Wanda Sykes is a funny comic who does a great bit about how nothing good ever trickles down. Paint trickles down walls, food trickles down our chins and sweat trickles down our foreheads, you get the picture. On the other side of her argument is that money, something we all need to survive, never trickles down to those who could use it. The other thing that doesn’t trickle down is the way many population groups are discussing overpopulation particularly in the US. I know because I used to embrace their narrative. I used to think and say in my presentations that if you take care of overpopulation, immigration as a cause of population growth will become a non-issue. I naively thought that if you just empowered women ‘over there’ they wouldn’t overwhelm our resources here.
Yes, I too used to buy into what I now call the ‘trickle-down theory of overpopulation.’ It looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work. Like Wanda says, nothing good ever trickles down. Many population groups full of dedicated staff and members work tirelessly on an issue many don’t even acknowledge as a problem. I commend them, many are my dear friends. But I also challenge them. They avoid the issue of immigration like the plague, which it indeed can be, I am not that naïve. The Overpopulation Project describes the missions of 38 organizations working on overpopulation issue. Immigration is only mentioned in two of them, though some may deal with immigration in some of their work. (https://overpopulation-project.com/organizations-dealing-with-overpopulation/) My request is that at least population organizations don’t give out false messages about the things that could actually work in real time rather than the fantasies that somehow reducing births across borders and oceans will magically translate into lowering the over 1 million legal immigrants arriving on the overfull US doorsteps each year. They ignore how policies promote the continued stream of people to come into the US (and other countries) under the assumption that we can and should be the release valve for more seriously overpopulated countries. Besides, if we had smaller families, it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s important to note that though population groups keep pushing for small families, native-born Americans have had replacement level fertility rates for decades and that at current levels of immigration, the US population cannot stabilize even if native-born fertility dropped to one child per woman. It seems so unfair to ask for those who want families to sacrifice their dreams only to be undermined by growth from new arrivals.
The theory goes that if NGO’s promote family planning and incentives for small families, then there won’t be people wanting to move from the ‘less than’ countries to the ‘more than’ countries. The proof that nothing good ever trickles down, is the fact that after decades of efforts by the UNFPA(United Nations Family Planning Association) and many others, we are still growing globally by 80 million a year on a planet which gained 6 billion in the last hundred years.
While high birth rates do indeed inspire migration, there are other reasons to leave your home, family, language and venture into unchartered experiences. Those reasons can be everything from economic opportunity to sexual and religious freedom to simply wanting to be reunited with family members. If it is easy to come and go, then human nature will bring countries with less material wealth to those with more.
Our 47 billion dollar per year foreign aid budget is designed to help other countries, but using immigration as a release valve for other countries’ overpopulation inspired poverty is a no-win path because relative to its resources the US is already seriously overpopulated. I often think how frustrating it must be for empowered and educated women and men already in the developed world to choose small families so that they may be raised with more open space, more water and wildlife only to look up in the sky and see high-rises being built to accommodate growth now mostly coming from immigration. If numbers matter, if we can agree that resources like water, open space, room on our highways and good jobs are local and limited, then overgrowing that capacity needs to be addressed wherever and however it is happening. Numbers can’t matter just when it’s about family planning, they must matter when it comes to immigration too. Humans are overrunning resources and living unsustainably everywhere on earth. It is understandable that people want to live better. That is why it is critical that every country address their own overpopulation problems by addressing both fertility and immigration. Garrett Hardin wrote about the metaphor of potholes. Potholes are a global problem but they must be addressed locally. That holds true with any environmental problem. Light pollution is an issue but we have a better chance of asking our local city authorities to pass laws about lighting type and usage than we do about insisting that something be done across the ocean in a country where we have no voice.
The world could not be set up any more unfairly. Barely an 1/8 of the word’s 8 billion live in a country that is desirable, the rest would like to move to where life could be better and yet that is impossible. How do 6+ billion pick up and move without creating chaos at their destination? Chaos is a relative thing. If you lived in Florida ten years ago the Florida of today appears to be bursting at the seams with traffic, development, pollution and loss of wild places. But if you come to Florida from a country so overcrowded and impoverished that malnutrition is everywhere, the 2.7 million increase will go unnoticed, it just seems like you have landed in paradise.
We are melting under the weight of our carbon atoms, how can more people be the answer for anyone? As David Attenborough has been quoted as saying, “There are no issues that we wish to solve which wouldn’t be easier with less people.” Population groups will admit this privately to me but they fear that their funding might dry up if someone takes a truthful stand on the ‘I’ ( immigration) word. I want to acknowledge that reality while saying that we are smart enough to find the nuance in taking care of Americans and America that doesn’t include hatred or mistreatment of anyone.
Who will pick the crops and do those jobs no one wants to do at the wages offered ? This represents a poor and uncaring argument which has real answers that industry ignores because it can. Immigrants who have it rough in their home countries are exploited, underpaid and hiring them ultimately undercuts domestic labor. Corporate America knows it can get away with inhumane treatment of a global workforce under our current set of laws. We subsidize the sugar industry so that unhealthy food remains cheap. We could subsidize domestic farm workers with those dollars, give them living conditions and competitive wages so that higher wages do not translate to outrageous prices for vegetables at the market.
Several population activists have recently asked me, “How can we lock our doors when we took over this country from First Nation Peoples?” The colonized world with all of its atrocities must be taught with all of its horrible truths in our schools and added to our country’s narrative, but it is the world we have inherited. We must not destroy the future based on the genocidal actions of the past. It is a sad reality that our country has so many genocides as its foundation. It is even sadder to use that as an excuse to be bad stewards of the land today, thereby allowing the further destruction and even more genocide because the destruction of our portion of the biosphere will gain steam under the weight of more feet.
The future will only be made worse by ignoring that growth comes from two places, TFR ( Total Fertility Rate) and FPC which I am coining now to mean( Feet Per Country.) While singularly focused on TFR, population groups are ignoring that FPC is what matters and where we have the most and only control now. FPC in the US is growing mainly by immigration.
We cannot help traffic by building more lanes. We cannot lower our carbon footprint enough by using reusable bags to buy our plant-based food stuffs. And we cannot do the sustainable thing and stabilize and reduce population in the US (and other developed countries ) by only offering to empower women in other countries. This narrative justifies looking the other way while lax immigration policies keep the US and other ‘first world’ countries growing unsustainably.
Sensible immigration and employment enforcement should be said in the same mouthful as sensible gun policies. Both are intended to make our country more livable. E-verify for employers looking to make sure their employees can legally work here, limiting chain migration and curbing visas are just a few ways more potentially successful in an immediate way than the ineffective trickle down approach of offering birth control in other countries. We don’t even fund birth control properly here in the US! If we could give a microphone to the underserved in this country I wonder what they would say to the very idea of adding to what we already invest in other countries when their neighborhoods are crumbling due to lack of investment.
Justice will be better served when America is not bloated with more people than its resources can handle. No immigrant bashing allowed, this is not personal. However a recognition that only suffering lies ahead as America seems destined to grow by the tens of millions because we are afraid of telling the truth about how we are (mostly) growing. The latest Census projections also show that our nation is projected to grow past 400 million by 2060 and that 90% of the increase is linked to future immigrants and their descendants. Assuming that is true, how does sending aid and funding programs in other countries address this? The answer is that it doesn’t. It’s like bringing a set of matches to a forest fire.
All population groups are busy working to bring awareness to this terribly important and mostly ignored issue, but they must do more soul searching on their offering of solutions. Numbers matter and if we ( or any other country especially the developed ones ) are growing mostly by immigration than we cannot pretend that condoms and education are as important as enforceable sensible and humane immigration policies. I am not asking them to all take on this dicey issue, but I am asking them not to act like their solutions will actually work when it comes to reducing population within the US in the coming years. I am asking them to defer to those who are the experts and at least not work against the truth about US growth in an effort to appear to be among those who despise racism. If they truly want to be aggressively anti-racist then be honest about what life will be like for the already marginalized in the US as we grow by the tens of millions because we were afraid of the backlash of being honest with the American people.
There is one good thing that trickles down that Wanda missed. Good ideas can trickle down enough to matter. Uniting behind sensible immigration policies is a humane idea and one that needs to trickle down so that the goals of population groups can be achieved in a time frame that will make a difference.