Dear
HCN,
In my view, Ed Marston’s
column “A son of immigrants has a change of heart” (HCN, 2/3/03:
The son of immigrants has a change of heart) is wrong in several
particulars. First, overpopulation is, as it was in the Rev.
Malthus’ day (a couple of centuries ago, when he first
suggested that the rapidly reproducing poverty-stricken classes
were a nasty threat to the existence of his class), a symptom, not
a cause. People are not poor because they have many children; they
have many children because they are poor.
People in
poverty or who live in insecurity have more children because these
“extra” children become necessary assets in living (to take care of
aged parents, to assist in making money for the family, as labor to
make inadequate plots of land more productive, etc.). Yes, of
course there are cultural attributes to all this (religion
promoting birth rates, the prestige of having many children, etc.),
but the facts remain that in developed social forms (Western,
non-Western) where folks have social and economic security in their
lives, population growth rates approach zero.
Take a look
at the high population growth curves of the U.S. before Social
Security and when lots of people still lived in rural areas and
engaged in agriculture. Once more people moved to urban areas and
Social Security came into being, the U.S. population growth rate
approached zero.
Rather than stop there with these archaic
and reactionary ideas about population dynamics, you compound your
problem by blaming the Mexican government for not keeping people at
home. My God, Ed, have you never heard of imperialism? NAFTA? GATT?
The “Free Market”? Mexico has not had a chance — we have
controlled its economy for decades, and its labor has developed our
society, kept our labor costs low, our gas and imported commodities
cheap. Mexican “overpopulation” comes about because people have to
have many children so to be able to send some north to provide
supplement to their bare existences and give them some security
missing in the distorted economy. Get the U.S. out of their
economy, and Colorado can stay, uninterestingly, mostly white.
James C. Faris
Sante Fe, New
Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Poverty — and U.S. policy — are the roots of Mexico’s problems.
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