from illegal immigrant families, it occurred to me that this can be seen as smoke coming from the real fires, which are the motivations for these families to leave their homes. After all, most people, even Americans, would prefer to at least stay in their own countries; many prefer to stay in the state or city in which they grew up.
The reasons given on the radio involve fleeing from violence and poverty, and that, so far, has been where it stops. So I started wondering, what is causing those problems?
Then I recalled a report I read long, long ago, about how the agricultural sectors of Third World countries can be devastated by the agricultural policies of First World countries. My vague memory went like this: the excess agricultural output of the First World countries must be disposed of – profitably – in some manner. Export is the among the easiest ways to do that. In order to grow the market, the First World governments subsidize the farmers and their exports. Soon, food is flooding the market of some Third World country.
We grow food as a cash crop; our hypothetical victims grow it as a food crop. Soon, because of the subsidies, the native growers are priced out of the market, they lose their shirts and their farms, and now they’re poverty stricken.
And it’s not tractors and all the paraphernalia of modern farming left sitting in their fields – it’s the natives themselves, who worked the fields en masse, who are left with nothing at all. Because they’re not the United States, they lack both the political freedom and the technology of Americans. Finding new jobs or getting training is not easy – or even feasible.
What to do next? There’s nothing available at home, so, like so many Americans before them, honorably or not, they pursue what will help their family survive – moving to the United States.
So how do I prove this assertion? Honestly, I don’t. I don’t have the time, nor the expertise. But I can point. Here’s the numbers on American agricultural exports from the United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service:
Yes, that says $billions down the side there. $140 billion isn’t chicken feed. How about just to Mexico? This is from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture:
I wondered if there was another way to approach the problem, and there is, although it’s somewhat problematical – looking at trends in rural population. This is from Trading Economics:
Certainly one can argue about improved technology and that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t care to try to explain how the rural population of Mexico lost 3 points over 9 years.
The Trump Administration is being excoriated – rightly – over its behavior with regard to immigration, from simply ripping families to pieces to lying with statistics, as WaPo points out in this article[1]. But this controversy, as important as it is since it illustrates the moral incompetence of this Administration and its allies, conceals the truly important question, which is How much is the United States responsible for these ills that are forcing the law-abiding foreign citizens from their homes and to the United States?
How much of this have we really brought on ourselves through ignorance, arrogance, and adherence to the capitalistic ideology?
I’m not a zealot on either side of the capitalism question. The benefits are unquestionable, but the potential for abuse is also unquestionable, and the tendency to plunge head-long into new ventures can rupture economies and societies which do not have the resources to be flexible in the face of a changing economy.
Not that this is even bad, for the forces of the status quo can result in their own special brand of misery if they repress economic wealth, or slow medical research, or pick your favorite societal good. But we need to be aware that stopping or even slowing the flow of immigrants may be bloody impossible until we understand – and possibly take responsibility for – the causes of the poverty and gangs in the various countries from which desperate immigrants originate.
1Summary, they’re stripping context and playing the small numbers game. There’s a rant somewhere in here about government being an eternal search for truth, but I’ll not do that for now.
