Bursting at the seams

There are simply too many people. You’ve seen the pictures. Crowded streets in Calcutta, impoverished babies with huge hungry eyes and bloated bellies in Mexico, refugee camps in Africa, masses of Chinese crammed into filthy cities. The earth can’t support these numbers. Something’s got to give. And you’ve heard the arguments.

The US (or the UK, or any other rich country for that matter) needs to close its borders to immigration from poor countries. Having finally reduced our own birthrate sufficiently to more or less stabilise our population, the last thing we need is a bunch of poor (brown) people moving in to crowd us out. (We know, also, that once they’re here they’ll breed faster than we do, and soon enough will outnumber us.)

I often respond to this argument by saying I’m all for closing the US border to Mexico (and every other border, for that matter, all the way down to closing bio-regional borders), so long as we close it not only to people but to resources as well. No bananas from Mexico. No coffee. No oil. No tomatoes in January. Why do you think people leave their families in Mexico (or any other impoverished nation) to go to work in the US?

Not...

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