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Latin America not expecting too much from Obama
With the U.S. facing the worst financial crisis in a generation, many here believe Obama will be far too preoccupied with fixing the U.S. economy to get into a battle over immigration.
In Mexico and throughout Latin America the feeling is that the Bush administration has largely ignored the region. If it didn’t have to do with drugs or border security, most here believed, the United States wasn’t interested. Now that worries over terrorism have been replaced by worries over a cratering economy, Latin America still seems far from becoming a focus for the incoming administration.
“Obama has said little about the relationship with Mexico and in fact, there’s little to be hopeful about in the short term,” wrote the influential Mexico City daily El Universal on Wednesday.
And here’s what Mexico City office worker Juan Juarez told us when we did a round of man on the street interviews after the election: “I think that for Mexico it doesn’t make a big difference who won the presidential election in the United States, since the Americans will continue their cold and distant way of treating issues of importance to us like immigration reform.”
That sentiment echoed throughout the region. Guatemalan Chamber of Commerce President Edgardo Wagner said he isn’t expecting much from an Obama presidency. “The issue of immigration will continue to be treated the same way,” he said. “If in better times the United States didn’t support us, now even less so.”
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By Fed Up
December 1, 2008 10:02 AM | Link to this
The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, New York Times and hundreds of U.S. newspapers frequently publish stories on legal and illegal migrants struggling to make a new home in America. Those pieces, filled with sob stories enough to empty a box of Kleenex at a ‘chick flick’—provide fodder for a never ending flood of immigrants seeking a better life.
But they never talk about the other side of the coin as those immigrants impact American citizens. Those newspapers never talk about jobs taken from American citizens by legal and illegal immigrants. They fail to talk about 28 million Americans living on food stamps or 14 million Americans unemployed because immigrants take millions of jobs annually. They fail to tell readers that taxpayers pay for the plane flights, resettlement costs, food, medical, education and housing for immigrants.
I’ve traveled in Nepal and Bhutan. Their cultures feature water buffalo for tractors and no electricity in their rural areas. They walk everywhere along with their donkeys they use for transport of goods. Melanie Asmar, RMN journalist, reported that Som Baral from Bhutan, a teacher, now bags groceries at King Soopers in Denver. His wages and taxes cannot come close to paying for the costs of his daughter’s education in our schools. He and his family suffer with culture shock that few of us can understand. Let’s say you found yourself thrust from Denver metro onto a farm in Bhutan. How would you like to drink out of a stream, plant crops by hand and use an outhouse 100 percent of the time, and no more TV or electricity? You would never see another movie. You’d go nuts in a week! Think how they feel changing from a farm, third world culture, different language and family—to Denver!
Worse, we displaced a teacher out of Bhutan that impoverishes that country far more by taking an educated man away from his culture. Thus, both brain drain and leadership skills flit away into America where Baral stands at the bottom of the intellectual and economic rung. America creates a brain drain all over the world that impoverishes all those countries—leaving them with bankrupted educational systems and economies. In other words, we steal their best and brightest.
Asmar reported Colombian Josefina Castro said, “I like it here, but I want to go back to Columbia.” Her federal aid runs out next year. She’s 80 so she hasn’t worked or given a dime in taxes. That happens to our country by the millions of refugee immigrants—cost us untold billions of dollars.
Whether they come from Somalia, Burma or Ethiopia, they find themselves ripped out of their cultures, languages and family connections. They arrive in the USA without any skills that benefit America. They cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in resettlement costs. They become cab drivers, grocery baggers, lawn mowing laborers and other jobs that require no skills other than showing up. At the same time, they take jobs away from American teens, working poor and other Americans—who now stand in unemployment lines, soup kitchens and living on welfare.
In order to save all the suffering people of the world, the U.S. would have to immigrate 18 million people annually that starve to death worldwide. That’s eight million adults and 10 million children that die of starvation or related diseases annually! Can we save all of them? No! How about saving them in their own countries? How about helping them with water purification, farming techniques and family planning?
Beyond the sob stories and the human misery, those reporters never talk about the horrific impact of adding 2.4 million immigrants to the USA annually. Each one causes a 12.6 ‘ecological footprint’ whereby 12.6 acres of land must be destroyed to support that person. The average immigrant causes an immediate 10 times more negative impact to as high as 30 times more impact on our delicate environment. Each immigrant overloads our water supplies, energy availability and carrying capacity. Those people represent a growing hyper-population load on the United States that cannot be tolerated as we head into the “Post Oil Era” whereby we cannot support 306 million U.S. citizens and growing toward 400 million in 30 years.
I invite all U.S. newspapers to write about what America faces when our “unending growth” causes our water to run out, the energy declines and what we face when California adds its projected 30 million people, Florida adds 18 million, Texas 12 million, Arizona five million and every state adds millions more—primarily by immigration. Those immigrants create the exact same disaster in our country from the one they fled in their on nations!
Ironically, the world grows by 77 million desperately poor and starving each year. We cannot save them by bringing them to our country! We face mega planetary consequences that explode beyond most readers’ comprehension. The more we bring to America, the worse it gets for all of us—faster! If you think I’m fooling, I recommend reading “The Long Emergency” By Kunstler and “Peak Everything” by Heinberg or my forthcoming book “Nation on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans.”
Since the American female averages a sustainable 2.03 children on average, everything we face stems from hyper-population loading caused by legal and illegal immigration. Sixty years from now, if not stopped, future journalists will write stories about desperate Americans scratching out a living in a country gasping for its life under the load of 600 million people. We can no longer afford mass immigration into America if we expect a viable and sustainable civilization. As it stands today, we face enormous problems beyond most peoples’ comprehension.
© 2008 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved