immigration

Philippe Legrain's puerile veneration of globalization and free market economics is, for its outrageous simplicity, alluring to some in the same way that Ayn Rand's uncompromising fantasies drew a cult following. His call for open borders is so boldly brazen that it disarms many of his incredulous audience in the manner that Milton Friedman or Julian Simon did theirs. But a glance at any best sellers' list will reveal that is typically those who stake out extreme and provocative positions without solid empirical foundation who attract readers and the favour of publishers. While those authors and commentators who are better informed of a broader and deeper knowledge, on the other hand, often lose their market edge because a more balanced account is inherently less exciting.

In fact, in his book review of Immigrants:Your Country Needs Them, Australian critic Mark O'Connor characterized Philippe Legrain as essentially "ill-read", "a rhetorician, not a thinker", who in his euphoric assessment of a world where mobility was unimpeded "ignores inconvenient issues of resources, spaces, greenhouse emissions and environmental degradation."

Like a tireless door-to-door salesman of a quack remedy that subsequent lab analysis would show to be lethal and fraudulent in its claims, the infamous open-borders advocate, economist and journalist Philippe Legrain knocked on French Canada's door recently to speak to the biweekly magazine L'actualitie. The message was practically the same one he has given to the Economist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Prospect Magazine, to the BBC and many foreign publications.

The pitch is: “Hey Canada (or America, or Australia etc.). Not enough water? Here's the medicine. Open your borders to limitless millions! Housing costs too high? Open your borders to limitless millions! Almost out of agricultural land? Open your borders to limitless millions! Educational institutions and medical system over-burdened? You guessed it. Open your borders to limitless millions! It's good for them and good for you too.”

Actually Legrain did not say that verbatim, but in so many words. For one thing he has no evident concern or awareness of any ecological consequences from his miracle cure. It is enough for him that bringing down national borders would allegedly double the size of the world economy. The effect of this on greenhouse emissions or biodiversity is simply not on his radar screen. But it is on the radar screen of the Royal Academy of Sciences who according to Monbiot has virtually stated that economic growth will have to be halted if we are to escape that critical two degree rise in global temperatures. Clearly Legrain's economic utopia would be an environmental dystopia.

When asked by L'Actualitie why we should abolish all borders and open all countries to freedom of movement, Legrain responded with the same line that he had given the New York Times six months before in October. "It is first of all a moral question. We should end this global apartheid by which we set the door wide open for rich and well-educated foreigners but close them for poor ones thereby forcing them to stay in their poverty. It is also a humanitarian question", in that according to the IMF immigrants send $300 billion in remittances to their home countries, "which go straight to the pockets of local people." But unfortunately he doesn't appreciate that from the pockets of local people it goes straight back into the pockets of corrupt policemen and officials as bribes. Remittances take the edge off the worst of third world poverty and emigration allows incompetent regimes to export their poor, providing a safety valve so that corruption and overpopulation never gets solved. How many potential Nelson Mandelas and Lech Walesas would be lost to emigration under a global free movement protocol?

I must confess that I find it somewhat galling when an economist of any stripe should protest like Legrain that "it is abhorrent that the rich and the educated are allowed to circulate around the world more or less freely, while the poor are not." Mr. Legrain should know that there are lots of things that the rich can do with their money that the poor can't in the marvelous free-market economy that he champions. They all can drive hummers if they want to, for example. Does that mean that, as a matter of equity, every one in Bangladesh should be afforded a hummer? Migration has vast ecological consequence too. If Mr. Legrain wants to vent his closet socialist conscience, why doesn't express abhorrence over the low wages that his unskilled immigrants are making everywhere in the developed world?

"A conservative position that encourages free trade and restricted immigration is not contradictory. Simply put, importing tomatoes is not the same thing as importing people.

Harvard economist George J. Borjas

Thomas Sowell also stated that people are not commodities, as commodities are consumed, while people generate more people, and immigrants impose a cost on the country. In his Canadian interview, Legrain argued that immigrants consume goods and services and generate economic activity, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse. What he did not mention, however, was the 2004 report by the Centre for Immigration Studies that showed that illegal immigrants consumed $10.6 billion more in services than they paid in taxes. Nor did he comment on the 1997 metastudy by the National Research Council that concluded that while immigration raises over-all output, the aggregrate additional net benefit to the U.S. native-born is nugatory--wiped out by taxpayer funded transfer payments to immigrants.

As for Britain, a House of Lords committee reported on April 1st of 2008 that ten years of record immigration has produced virtually no benefits to the country. The report argues that the 6 billion pounds that foreign workers supposedly add to the nation's wealth each year must be balanced against their use of services like health and education and the growth of the population. The error of conventional government assessments of migrant benefits to economic growth (15-20%), according to Professor David Coleman of Oxford University, is that it has excluded costs from crime, security, race relations and imported ailments like TB. And, according to visiting Professor Richard Pearson of the University of Sussex Centre for Migration Research, "these migrants are likely to be displacing, and reducing the incentive on employers to recruit and train low-skilled, indigenous workers."

If these are the results of a Labour government that critics say has lost control of the nation's borders, issued too many work permits and should not have exposed the labour market to Eastern Europe, what would have been the result if they had followed Philippe Legrain's formula for success and thrown open the borders entirely? One pill makes you sick so you take three or four more?

Legrain of course, can no doubt conjure up a study to show wage improvement in the wake of mass immigration, but other studies by more eminent economists like Borjas can counter them. But can't Philippe Legrain be honest here? Does he really believe that big employers lobby governments for more immigration so that they can raise wage levels? Is that why Bill Gates went to Congress to ask to loosen H-1B visa regulations and raise caps, as a philanthropic measure to improve the wages of IT workers in America? Give us a break, Mr. Legrain. It is as Garrett Hardin said, "immigrant labour pauperizes local labour." What is most sickening about Legrain's argument is that he presents it mostly as a cause of social justice for the global poor while it is in fact, really a cause to bring cheap labour to the developed world and improverish its indigenous working class. As socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont observed, five million middle income workers in America have been caught in a vice between out-sourcing and cheap immigrant labour and have dropped into the ranks of poverty during the Bush era. Even more sickening than Legrain's hypocrisy though has been the collusion of leftists and liberals in it. Imagine if Charles Dickens had teamed up with the Manchester school. Contemporary leftists are not internationalists. They are globalists, unwitting collaborators in the pyramid scam of runaway population growth that cloaks the naked profit motive under the attractive guise of cultural diversity and human rights.

Now for the old chestnut. The one Legrain repeats ad nauseum in countless interviews and essays in reference to several countries. The famous "they do work that locals won't do" routine. For example, he recently stated in his blog that "with France's growth slowing, its sclerotic labour market could do with an infusion of foreign blood—of hard-working , enterprising people who are willing to do the jobs that French people can't or won't." There is always an inference that native workers aren't hard-working, or "enterprising", and as far as a "sclerotic" labour market in a slow growing France is concerning, there is an alternative translation for that. The workers of France are benefiting from a "tight" labour market in a "stable" economy. As one should know, but many including Legrain apparently don't, there is no such thing as jobs that Frenchmen, Americans, Canadians or Australians "won't do". Merely jobs they are unwillingly to do at the wages offered. The phrase "they do work that locals won't do" evidences equivalent ignorance to other phrases that have consigned to the lexicographical museum like "I drive better when I'm drunk" or "my wife had it coming."

Legrain's open borders recipe, aside from presenting monstrous adjustment problems for recipient countries, would also pose problems for poor countries, one would think. When asked by L'Actualitie if they would not be crippled by an exodus of doctors and engineers, Legrain was cavalier and dismissive. Émigré doctors would only meet 12% of current needs if they were forced to return now, so therefore it was better just to assist developing countries in training more doctors. And then what? So they in turn could leave for the First World? Is that Legrain's vision? India and Africa as a big medical school for the West?

Philippe Legrain is not very re-assuring about terrorism either. Since "99.99% of immigrants aren't terrorists" then border controls don't make sense as a deterrent to terrorists. OK, Mr. Legrain, since 99.99% of all air-line passengers aren't bombers, on any plane that you are boarding, we won't bother to do any security screening or luggage checks.

It would seem reasonable, would it not, that when toying with the fate of 6.7 billion people and 194 plus countries that before unleashing a sweeping change of Philippe Legrain's prescription we first test the waters by leaving one or two nations defenceless against incoming hordes. Actually the experiment has already been conducted. Does anybody know how things have working out for Tibet the last little while? How have the ethnic Serbians made out in Kosovo? How did the Poles like their open borders in September of 1939? Must admit, those hard-working enterprising Germans did work that the Poles would not do.

Legrain doesn't favour a kind of incremental, phased relaxation of borders, but rather the shock therapy of an immediate global village.

I think it prudent then, despite Legrain's assurances, to first test the market as it were by granting an unlimited number of visas to all third word economists who wish live and work alongside Mr. Legrain in the UK. With an economist coming out of every manhole cover to bid for jobs as columnists with the Guardian and the Times and so forth, and as commentators on the BBC, Philippe Legrain could test his hypothesis that immigrants raise the wages of local labour.

If this pilot project was pronounced a success and British sovereignty subsequently dissolved, then I could look forward to moving into Legrain's London flat, with a host of my relatives, who have always fancied living in the great city. Even if it contained only the 76 square metres of space that the average British dwelling does, I am sure Mr. Legrain, as a matter of logical consistency, could have no objection to moving over and making room for us. After all, a man who favours open borders can hardly oppose open houses.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
28 March 2008

Rupert Murdoch's Australian Newspaper in an article Migrant workers scoring top pay" has made use of figures which which purportedly show that immigrants earn more, rather than less than their Australian equivalents, , as if to answer any possible objection to Australia's current record high rate of immigration.

SKILLED temporary migrant workers are earning on average $15,000 more than their Australian counterparts, undermining trade union claims that the system is being abused to undercut local wages.

Figures obtained by The Australian show that holders of 457 visas, which allow temporary skilled migrants to work in Australia for up to four years, are earning more than the average salaries of local workers across all industries in which they are employed.

The figures have reignited the debate over the use of foreign workers, with the Opposition seizing on the data as "dispelling the myth" that temporary skills workers are driving down wages, but unions and the Rudd Government insist that many visa holders are exploited by unscrupulous employers.

Of course, notwithstanding these purportedly average figures, there still remains many documented examples of ruthless exploitation of immigrant workers, and their depressing on the value of the labour of many in Australia's current workforce and this remains a valid reason to oppose high immigration.

However, even if it were not true as the figures in the Australian purport to show, the case against immigration should not begin and end with that question alone, rather it should most of all concern what serves the best interests of the existing inhabitants of this country. Displacing existing workers by immigrant workers, whether those workers are paid more or less is not in their interests.

If we are to believe the free market economists, then the unstated conclusion to be drawn these statistics is that immigrant workers are paid better because they are more productive and skilled than their Australian counterparts.

However, other factors may help increase the amounts that skilled immigrants earn. One would be that they are inherently more mobile and hence more able to move to where better wages are on offer.

At this moment in time the Australian economy is hardly a typical economy by world standards. The ever-escalating level of exports of our finite endowment of mineral resources as well as the subdivision of bushland and agricultural land for residential development means that there is a wealth available for those with the niche skills required for this economic activity that would not be available in other economies. It should not be altogether surprising if much of this finds its way into pockets of skilled migrants, but this economic activity is unsustainable in the longer the longer term, and the wealth generated is at an unacceptable cost to the environment and future generations. Without these distortions in the Australian economy the picture would be very different.

Wherever the ultimate truth may lie in claims and counterclaims about relative wage levels in Australia's highly dysfunctional economy, this article is typical of the shallow self-serving treatment given to the complex and socially divisive issue of immigration by the Murdoch press. Amongst the many other questions not even acknowledged here or in any of its other pro-population-growth propaganda is the well understood effect of population growth adding to housing hyper-inflation, traffic congestion, destruction of bio-diversity, water shortages, demands for services that our governments can no longer meet and the ongoing decline in our quality of life.

See also Immigration myths demolished by economics journalist, Immigration as the quick fix

If the Canada of 1965 could have been preserved in aspic its medicare system might have been viable. But how is it now to contend with the massive numbers who make major claims on hospital services? Tim Murray, Director of Immigration Watch Canada describes the strains that runaway immigration levels have placed on Canada's health system.

A cynic might characterize Canada's medicare system as the universal, free, democratic and egalitarian access to a two-year waiting list. You jump the queue only if you have the bucks and the referral to jump over the 49th unless a life-threatening emergency sends you to the OR.

America's health care system on the other hand is discriminatory and expensive, but it offers immediate access to the best medical treatment in the world.

In both cases timely care for everyone is an elusive goal.

In any event Michael Moore's take on Canada is superficial, euphoric and unrealistic. New technology, abuse and the insatiable demands of an ever expanding clientele of elderly relatives sponsored by Third World immigrants is breaking the bank. It has been calculated that each sponsored immigrant in that age group will cost the Australian medical system $250,000. Since roughly 75% of Canadian immigrants and refugees, drawn from largely "non-traditional" sources, in fact consist of their unskilled dependent children, a terrifying portrait of the toll that Canadian immigration policy is taking on medicare could no doubt be drawn.

A recent article featured in the London Free Press (Thursday, March 13, 2008 "Hospitals forecast deficits") recognized population growth as one principal reason why the Canadian health system was on the brink of deficit financing, with half of Ontario's hospitals facing service cuts to meet the legal requirement for a balanced budget. Seventy percent of Canada's population growth is driven by immigration.

It was economist Milton Friedman who commented a decade ago that "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." As Robert Rector explained, to be properly understood, Friedman's observation should be viewed as applicable to the entire redistributive system of benefits, subsidies and services that lower income groups disproportionately enjoy at the expense of higher income groups.

Unfortunately this superstructure of benefits and services rests not only on an economic foundation but a cultural one as well. A people that is very much alike is more inclined to trust one another, and this trust translates into a willingness to vote for redistributive policies. But we are no longer a mostly ethnically homogeneous society with a shared respect for institutions and a shared sense of civic obligation. When a significant portion of the population is from another hemisphere, another culture or even another generation with different values, the welfare state is perceived as an unlocked candy store with services to be exploited to the maximum.

Redistributive policies like medicare are inversely correlated to cultural diversity. Rather than confront this reality, Canadian leftists demand yet more financial IV injections into the morbid body of the health care system. They refuse to acknowledge that even the Swedish Social Democrats, their role models, were forced to discover the "Laffer curve". That is, push the tax rate up beyond a certain level and tax revenues fall in response. Tax payers will not keep working and producing if they can't keep enough of their income. There are limits to what can be funded.

The Canadian model is not sustainable. It works only if there is enough public money to fund it and not enough patients with doctors to help them abuse it.

Those days are gone forever

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Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada, follows the money trail in the US Presidential primaries.
Note: all dollar figures given in following article are in US dollars.

Also published in Canada Free Press on 11 Mar 08.

Popular opposition to immigration ignored by U. S. legislators

The numbers are unequivocal. For a decade polls have consistently recorded a wide discrepancy between the attitude of ordinary Americans toward immigration and the attitude of those who govern them. And the gap has been growing. In 2002 a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 60% of the public thought current immigration levels to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," as compared to only 14% of the country's leadership. This 46% gap compared to a 37% gap revealed by a 1998 poll. 70% felt that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign policy goal compared to only 22% of the political elite₁.

Polling done by TM, inc. in October 2006 confirmed these results. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill (S2611) supporting a large increase in legal immigration, 68% of voters thought the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, was too high, 34 times the number who said it was too "low". 71% said that low paying jobs could easily be filled if employers paid American workers decent wages rather than import low-skill labour. And 62% agreed with a statement that Canadian viewers of CBC immigration sob stories have frequently observed, "The media coverage of illegal immigrants is mostly devoted to human interest stories like how illegals risk their lives (to get here), rather than the costs they create and the Americans, particularly low-wage American workers, who may be harmed by their being here."

The polling company Inc./Woman Trend in October of 2006 found 66% in agreement that the population increase caused by the present level of immigration would negatively impact the environment. A Zogbylcis poll of April 2006 revealed that 67% of Americans wanted less immigration to promote the assimilation of those who were already here. A poll conducted a month earlier by the same company found that 60% wanted their congressional representative to support more restrictive immigration policies.

What is interesting about sampling public opinion about immigration is that no apparent or substantial fault lines appear between ethnic groupings. Now it is understandable that African-Americans, given their socio-economic standing, feel the direct brunt of illegal Hispanic labour competition , and would therefore take a severe position on the issue. In fact, 59% of black Californian voters favour imposing stiff penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens, (Field Poll, April 2006), and 66% of them favour building a border wall along major sections of the U.S./Mexico line.

Opposition to immigration embraced by non-European communities

But it would surprise some to learn, especially those like most American liberals, who are ignorant of Caesar Chavez's long standing fight against immigration, that 76% of Hispanics said in a December 2007 poll done by Arizona State University-Southwest that illegal immigration is a serious problem. Or that 53% of Latinos would change the 14th amendment so a child born to an illegal immigrant in America could not automatically become an American unless the other parent was a citizen. Or that 56% of Latinos favour increasing the number of border patrol agents by a third. Unfortunately, as former Mexican government advisor Fredo Arras-King observed, "American Latinos who criticize mass immigration tend not to organize, as they are especially targeted by pro-immigration Latino leaders."

Causes of disparity between attitudes of US citizens and their political leadership

The question that these poll results beg is why? Why the cleavage between leaders and led? The anti-immigration sentiment of America's middle and working class is easily accounted for. According to Centre for Immigration Studies data, in the decade preceding 2003, immigration increased the supply of people without a high school education by 21% and the supply of other workers by 4%. Rudimentary economic theory suggests that the more poorly skilled workers there are, the less money they'll make---a fact confirmed by the National Research Council in their findings that about half the drop in real wages for high school drop-outs from 1980 to 1994 was due to immigration. A report by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop when they work alongside new Hispanic immigrants. Harvard Professor Dr. George Borgias has accumulated similar data and has made the shocking assertion that American workers lose an incredible $152 billion per year in wages from immigration.

Immigration provides a ready-made source of cheap labour, by growing the labour pool it weakens the bargaining power of American-born workers and reduces the clout of their unions, if they still have them₂. Medical benefits not borne by the employer are subsidized by the taxpayers who also pick up the educational costs of their children. Writer Rich Lowry made the best assessment: "No wonder corporate America loves our open borders: they serve as a kind of rolling reverse minimum wage law." And no wonder the late African-American liberal Congressman Barbara Jordan called for cutting back immigration in the 1990s. She was defending her constituency of low-income black workers, the first casualty of the corporate welfare program of high-level immigration, marketed by the left as "multicultural enrichment". Cultural diversity is the fig leaf of naked corporate exploitation.

So blue-collar attitudes to immigration are easily explained, ordinary people are simply following their class interests. And class interests can explain the open borders position taken up by America's opinion leaders and decision makers too. They are much more affluent and educated than the people they lead and attempt to influence, and feel no threat from the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies and gardeners or tip at fine restaurants. One thing is central to the understanding of the immigration divide in the United States, and that is to divest oneself of the almost universal and persistent belief that somehow the Democrats are white knights who represent the working class, the poor and the environment, while the Republicans are the incarnation of power, privilege and plutocracy. To assist you in this task you should be apprised of the following.

A TM Inc poll of 2006 disclosed that those most apt to be satisfied with the current level of immigration which is killing American working class living standards were 25-34 year old liberal college graduates and professionals who identified with the Democratic Party. The same poll found though that it was 35-44 year old conservative Republicans who favoured large-scale round-ups of illegal immigrants. That profiles the supporters of the pro and anti-immigration positions, but the current party leadership positions could best be ascertained by the fact that as of the end of January 2008, all Republican contenders rejected the legalization of "undocumented" immigrants now in the U. S., while the Democrats continue to support it.

Corporate donations flow toward pro-immigration candidates ...

The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by a look at campaign financing. McCain, Clinton and Obama are, to put it bluntly, Wall Street candidates. The big banks, the financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity firms pay the pipers. But, according the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) (www.opensecrets.org), the Democrats are the clear favourite. Hillary Clinton took in $106.1 million and Barack Obama $102.1 million for all of 2007. McCain received susbstantially less at $41,102,178. Hillary Clinton received $1.3 million from private equity firms, while Obama received $1 million. McCain finished a distant fourth at $ 395,000. Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory.

Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal tax rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Clinton and Obama have also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests. Corporate law firms gave Clinton over $11 million and Obama over $ 9 million. McCain only got just over two and a half million dollars, the most for Republican candidates. As of February 22, 2008, bagmen have raised over $138 million for Obama, over $134 million for Clinton, and over $53 million for McCain.

Most interesting is the disposition of "Silicon" money. Between 1998 and 2006 almost $83 million in political contributions in the form of individuals donations, PAC contributions, and soft money were made by 40 technology companies. Amounting on average to just $295,708 per company per year of lobbying, it was money well spent. The concession Bill Gates wanted, the H-1B Visa program that allows cheap technology workers into the country, reaped profits a hundred times that investment. But Microsoft wanted to be more certain the fix was in. Over that that seven year period they gave $5,7888,286, with half of Congress on its payroll it would seem. AT+T donated $3,504,773, Apple $3,620,823, and Vericon $4,237,884₃. Data for the 2008 campaign showed Obama at $981,459 and Clinton $954,325 as the leading recipients of "computer-internet" donations, with McCain getting a third of their take. To put all of this in perspective, Hillary Clinton, the great white hope of progressive liberalism, received only 11% of her PAC money from labour, but 56% from business. It would be difficult to imagine that the AFL-CIO could match the donation dollars put up by Wall bankers and law firms.

The most revealing fact to be gleaned from presidential campaign donation statistics is one found when donation records are subjected to sector analysis. If one studies 12 business or professional sectors of American society from Agribusiness to Construction to Health to Labour etc., there is one sector that is clearly salient---the "financial-real estate" sector. It has contributed over $73 million to various campaigns, $25 million more than any other sector.

Real estate interests (including mortgage brokers, homebuilders and property developers) gave $4.8 million to Clinton, $2.7 million to Obama and $1.9 million to McCain. The conventional interpretation of their motive is that they want access to the winner when an expected crackdown over predatory lending and a troubled housing finance system reaches the top of the legislative agenda. But there is an alternative, or at least supplementary explanation. One that has been advanced by Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman. The land tenure system that characterizes Anglo-American societies encourages speculation, and much money is to be made simply by population growth. Newman has written extensively to demonstrate that real estate developers are key players in lobbying for mass immigration. US campaign donation records seem to vindicate her hypothesis, as does the fact that a nation like France is close to achieving population stability because the real estate development industry cannot exist as an agent for growth, given that land cannot consistently be reduced to a speculative commodity largely because of the way tenure is arranged₄.

... whilst anti-immigration contenders miss out

What then became of the candidates who challenged the corporate open borders agenda? Their campaigns died from lack of funds. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado is a case in point. Wall Street likes pro-immigration candidates for obvious reasons and so they will reward those who sing their tune. Tancredo insisted on singing an objectionable note, like a three year moratorium on immigration. So he paid the price and collected just $6 million dollars or less than 6% of what Clinton received by year's end and was forced to end his campaign. Clinton at that time was Wall Street's anointed one, someone who, in the words of Numbers USA, "consistently pressed for U. S. population growth, immigration and foreign labour importation." But of course such an agenda of unabashed greed needs always to be camoflauged with a politician's candy floss, the spin is what they are purchased for. So Clinton obliged her corporate donors by saying that "we should always be open to legal immigration-it reforms, it makes us better." Well, it certainly makes a few of us richer Hillary, doesn't it, like your donors and supporters, the most well-heeled of either party!

Corporate America gets what it has paid for from open-border legislators

An examination of Clinton's voting record should confirm that big business is getting what it paid for. Clinton was co-sponsor of Bill S-2109 to help employees import cheap high tech workers while the big law firms who give to her campaign are counseling them how to use the legal system to avoid hiring qualified U.S. workers. Her support of Senate bill 2109 helped expedite the processing of the infamous H-1B visas that depress wages and displace workers. She supported an amnesty of illegal agricultural workers (S bill 1340) and another one of a similar nature (S. bill 2137) that would have brought an amnesty to another 860,000 workers not counting family. Clinton's support of Kennedy's bill S 2381 would have meant amnesty to almost all illegal aliens. Her numerous attempts to sponsor "shamnesty" bills is reflective of a comment she made to a man who said that his wife was an illegal immigrant. "No woman is illegal", Clinton replied.

If Hillary's record is atrocious, it is doubtful if Obama's is any better. His positions seem almost indistinguishable from Clinton's, the difference being more one of emphasis than policy. He supports employer verification of employee identity to deter the hiring of illegals, she doesn't. She favours lower legal immigration intakes, he doesn't. Obama's main focus is the human rights and economic needs---of those knocking at America's door wanting to come in and those already in, legally or illegally. On the Senate floor he stated on May 23, 2007 that "Where we can re-unite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with skills our economy needs, we should." This was an ominous declaration. Since the law was changed in 1965 to create the so-called family re-unification system, "chain migration"---where an immigrant sponsors several others who in turn sponsors several more---has caused the numbers under this category to spiral out of control. In 36 years the number of immediate relatives admitted was over 13 times higher than it was when the law was first enacted to almost one-half million per year.

An Obama policy statement maintains support for "improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America." But H-1B visa holders are not paid as much as Americans, and even Microsoft admits that salaries have not kept pace with inflation. That would do much to explain a so-called labour shortage in the field. As for Obama's goal of attracting the best and the brightest, the vast majority of H-1B holders make in the $60,000 range (Intel's median salary is $65,000), but top talents in the industry capture more than $100,000. And ironically the great majority of awards for innovation have fallen to Americans, indicating that the industry is not shackled by a domestic cognitive deficit that needs relief by a massive injection of foreign Einsteins. The quest for the best and brightest of overseas talent is a smokescreen for the tech corporations' prime motive, the hunt not for the brightest minds but those that come at the cheapest price. And the H-1B program doesn't even require employers to give hiring priority to qualified American citizens, and they have an arsenal of legal measures to reject those who apply. If one is given to wonder why a U.S. Congress would expand the H-1B program in 2000 when their employers, the American taxpayers, most of whom are workers, were not its obvious beneficiaries, Utah Senator Bob Bennett's comment would be informational: "There were, in fact, a whole lot (of Congressmen) against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public."

John McCain, the only Republican contender left standing, were it not for his title as waterboy for Iraq, could run for the Democrats. He got the ball rolling in 1986 when he signed the 1986 amnesty for illegals and thereby gave the green light for aspiring border-crossers who knew that American law could be violated with impunity and trespass retroactively forgiven. He ran his nomination race on a full-throttle amnesty platform until he found religion earlier this year and back-pedaled. He has voted for S-1639 to double legal immigration, to continue chain migration and the ridiculous annual jackpot lottery of 50,000 applicants from third world nations called "Diversity Immigration". McCain's problem is that he is a dark horse and Wall Street, while hedging its bets, likes to back winners. So his take of their money is but one-third of Obama's and Clinton's.

Ron Paul is a footnote, like Tancredo. His $32 million was not enough and he is the only one who doesn't know its all over, apparently. Paul's anti-immigration stance has not been as comprehensive or as strident as Tancredo's, but firm nonetheless, as reflected in his statement that a nation without secure borders is no nation at all. But Paul is a walking/talking contradiction. While he favours the the usual gamut of measures to protect American workers from the competition of the illegal invasion---border security, employee verification, no amnesty, no welfare for illegals, no alien birthright citizenship etc.---he is also a libertarian in the Friedman tradition. Leaving the working class alone to fend for itself against an unregulated free market is like trusting a ravenous beast to mind your children. With closed borders and free markets Ron Paul offers American workers a goblet of hemlock mixed with green tea for good health. Paul thus falls between two stools. He's no good for Wall Street and he's no good for Main Street either. A curious fellow.

Failure of immigration opponents to address its causes

The most disappointing feature of the American immigration dialogue is its one-dimensional nature. Two critical elements are virtually absent from the arguments presented by both open and closed borders advocates. One is that both sides talk about what attracts Mexican labour to America, and therefore the measures for turning them away. But no one talks about the conditions in Mexico that drove people to take desperate risks to get to the United States and who is responsible for those conditions. When is America going to look in the mirror and admit that the larcenous NAFTA agreement and rapacious rampage of multinational corporations undercut a viable Mexican economy and the basis for a decent life for so many Mexicans? When are American politicians and opinion-makers going to acknowledge that much of American prosperity is built on the backs of those people and others like them in the hemisphere and the world? All the measures proposed by the anti-immigrationist forces are necessary, but by no means sufficient to defend the borders. America cannot play King Canute and hold back a tide of billions. It must reduce the tide by ensuring that the billions do not want to leave home. Scrap the trade agreements, the IMF, SAPs (Structural Adjustment Policies) and offer restitution to rebuild economies that have been pillaged₅.

Carrying capacity of U. S. overlooked in debate

Aside from NAFTA, there is another crucial phrase missing from US immigration discussions. Carrying capacity. Each year the United States adds the equivalent of another Chicago. During the Bush administration it has grown by 21 million people. Immigrants, their children and grandchildren will account for 82% of all population growth in the years leading up to 2050, when the country will reach a staggering 438 million if this growth rate is not slowed. Some worry about assimilation, since the share of non-Hispanic whites will fall from 67 to 47%. Obviously the labour market is the focus of most, who would share Samuel Gompers's conviction that "immigration is fundamentally a labour issue." But full employment and economic prosperity in a culturally or linguistically cohesive America would be a pyrrhic accomplishment if such a nation were to rest on a collapsing ecosystem. Can America sustain half its current population when critical resource shortages appear or biodiversity services are compromised ? The works of analysts like David Pimental, Dale Pfeiffer and Richard Heinberg do not inform any Congressional debate about how many people the country should admit. Clearly a Population Plan is overdue.

The American people have spoken on immigration but the political elite will not listen because they are paid by their corporate benefactors not to listen. It is sad to see the world's greatest democratic experiment come to such grief. The Founding Fathers devised a system that they embedded in a constitution with mechanisms to counter-act the natural instinct of the political class to usurp power and exercise it as a permanent elite dominating pauperized subjects on the old European model. They counted on a "vigilant and manly spirit" that animates the American people to breath life and vigour into the constitution. But alas, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly foresee the power and the scale of Wall Street money.

In America today, anything's for sale, even democracy. I hear a Senator earmarked for the White House can be had, for, oh around 134-138 million. Sound right?

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
February 23/08

Footnotes

1. See www.worldviews.org/detailreports/usreport/html/ch535.html, www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1402.html.

2. See Tim Murray's article "Is it reactionary to oppose Immigration?" of 16 Dec 2007 at webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2240, candobetter.org/node/284l.

3. See chart of political contributions from hi-tech companies at www.news.com/2009-1028-6050978.html.

4. Refer to Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's year thesis "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France (PDF - 2.6MB) downloadable from candobetter.org/sheila.

5. Refer, also to Tim Murray's article "Closing our borders can't mean turning our backs" of 25 October 2007 at candobetter.org/node/228.

Poet and author Mark O’Connor has written another important analysis of Australia’s ecological eclipse at the hands of the growth cult. While the continent is obviously unique in its botanical character with problems that don’t challenge Canadians, the similarities with Canada that O’Connor reveals in his description of the evolution of the growth ethic are simply astounding.

Like Canada, “Australia was, and still is, even though much trashed and abused, a treasure house of biodiversity,” toward which the people have a somewhat schizophrenic attitude. On the one hand, “Australians are genuinely proud of their wildlife…many people assign a very high, almost religious value to conserving nature”, as evidenced by their tolerance of crocodiles which make it impossible to swim in their waters. 10.7% of Australia is incorporated in a strategic network of parks.

Yet, O’Connor writes, “Attitudes to Australia’s biodiversity remain mixed.” It may be inspirational to watch them in flight but “people don’t appreciate kangaroos eating their crops.” Sadly Australian experience shows that democracy is not good at preserving other species---they don’t vote.  "(There is) a theme that runs through Australia’s ecological history: the clash between the desire to protect biodiversity versus the need of an ever-growing human population to make a quid from it.”

O’Connor reminds readers that Australia’s ecology was dynamic. While “we might prefer to praise the Aborigines’ achievement in living sustainably with the land for millennia, and contrast this with the damage eight generations of  European lifestyle have wrought,” Aboriginal hunters had already modified ecology by the fire regime they imposed before Europeans arrived. Paul Watson, it should be pointed out here, asserts that Aborigines killed off 85% of the continent’s megafauna before the British hit Botany Bay, an assertion that has been contested. Nevertherless, Watson is one of the very few Canadians not given to romantic illusions about indigenous stewardship of precious resources.

The foundation of Australia’s current ecological crisis, and that of Canada, is their false self-perception as vast empty lands desperately in need of more people: two bloated bulimics who look in the mirror and see themselves as Twiggy with lots of room to grow. The myth is best captured by Australia’s national anthem “Advance Australia Fair” when it says “For those who’ve come across the seas. We’ve boundless plains to share.”

But as O’Connor notes, Australia has only 6% of its land mass proven
as arable. For Canada it is 7% with soils marginal by European standards. As for wheat, because Australia provides 20% of the world’s wheat imports, feeding 40 million people, “boomers” argue that Australia could feed a far higher resident population than its current 21 million. But they forget that much of that foreign exchange is needed to pay for the fuel and nitrate fertilizer used for production, and soil loss, acidification and climate change will diminish yields. “Every tonne of wheat still costs some tones of eroded soil”, O’Connor observes.

Even so, with the drought tolerant wheat grown in fertile soils in a good year Australia produces less wheat than France, and in a bad year sometimes less than Britain. And all at the cost of ‘fascinating’ bio-regions cleared and species eliminated.

So if the big empty land in fact suffers from a limited carrying capacity, if food self-sufficiency is a myth, if biodiversity is taking a beating, why then does Australia seem in a frenzy to add to its numbers? (Canada could be asked the same question). Who drives growth? Qui Bono? Who Benefits?

The answer might be found in research done by the Australian Green Party that revealed that the governing Labor Party of New South Wales received $8.78 million in 1998-99 from property developers, while the opposition Coalition Parties received $6.35 million. Not surprisingly then, Sydney’s councils have been instructed to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people (24%) in 25 years so that Australia offers the paradox of a huge country with urban housing prices comparable to New York or London, where land prices double in a decade and its 1.5% population growth is higher than Indonesia’s and indeed many Third World countries.

“Local and even national newspapers run a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers---alternately with pieces about how we are desperately short of projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like.”

O’Connor cites Australia’s Anglo-Celtic property system for fuelling the drive to “fill the country with people” by rewarding private speculation in land. “By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.”

To footnote this observation, it should be noted that Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman has ably documented the relationship between the British property system and the population growth lobby on the one hand, and the French property system and the absence of anymeaningful lobby for growth in France on the other hand. Students of Canadian civic politics know that developers virtually own city councils. What sinister role do they play behind the scenes in framing federal immigration policy or influencing it? The Urban Futures Institute, a high profile Vancouver-based think tank, is a consistent cheerleader for massive immigration. Its former mouthpiece was “demographer” David Baxter who couched his arguments in demographic statistics to prove that he was in possession of a crystal ball. In fact, he had no credentials as a demographer. He was merely a front man for the real estate industry which fully funds the institute. He was guaranteed an interview by every media outlet when occasion demanded it.

Has any voice of caution or restraint been raised against this mad rush to ecological oblivion? Well there was the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-75 which reacted to the first Global Oil shock by limiting immigration and population growth. Then the Australian Academy of Science made a major public statement in 1994 that advised that Australia’s population not exceed 23 million and that immigration be half of what it was during the Hawke-Keating era. The Science Council of Canada issued a similar report in 1975 when it warned that Canada’s population should not go beyond 30 million. The government responded by abolishing the Science Council and then proceeding along a path that saw the land of frozen tundra, lakes and mountains fill up one-fifth of its Class 1 farmland with subdivisions and become a nation of 33 million with the fastest growth rate in the G8 group.

The Australian Democrats came out in favour of zero-net-migration, but the political culture was poisoned. Under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996, Australia was essentially a “plutocratic democracy” where voters were presented with a Hobson’s choice between parties who were “servants of business-growth lobbies”. While cognizant of conservationist sensibilities, “Hawke dared not offend the growth lobby.” But even the large immigrant communities were among the 73% of voters who in 1991 said immigration levels were too high, or the 71% in 1996 who held to this opinion. Again, Canadians have affected consistent opposition to immigration in the same proportions, but like Australians, have been presented with a solid parliamentary front in favour of a policy they detest.

But nevertheless, given the scale and persistence of this discontent, Labor’s spin-doctors needed to give the old myth of Australia, as an empty land, a make-over. There was no farmland available and urban land prices were beyond reach, so alright then, it would no longer be Australia’s manifest destiny to build a “great” nation but rather a “diverse” one. It would become a United Nations of ethnicities and races, sustained by permanent immigration, long after the pioneering period had passed. But the obsession with cultural diversity would trump concern for preserving biological diversity.

“Thus instead of being ashamed that we have lost so many of our marsupial species, many Australians on the left seem more ashamed that we do not have a flourishing Inuit or Bantu community in their particular city. Quite why it should be Australia’s duty to turn itself into a representative sample of the cultures of the earth is never explained. Instead, there are constant shouts that any reduction of immigration will lead us tumbling back into an abyss of ‘racism’ and ‘boring monoculturalsim’.”

“Hawke’s and Keating’s spin doctors even took advantage of the Anglo-Celtic guilt over having immigrated upon the Aboriginal tribes without their permission and violently displaced them. Somehow this became a further reason why high immigration, so long as it was no longer Anglo-Celtic, was essential­--as if inviting in the rest of the world would legitimize it.”

O’Connor forecasts that the incoming Labor government of Kevin Rudd will continue the traditional quest for economic growth, only addressing GHG issues if they do not compromise this goal. He compares Australia to “a cruise liner whose captain is required to sail in the direction chosen by a deck-steward whose priority is to keep the sun shining on the deckchairs in the saloon section, so that their occupants will order more drinks.”

The metaphor is an interesting one, for Canada too could be compared to a cruise liner: The HMS Ecological Titanic still robotically stopping to pick up more passengers as it ploughs forward toward the iceberg of over-population.

We may, albeit in diminished numbers, adapt to climate change, but we will not adapt to biodiversity collapse. O’Connor spoke of Australia’s botanical and ecological fragility, but this is what environmentalist Brishen Hoff said of Canada: “Our boreal forest continues to experience wholesale clearcutting and relentless road expansion. More water is being diverted from the Great Lakes watershed than what is being replenished, causing the highest lakes (Nipigon, Superior, etc.) to dramatically drop their water levels. I could go on with thousands of examples of species extinctions and worsening environmental quality right here in Ontario and Algoma-Manitoulin all because of human population growth.”

In fact most of the more than 500 threatened species dwell within the range of Canada’s major urban centres where they are imperiled by sprawling subdivisions, roughly 70% of which are occupied by immigrants. But remember, mass immigration is to be celebrated in Canada as, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “our great multicultural project.” Like Sydney, Vancouverites are told that they must move over and accommodate another 800,000 migrants in the coming 23 years (24% growth) and appreciate the newcomers for the “diversity” they bring. But at what cost this “cultural diversity”? An infinitely richer, more vital heritage. The biological diversity of the species that this growth will extinguish.

What’s the answer? O’Connor quotes Gordon Hocking of NSW: “As long as we stick with an economic system that needs to perpetually grow we will remain trapped on the road to ecological and climate disaster.” Brishen Hoff would add “None of these symptoms can be reversed without shrinking the size of our economy and then moving to a steady state economy.”

Bulimics gorge, then purge. Let’s hope our national binging ends soon and our demographic weight loss is progressive and incremental rather than dramatic and deadly.

Watch for Mark O’Connor’s upcoming book, “Overloading Australia”.

Tim Murray
Director of Immigration Watch Canada
8 January 2008

1. 1. Consumption is almost everything. Population is almost nothing.
2. Overpopulation is a global problem, so lets not try to stabilize our own.
3. Renewable technologies and greener lifestyles will save the day
.
4. We are committed to sustainability---and growth---at the same time.
5. Growth can be rendered ecologically benign if channeled, managed or deflected.
6. We share the consensus for the need for economic growth, therefore we favour liberal immigration.
There is always a chronic labour shortage isn't there and oh, don't undocumented migrants make such a contribution to our society?
7. Since we favour liberal immigration that is non-discriminatory, then we favour an aggressive multicultural strategy for the integration of migrants. We reject the concept of a national culture.
8. We place far greater emphasis on climate change than biodiversity collapse even though more species will be lost sooner to human overpopulation than to global warming, which is not as imminent or as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity services.
9. We will only acknowledge overpopulation as a problem in developing countries. Migration of people to high consumption societies is to be countered only be lowering the per capita consumption rates of those societies.
10. Closed borders, immigration controls, or as we call the Bush fence, the "Wall of Shame" send out unfriendly signals to emigrant-countries whose cooperation we need to solve global environmental problems like AGW.
11. Relieve the wealthy of progressive income tax and capital gains tax and introduce Green Taxes. Punish those at the bottom of the income scale for not having the money to buy hybrid cars and retro-fitted houses.

People with dark skin or from Asia are not the only people who suffer racial vilification these days. In arguing for more immigration a Maltese immigrant complained on the "Sounds Like Canada" program of Friday, January 25/08 that one or two maritime provinces were mostly white and that others were "even worse". Typically, multicultural enthusiast and host Sheila Rogers did not challenge him for this outrageous racist statement.

One wonders how a CBC interviewer might react if a guest said that the downtown core of Regina was mostly aboriginal but other communities were "even worse". Or that many districts in Greater Vancouver are predominantly Chinese but others, like Richmond, are "even worse". When comments like these go by the board on the national broadcasting network, it is little wonder that so many politically correct bigots feel able to complain openly that their particular town is too "whitebread".

I am a native-born Canadian of European ancestry and I am sick and tired of being made to feel that I am some kind of disease who should be made to feel perpetually guilty for my white skin and for the multitude of sins allegedly committed generations ago, a disease that needs to be cured by a massive foreign influx.

Insults directed at the national whipping boy, Canadians of white pigmentation, are not the way to build the harmony you claim to seek.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
Canada V0P 1N0
January 28/08

The article below was originally a comment on webdiary

On December 4, 2003, Australia’s population was estimated at 20 million and projected to reach about 30 million by 2050. Slightly less than 50 per cent of this growth rate resulted from net overseas immigration. By 5 November 2007, Australia’s population had ballooned by more than one twentieth of itself (or 5.66 per cent) to 21,131,216 and was projected to reach 34 million by 2050.[i] In fact, with that growth rate of 1.5 per cent per annum, it is on course to double within less than 50 years. Annual immigration has been responsible for more than half this growth, even though the birth-rate had increased in a context of misleading pronatalist propaganda.

Before British colonization in 1788 the peoples of Terra Australis managed to conserve an almost exclusively hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle. Art[ii] but no written history, has been found, and reconstruction of their impact relies on anthropological, archeological and ecological studies. “Australia” was transplanted and adapted from a British society which was on the cusp of industrialisation. Pre 1788, Australia’s aboriginal population averaged continent-wide less than one person per 8.5 square kilometers – possibly as few as one person per 51 square kilometers.[iii] Numerous clans inhabited the continent at different population densities, reflecting regional rainfall, soils and climate.[iv] Also patterned by climate and soils, the fossil-fuel-era population distribution is similar, but much denser.

Early attempts to establish agriculture failed with some unintensive exceptions recently uncovered.[v] The British managed to gain an agricultural foothold using ‘white’ slaves in the form of convicts drawn mostly from the ragged army of their dispossessed. Their number was later supplemented by indentured labour, displaced aboriginals, and, until Federation, ‘black-birding’ – the practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders and bringing them to work in Australia, principally for the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company. There is thus no history or tradition of an established pre-fossil fuel agricultural society. The gold-rushes of the 1850s attracted capital, finance and economic migrants, resulting in a rapidly morphing population and economy and formation of a working class. This class made a national wage-fixing pact with capital at Federation in 1904 and also obtained the agreement of CSR to outlaw black-birding [vi] and the importation of other 'non-white' labour, widely perceived as synonymous with slaving.[vii]

The economy intensified after World War II, but much land was cleared and divided up for development by land speculators from the time of the gold rushes of the mid 19th and early 20th century. When the gold ran out, there was a massive depression, which probably assisted the formation of the above industrial laws.

After WW2 business promoted a fear of population implosion among politicians and a policy for mass immigration came in. High immigration, combined with the unforeseen baby-boom that accompanied the petroleum era, made the newly privatized housing industry very powerful and consolidated an economic addiction to population growth. Although the ‘white-Australia’ policy was dismantled, wages and conditions legislation under the 1904 constitution protected workers and made it unprofitable to import labor simply to undercut wages. However, in 2006-7, the conservative government found a way around this - (Workchoices).[viii] At the same time net immigration was encouraged to increase from an average of around 75-80,000 per annum to upwards of 160,000 per annum,[ix] at the behest of the development, housing, mining and financial lobbies. All this took place in the context of a huge increase in mining and construction, including massive engineering projects in most states which have drawn angry but useless protests from Australians. These circumstances underpin Australia’s demographic and material overshoot.

The ideology of multiculturalism has been useful for suppressing protest against this massive population growth by tarring as 'racist' any protest against immigration for whatever reason. It is ironic that the White Australia policy, which was introduced to combat the kind of slavery which the USA was built on, has been replaced with a much nicer-sounding Multiculturalism, which allows the importation of low-wage labour and the flooding of the housing market to benefit speculators, in the context of rising land prices and rising homelessness.

Footnotes

[i] “Australia’s Population” (Population Clock), Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.abs.gov.au [5 Nov 2007]

[ii] Much of which functioned as maps of areas of land with markers for water, game, people and landmarks.

[iii] Total land stock is 770 million ha of 7,700,000 square km. Estimates of population range between 150,000 through 300,000 to 900,000.

[iv] Joseph B. Birdsell, “Australia: Ecology, spacing mechanisms and adaptive behaviour in aboriginal land tenure”, in Ron Crocombe, (Ed.), Land Tenure in the Pacific, OUP/MUP 1971, pp.334-361

[v] Jennifer Macey, “Vic bushfires uncover ancient Aboriginal stone houses”, The World Today, 3 Feb. 2006 12:45:00, www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1561665.htm

[vi] “With Federation, the Commonwealth Parliament became dominated by spokesmen for ‘White Australia’. In October 1901 legislation was passed prohibiting the introduction of Pacific Islanders after 31 March 1904.”, McKillop, R.F., referring to Bolton, G.C., A Thousand miles away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, ANU Press, 1972, p. 239, in “Australia’s Sugar Industry” on the Light Railway Research Society of Australia site, www.lrrsa.org.au/LRR_SGRa.htm

[vii] The Colonial Sugar Company aroused similar responses among indigenous Fijians who also objected to black-birding as well as to the importing of Indian indentured labour. “The Indian Connection”, Frontline, Volume 17 - Issue 12, June 10 - 23, 2000, www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1712/17120130.htm

[viii] “How low can you go?”, Colin Fenwick, Economic and Labour Relations Review,5; (2006) 16(2) www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ELRRev/2006/5.html

[ix] “Largest population increase ever: ABS,” Media Release, September 24, 2007, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Latestproducts/3101.0, “Net overseas migration contributed 54% (162,600 people) to this growth, which was more than the natural increase of 46% (138,100 people or 273,500 births minus 135,400 deaths).” This occurred with confusing changes to statistical methods plus new ease of transfer from temporary to permanent migrant (largely equivalent to European citizenship).

Multiculturalism is Canada's Ingsoc, a state ideology so powerfully pervasive that few in the media, in the educational institutions or the political parties would dare challenge it. One might think that the left would offer criticism, but apart from journalist and former socialist parliamentarian, Douglas Fisher, and columnist Larry Zolf, none come to mind.

The Liberal Party was able to steal the affections of working class voters earmarked for the social-democratic NDP by appealing to their cultural identities. Running candidates of the same ethnicity as the prevailing group in the riding, and granting federal money for the construction of ethnic centres was a classic Liberal formula for vote-buying. And it usually worked.

The NDP approach has always been to appeal to people's class identity above and beyond the language they speak and to their sense of solidarity to people who live similar lives but have different cultures. Multiculturalism has not been good for class solidarity.

J.S. Woodsworth, the father of Canadian socialism, founder of the CCF-NDP and described as the "Saint of Canadian politics", I think knew as much. Allen Mills in "Fool for Christ-The Political Thought of J.S. Woodsworth", wrote that during his leadership in the twenties and thirties he continued to evince a profound concern for " the social integration of the alien." Allen writes that Woodsworth talked "of uniting immigrants into a new Canadian type: he worried that the melting pot was not working and the country would become 'balkanized', there was a necessity to 'absorb', 'weld' and 'incorporate, immigrants into the Canadian way of life.'p.228

Although Woodsworth was an opponent of immigration in the 1920s and 30s because there were not enough jobs, he also recognized the need for more social cohesion. A higher proportion of newcomers of our own British traditions would mould these incoming armies of foreigners into 'loyal subjects'.

Greens have been among the most effusive champions of Ingsoc, with Green leader Elizabeth May justifying the country's absurdly high immigration levels as Canada's ongoing "multicultural project". Environmentalists claim that "cultural diversity" is the analogue to biological diversity, the necessary variation found in plant and animal forms. Trouble is, the immigration levels required to sustain these culturally diverse ethnic enclaves is fuelling urban sprawl and crowding out wildlife. Variety is the spice of life, but the human is flourishing at the expense of the non-human. Multiculturalism has not been good for the environment.

But there is a JS Woodsworth of Canadian greens. He is none other than the famous co-author of "Our Ecological Footprint", Dr. William E. Rees. This is taken from his "Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?"

"... there is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that multi-racial or multi-cultural countries are more likely to unravel chaotically in the event of rapid ecological change, resource shortages, or economic decline than are more homogenous societies. Because socio-political stability is a prerequisite for ecological sustainability, we thus have yet another reason for a pre-emptive cautionary approach to large-scale migration in coming levels and adopt explicit 'melting pot' strategies designed to facilitate the integration and assimilation of new-comers into the social and economic fabric of their adopted countries. They should also include ongoing public education programs that stress both the need for, and the national benefits of, limited immigration.

The main objectives of this approach are to discourage the development of persistent immigrant enclaves, to accelerate immigrants' development of a sense of identity with the larger society, and to improve public understanding of the modern role of economic and environmental changes that may be required for ecological sustainability. Immigration policies that favour multiculturalism and that apparently succeed during periods of growth and plenty may not be adaptive in the face of rapid global ecological change of economic decline."

So while the sheep continue to bleet "diversity", the wise old shepherds speak of the virtues of integration and cohesion.

Just as Central Asia exported the bubonic plague, and Central Africa exported the Ebola virus, Canada gave the world the ideology of Multiculturalism. It might be cautionary then to heed the words of our brave critics as they spoke them right in the guts of the ogre before the Thought Police could silence them.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Canada
December 23/07

Note: This article was also published on webdiary on 19 December 2007. It had attracted 69 comments by 24 December 2007.

Andy Kerr, former president of Alternatives to Growth Oregon, posed these questions, "To those who support generous immigration, I ask you this: Why are you are on the same side as Microsoft and the other huge computer corporations and of Archer Daniel Midland and the rest of the agribusiness lobby? How can you support a policy that helps ensure that our existing poor will never be adequately valued for their labor."

Kerr's questions could well be asked of so many left-wing critics whose first reflexive response to closed border arguments are that they are "right-wing", "reactionary", "racist" or "xenophobic", despite the fact that historically the first beneficiaries of mass immigration to North America, and several other localities, have been cheap labour employers. Naomi Klein, in "The Shock Doctrine" blemishes her excellent analysis with this commonplace attitude.

If Klein wanted to probe the shock therapy applied by big capital by using immigration as a battering ram to break down the working class, she need only have looked to the history of British Columbia, where her brother Seth labours for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In the nineteenth century Chinese labour contractors imported labour to the point that perhaps one-third of the entire workforce had become Chinese. Working for half the wages, paying no taxes, they were prepared to ignore safety regulations, so the Dunsmuir Coal Company used them to break a pivotal miners' strike in 1883.The Miners Union then presented a resolution to government to restrict Chinese labourers from working underground, and another one stating that these labourers were a menace to underground safety, had lowered wages, deterred other Canadians from seeking employment in B.C., offered unfair competition and were provocative to public peace.

In 1907 five Tokyo immigration companies filled an order to bring 6,000 Japanese labourers to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway (C.P.R.) when the province was experiencing a recession. B.C. workers were against the ropes, so the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council met to form an "Asiatic Exclusion League". Two days later a Japanese ship arrived with 1177 labourers. The chemistry was right for the infamous Vancouver anti-Asian riot of September 7, 1907, an incident which has been retroactively depicted as a simple and despicable act of racism. In fact it was a reaction to B.C. businesses which were then using Japanese cheap surplus labourers instead of their Chinese counterparts. It should be known that Native Indians also seethed with resentment at the Japanese presence.

Chinese immigrant labour had finally been slapped by a "head tax" by the federal government in response to decades of lobbying by the B.C. to level the playing field with Canadian labourers. But they wouldn't they wouldn't follow suit with a similar tax on Japanese labour for fear of jeopardizing trade arrangements with Japan. Hence the end run by employers and the pogrom by B. C. workers. To demonstrate labour's outrage at the collusion between now Lieutenant-Governor Dunsmuir and the C.P.R.to orchestrate the Japanese influx, a Socialist legislator moved a motion in the B.C. House that Dunsmuir be impeached.

It should also be noted ---and this is always omitted by revisionists-the Oriental Exclusion Act was actually a misnomer. It was in reality, the Oriental Labourers Exclusion Act. Chinese merchants and their families continued to enjoy access to Canada. The purpose of the omission is obvious, to foster guilt and shame so that an agenda of "justice" an restitution can be pursued by Canada's immigration industry so that corporate Canada can have its labour requirements satisfied in the same way that robber baron Robert Dunsmuir's was. Just 30 miles from where he used Chinese labour to break the miners strike of 1883, the corporation I was working for used Chinese labour to try and break my strike a century later. As waves of Chinese, fresh from Hong Kong, passed through my picket line, escorted by police, it occurred to me that I was having a "multicultural" experience. I was so enriched. Like the miners were in 1883.

The same misrepresentation and spin was made of the "Komagata Maru" incident where East Indians were denied entry at the Port of Vancouver. Does this mean that racist antagonisms did not alloy with legitimate economic grievances? It would stretch credulity to argue that case, particularly in light of the outrageous internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942, the fact that Chinese-Canadians were denied the vote until 1948, or the right to own property in the exclusive British Properties among other indignities. But should illegitimate motives discredit and invalidate the very cogent arguments of working people to defend their livelihood?

These arguments have been made by socialists and trade unionists not only in Canada but in America a century ago by Jack London, Socialist Party leader Victor Gerber, and the legendary Samuel Gompers. They were also made by the heroic Cesar Chavez who was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez even picketed the border and reported illegal aliens who served as strike-breakers against United Farm Workers.

Today leading labour economists have carried on the fight. Dr. George Borgias of Harvard University is most notably among them. It is his contention that native-born American workers lose $152 billion annually because of job displacement and wage depression caused by immigration. And yet, how does the labour movement respond? This is what the Carrying Capacity Network asks:

"The AFL-CIO, the biggest labor union in the country, is AGAIN urging Congress to give amnesty to as many as 13 million illegal immigrants. Result: depressed wages and lost jobs for Americans while rewarding lawbreakers with the right to work and potential citizenship. Isn't the AFL-CIO sanctioning lawbreaking by pushing for an amnesty?"

Where does the Canadian labour movement stand? You can guess. In a letter dated May 4/06 to Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day and Minister of Immigration and Citizenship Monte Solberg, Secretary Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) Hassan Yussuf complained about the "zealotry" of the Canadian Border Services Agency. "(They) aggressively deported a number of undocumented residents, particularly those from the Portugese community as well as targeting members of the Asian, Chinese, Caribbean and Latin/Central-American communites. The manner in which those deportations were handled exposed a government acting with excessive zeal, hardness, and in some cases, an inexcusable lack of humanity.

I suppose the more "humane" course of action for the CLC would be just to let everybody who wants to come to Canada stay. Open borders. One world. John Lennon's dream. Just imagine. But that's globalism isn't it? Who will speak for the Canadian workers whose wages and working conditions are being hammered by this vision of brotherhood? Why, the CLC of course. Like its political arm, the NDP, it claims to represent them. Yussuf's letter concludes: "The CLC representing more than 3 million workers, joins with those calling for a moratorium on all CBSA deportation/detention activities."

How about a moratorium on immigration instead? That would do more for those 3 million workers. And more than a swift process, in the CLC's words, to "regularlize undocumented workers.whose skills are in need and who have been contributing to the economy." You have to love the CLC's politically-correct language. Calling an illegal immigrant an "undocumented resident" is like calling a drug-pusher an "unlicensed pharmacist". How does the labour movement like it when people call scabs "replacement workers"? And why doesn't the CLC just call "regularize" what it is---amnesty for law-breakers, or, as Geoffrey Blainey once put it, "an incentive for others to arrive, hoping to benefit from further amnesty."

Contemporary socialist and trade union affinity toward international solidarity even at the expense of national well-being can be traced to a Marxist legacy that sees class, not nationality, as the primary divide. Even social democracy taps into this tradition which combines as one strand in a muddled xenophilia with Christian and environmental thought. The latter mutation is expressed quintessentially in the Canadian Green Party line that since global warming is a global problem requiring global cooperation, to obtain this we must not send out an unfriendly message of "fear" by closing our borders, but on the contrary drop them instead. Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in. Instead of "workers of the world unite", the Greens offer us a new rallying cry: "more and more people, consuming less and less".

What is interesting is that American icon, Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate for President, does not share this Canadian love affair with the world. He had this to say in 2000: "We cannot have open borders. That's a totally absurd proposition. It would depress wages here enormously, and tens of millions of people from all levels, including scientists and workers, would be pouring into this country."

Australian political scientist Frank Salter had this to say about the socialist attitude to nationalism. "The Left, as it has evolved over the course of the previous century, looks down on the ordinary people with their inarticulate parochialisms as if the were members of another species. since they care nothing for the preservation of national communities. Ethnies are considered irrelevant to the welfare of people in general. It would be understandable to Martians to be so detached from particular loyalties. But it is disturbing to humans doing so, especially humans who identify with the Left."

Such is the European Left's identification with the Other at the cost of the resident national that, in the name of anti-racism, it was possible for left-wing novelist Umberto Eco to declare his hope that Europe would be swamped by Africans and third world emigrants just so to "demoralize" racists. And such is the identification of the AFL-CIO with 13 million illegal immigrants as potential recruits that it supports amnesty and essentially a corporate welfare program that reduces wages for the lowest of American workers. A scheme which advocates call "liberalism" but American workers call an invasion. The CLC (Edgar Bergen) and its social-democratic parliamentary arm, the NDP (Charlie McCarthy), sing the same tune. Crocodile tears are shed for "undocumented" workers who allegedly make great contributions to the economy, according to their hire-a-left-wing-think-tank. But Statistics Canada's conclusions about the effect of immigration on the Canadian work force echo those of Dr. Borgias for American workers. Except the May 2007 Statscan report showed that in Canada, it was the educated workers who were really taking a hit. Between 1980-2000 their wages dropped 7%. And in Britain, careful analysis revealed that the Trade Union Congress was wrong in its contention that amnesty would net the Treasury one billion pounds annually. Rather it would cost taxpayers 1.8 billion pounds a year.

But alas, socialist thought is not monolithic. The Leninists were wrong. For the working class, national identity was as important as class identity, or as Orwell put it, "in all countries, the poor are more national than the rich." If they can't find a voice on the Left, in desperation they will look to the Populist right, as they did recently in Switzerland. But just when it looked like the field was left entirely to globalists, maverick social-democratic and socialist leaders in the tradition of Berger, London, or Canada's J. S. Woodsworth are staking a claim for national, as opposed to international, solidarity. They are doing so after their constituents have been battered by one of the greatest migratory waves in history, that saw the United States for example import the equivalent of three New Jerseys in the 1990s alone, or 25 million people. One would have thought that Naomi Klein, a Canadian, would have known that the Father of Canadian democratic socialism, the Saint of Canadian politics, the Rev. J. S. Woodsworth steadfastly opposed immigration throughout his leadership in the 1920s and 30s. Woodsworth understood that his constituency was in Canada, not overseas. His motto was no doubt that of Vancouver Rev. Edwin Scott: "We are not universal nations yet. Universal nationality and universal brotherhood are two different things."

The Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has begun to make some noise about the disaster that is the illegal immigration invasion in the United States. His voting record in reducing chain migration, fighting amnesty and unnecessary visas rates B-, B-, and A+ respectively from Americans for Better Immigration. "If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now." To Sanders the American working, middle class is caught in a squeeze. "On the one hand, you have large multi-nationals trying to shut down plants in America, move to China and on the other hand you have the service industry bringing in lower wage workers from abroad. The result is the same-the middle class gets shrunk and wages go down." Five million people have left the middle class during Bush administration, Sanders observes.

Other social-democratic leaders have spoken out against open borders. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt now admits that immigration under his government was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that "with idealistic intentions, born out of our experiences with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners." Dutch Socialist leader Jan Marijnissen is strongly opposed to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans are hired as "independent contractors" to circumvent labour law. Marijnissen wrote "It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as they were in competition in the nineteenth century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn't open the borders further, but set limits instead."

Setting limits. Acknowledging limits. That is the great divide. In the past those limits have been perceived to be economic by those with the sense to perceive them. Now, some on the left are beginning to realize that the more unforgiving and immutable limits are set by nature. Former Labor Premier of NSW , Bob Carr, and his fellow Laborite retired veteran MP Barry Cohen joined environmental leaders Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe in exposing the myth of Australia as a big empty land begging to be filled up with people. Said Carr, "our rivers, our soils, our vegetation, won't allow that to happen enormous cost to us and those who follow us." Carr and Cohen call for severe immigration cut-backs and a population policy put in place.

In Klein's Canada, meanwhile, the phrase "carrying capacity" is as unknown in the socialist lexicon as it is the corporate. Biologists and ecologists might as well be speaking ancient Aramaic to leftists to make them understand that their human rights agenda cannot be built on an environment that will not sustain it. Canada cannot become the soup kitchen to tens of millions of refugees, nor can vital biodiversity services coexist with a population of 50 million Canadians. In economic jargon, its called "diseconomies of scale". In the language of real science, its called a "limiting factor".

This essay began with two questions from Andy Kerr. It will end with six or seven of mine.

Why? Why has opposition to a policy of mass immigration, a policy that drives down the wages of marginal workers, middle-income workers and professional workers been characterized and vilified as "right-wing" and "reactionary". Why has earlier socialist and trade union understanding of the negative consequences of this policy been overtaken by "love thy neighbour" zeitgeist of the post-war era? Why is the "Left" on the same side as the "Right"? The same side as Microsoft, ADM, the real estate developers and the cheap labour employers?

It is high time to challenge this labeling and to challenge those who use it to prevent thoughtful discussion. The question that needs to be posed today is not the conventional one, is it Left or is it Right? But rather, do we accept that there are Limits, or do we continue to persist in the fantasy that this country, and others, is a massive treasure trove of boundless resources waiting to be unlocked by an endless number of people who can exploit them without ecological consequences?

History shows, sadly, that the latter delusion is shared equally among the devotees of both Adam Smith and the Communist Manifesto and its derivatives.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
Canada
December 16, 2007.

To many, George Bush's $2 billion border fence will be but another testament to the futility of walls. In the face of persistent adversaries and technological advances, each of history's more notable barriers have proven obsolete over time. The 1500 mile Chinese wall was penetrated at least three times, most famously by the Mongols in the 13th century. The 300 mile Roman barrier of Limes was useless against the mass migration of Huns and Goths after the late 4th century, while only Hadrian's wall could claim some efficacy, until its garrison withdrew abruptly for the defence of Rome. And of course, the Maginot and Siegfried lines were spectacular failures.

That barriers can nevertheless be somewhat effective, however, is a reason that they continue to be built. The Moroccans built a 1600 mile wall to control Western Sahara in the1980s, and Israel has built a 120 mile barrier in the West Bank, and is planning to extend it by 140 miles. More pertinent perhaps to our interest, India is about to complete a 3034 mile $1 billion fence against Bangladesh to protect its precious Northern wilderness from 150 million Bangladeshi, many of whom have been displaced by the flooding that Indian deforestation of the Himalayas has caused.

The question is, though, how effective can barriers of any kind be in the long run. Bush's border fence, which could cost as much as $30 billion, not $2 billion, will not stop the one third of people who did not walk across the border illegally, but rather just entered on tourist, student or work visas and over-stayed. As for the other half million who come illegally each year, one has to realize that American corporations are so addicted to cheap labour, and smuggling is so lucrative, that come hell or high water ways will be found around the Tortilla Curtain, by land, sea or air.

What is troubling about most of the immigration-reduction movement---of which I am a part---the conservative wing particularly, is that they don't look at problems like the negative impact of immigration on the North American working class, and on the environment, and ask questions which go to the root causes of those problems. Questions like: "Why do people from very poor countries like Mexico want to leave their families and homeland all behind so badly that they take so many risks to move here and work for miserable wages?" American Republicans against amnesty don't ask these kinds of questions because they really don't know much about NAFTA and its impact on the Mexican people, nor do they care. Nor do they know anything about the IMF and Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), and their impact on the people of the Third World. They take no responsibility for Mexican poverty or the hardship and misery of the billions who will never even catch a glimpse of the Californian dream. They have no questions. Only answers. One answer. Send them home and slam the door shut behind them.

Well I agree that the door must be shut. And so does Ralph Nader, Presidential nominee for the Green Party in 2000, who said that open borders "is a totally absurd proposition." The environment must be allowed time to recuperate from the demographic onslaught it has suffered in the past two decades. Immigration-driven population growth is killing biodiversity and thwarting Kyoto targets. Each immigrant costs America one acre of farmland every minute and generates 23.8 tons of GHG annually. Canada has lost 18% of its best farmland to urban sprawl from immigrant-propelled growth, which is also threatening 70% of its endangered species. But shutting the door is one thing, keeping it shut is another. To do that we must relieve the population pressure that is coming from the outside.What is generating that pressure? The tautological answer would be population growth. But it is not just a fertility issue. It is an issue of economic justice, unequal distribution of wealth, and greed---institutionalized by larcenous trade agreements.

NAFTA, by allowing heavily-subsidized US corn and other agra-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, drove two million Mexicans off the land and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty, and attempt to cross the US border to feed their families. NAFTA's service sector rules also permitted large companies like Wal-Mart to sell Chinese-made goods so to bankrupt 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses. Mexican wages, not surprisingly, have fallen under NAFTA. It is considered the province of corporate lobbyists, not a "human" issue, and why not? Desperate conditions in Latin America and Mexico produce lower wages, pressure to reduce environmental protection, and help union-busting prospects.

If Mexico's plight is desperate, that of the global proletariat is worse. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis reports that one-third of the world's urban population live in 250,000 slums, half of them people under 20, and 100 million of them street kids. In a decade nearly half of all city dwellers will be poor. Davis makes it clear. The IMF put those people in those slums and made it their "implacable future", by using the leverage of debt to restructure the economies of most of the Third World, and force the retreat of the state and its social safety net. The gap between rich and poor nations widened by century's end to a Gini coefficient level of 0.63.

SAPs forced developing countries to dump their raw unprocessed commodities for cheap prices in an effort to pay off the debt and pay for expensive imported goods from developed countries which often barricaded their agricultural products. Fifty third world countries depend on three or fewer commodities for over half of their export earnings. Some spent more on debt servicing than on education. Observing this relationship it might be said that the First World preaches free trade but practices good old fashioned mercantilism.

In describing the IMF program of slashing social services and infrastructure, escalating resource extraction to generate hard currency, re-orientating farm production from serving local needs to serving global markets, and increasing dependence on imported capital-intensive technologies---all in the name of debt-servicing---Raj Patel compared IMF policy to a weapon of mass destruction:

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanction policy that kills one and half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, author of the seminal book, Eating Fossil Fuels, put the case eloquently and cogently in his article Energy Depletion and Immigration:

Closing our borders alone will not stop the flow of illegal immigrants. It will only leave them more at the mercy of their employers within this country. As long as there is such a disparity in wealth and well-being between the US and other countries, there will be people attempting to flee to the US no matter what abuse they are met with on this side of the border. If we truly want to solve the immigration problem, then we must start by addressing the reasons why people would rather slave in the US than remain in their homelands. To solve the immigration problem, we must first face the fact that the US has built itself up on the riches of other nations (and) stop the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, then we must raise up the living conditions in their homelands. If these people could make a decent living in their own countries, they would not want to leave everything that is dear to them in order to slave in the US.

Unfortunately, Pfeiffer is among the vast army of environmentalists whose environmentalism is trumped by their laudable human rights agenda. Like many others, he has catalogued not only the appalling economic cost of the Bush border fence, but its cost to the wildlife whose viability is dependent on cross-border mobility. But he doesn't consider the countervailing cost to wildlife on the whole continent that the population growth from out-of-control immigration will cause. Indeed, the prime focus of any critique of world trade arrangements should not be there effect on global wealth distribution, but the fact that unfettered trade permanently reduces carrying-capacity. Ecological considerations supersede all others.

As Dr. William Rees has noted, trade only appears to increase carrying capacity because each trading country or region is treated as if it is a separate open system, and not integrated into a closed global system. Many wealthy nations have ecological footprints vastly in excess of their bio-capacities. For the UK, Holland and Japan, it is four, five and six times larger respectively, and the United States burdens the global commons with an ecological load twice its biophysical limit. Why?

Trade allows consuming populations in ecological overshoot (eg. the UK, the US) to feel insulated from their stressed local ecosystems, and without negative feedback they feel little need to curb their over-population or material growth and confine it within carrying capacity. Developing countries too, who receive remittance payments from expatriates in wealthy countries are somewhat buffered from the harshest reality of natural capital depletion.

So while open-borders advocates argue that is unjust to allow goods, services and finances to flow unhindered across borders but not people, Rees counters that "merely liberalizing migration to match the free-flow of goods/capital, the world should rather seriously consider re-regulating both to help achieve sustainability. On a planet in ecological overshoot, achieving sustainability will demand lower levels of material consumption, reduced movement of goods and people, and the rehabilitation of ecosystems." ( Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?")

Like a 21st century enclosure movement, global capitalism has chased third world farmers off the land into the lap of the cheap labour employers of North America and Europe. To open the doors ever wider would only serve its interests, it would only further depress the wages and displace the jobs of low-income native residents, further despoil the environment, not relieve world poverty but cripple our ability to alleviate it.

But not accepting immigrants or refugees makes it a moral imperative, and a matter of urgent self-interest, to aggressively redress trade agreements and SAPs or abolish them, and vastly increase foreign aid conditional on family planning. Building walls, figuratively or materially, is but an interim complement to these measures, a necessary but not a sufficient step to protecting our environment. An immigration moratorium, and a population plan that provides for population stability within our national carrying capacity as determined by that plan, can only buy us time.

Ultimately, we cannot build a wall against global warming, peak oil, peak grain or the tsunami of humanity that one day will sweep over us if we don't get the IMF and the World Bank off their backs and turn back the clock on globalization.

In closing our borders, we must not turn our backs.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island BC
Canada V0P 1N0
October 22, 2007.

1. The construction of this solar electricity plant will consume large quantities of fossil fuels and produce a large amount of GHG.
2. The farm land that the solar panel site has taken over will be lost forever, thereby increasing our reliance on our areas, either on Canadian farm land whose supply is very limited or on nearby foreign farm land whose supply is decreasing because of population demands.
3. The immigrants will consume much more than the household electricity produced by the solar farm. They will consume water, electronics, paper products, air travel, etc. Increases in human population inevitably lead to the expropriation of other areas for the use of the new people.