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Saturday, August 15, 2015

Deporting 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants Would be Tantamount to a Crime Against Humanity

Deporting 11 Million Undocumented Immigrants Would be Tantamount to a Crime Against Humanity
Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

There are many people in the US with ill-conceived notions to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants from American soil. Assuming for discussion that they are all Mexicans and can be deported to Mexico, there would arise a string of refugee camps in every border town in Mexico that would become home to those 11 million people. This number is larger than any refugee event in recorded history. As a burgeoning "humanitarian crises" develops on our border, would we provide food, water, doctors and medicine, tents and blankets, latrines and other infrastructure to alleviate that crises? If we did not, would not WE be guilty of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other crimes against humanity?

At least while these undocumented people are resident inside our border, they are geographically dispersed, able to work at some job to support themselves, and not be forcibly concentrated into camps in a hostile climate. Right now they do jobs that we want done. They work for far less money than an equivalent documented citizen would. The only beneficiary of that are businesses that want cheap labor.

In the concentration camps there would be nothing for the adults and teenagers to do. Without the ability to earn money from the outside they would have to rely on what each new arrival brings. These camps would be ripe pickings for drug suppliers, child predators and traffickers who promise a nocturnal border crossing back to the states, for a price.

Saying you'd deport the illegals is a high and mighty rhetoric, but is only half of the statement. The other half is that you would create the greatest humanitarian crises that this hemisphere, and possibly the world, has ever witnessed.

We as a species of animal that shares this planet with all the others and all the peoples of the world must come to terms with the potential for massive migrations that will disrupt every aspect of civilization we have to date created.

The Dynamics of Massive Migration

In the middle of the 20th century a demographer asserted that if you lined up the Chinese people, five abreast and marched them into the ocean, the line would never end. Before anyone becomes indignant about repeating that statement here, this author denies any malice against the Chinese people and mentions this scenario only to make the point that very large populations have a huge impact on the earth. Today that number exceeds 25 abreast and the column never ends. This mathematical example applies to the people of India too.


Now the purpose of bringing up this bizarre concept is: what if you exchange the ocean for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in a mass migration intent on survival in new land rather than death by drowning? There would be two columns of migrating people, one Chinese and the other Indian. Two columns collectively 50 people wide pouring over the borders and into what certainly would be hostile territory would be an unstoppable tide. To obtain the maximum affect they could walk in a far wider path and not intend to make the line never-ending.

People walking at about 4 ft/sec moves 50 ppl/sec over any border line. In a day, 4,320,000 people would cross that border and in just over 115 days, they would have emigrated 500 million people. There would still be 1.6 billion relatives back home who could follow if sufficiently motivated.


Of course these three initial countries are only the beginning.  Iraq, Syria and Turkey are next on the itinerary to Europe. Bulgaria is only a small land bridge away with Greece nor much further along. East European countries lay beyond with land that would be squatted and homesteaded by these migrants as they overwhelm the locals. These are agrarian people, people who make their own furniture, tools and clothes. These are people who can weave a house out of sticks and hides. They are not dependent on the electric grid or natural gas pipes. They need no gasoline for the cars they do not have. They will be amply able to make due with whatever surface resources are available.

This is not to say that they would nor denude the forests for firewood and pollute rivers with their human wastes, but they will be able to survive in the far more moderate Euro-zone.

Now all of this conjectured migratory activity supposes that there is a need to do so. People do not pack up and leave their ancestral homes unless forced by some vector to do it. Drought and famine come to mind.

I'd like to point out that a walk along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea through Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco is not much of a greater distance into Europe than going the counter-clockwise route. Spain and Italy are only a ferry ride away.

Russian was so concerned about China flooding across their mutual border that they build their railroads at a different wheel gage so Chinese trains could not use their track to invade. Even today the Trans Siberian Express stops at the border each week to change the wheel trucks under all the cars. That process takes 4 hours. A slow invasion it would be.

Why People Would Undertake Massive Migration

Here again China and India stand as proxies for the growing crises of human migration from Asia and Northern Africa into Europe. In the case of Africa, the migration can also be characterized as a refugee event where hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing war, genocide, the extremist Muslim armies that execute large quantities of people on their march to their State goals.

Fleeing war and ideological mayhem is only part of the driving forces that motivate people to walk a thousand miles, float across 250 miles of open sea in crowded boats only to walk another thousand miles to try to get a job in France or England.

Northern Africa is enduring progressive desertification and drought even as they are experiencing the hottest temperatures since records were first made. War and religious genocide has made food into a weapon. Burn the fields and kill the animal herds and the people will die or move away. When the move away there only is Europe to see as sanctuary. Going south is only walking into deeper trouble.

Right now, in August 2015, there are only thousands of Middle Eastern refugees trying to cross into England from France via the channel tunnel on the last leg of their search for a better life.  They try to hop trains to get a ride through. This activity although risky, is nowhere near as dangerous as the trek they make from their homes in countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and others.


As change occurs to the global climate there will be those people who see more rain (resulting in flooding and landslides) less rain (resulting in drought, famine, wildfires and long term desertification) sea levels rise even as the withdrawal of ground water makes the land sink and allows seawater intrusion. There will be people whose million dollar homes are lapped at by the high tides while others will see their entire terrestrial existence covered by the sea. Even as wildlife activists try to stop arctic oil drilling to save polar bears and seals, we need to understand that those species are the "canaries in the mine shaft" and whose fate foreshadows our own.

But back to migration of humans. We are capable of looking out to sea and seeing the water rising. We can connect the dots that show us that our accustomed home is no longer habitable. We can decide to move elsewhere while the polar bears and migratory birds will die before they can realize what is happening. It is supposed that humans are the only species that can anticipate dire consequences of their environment. It could be that others see the carnage to come, but lack the facilities to stop it (us.)

The levels of economic migration that we see today may pale in comparison to that which may arise as millions of sea-level populations are displaced. When the rivers cease to flow because their headwater sources are depleted there will be migration. When the soldiers come and decimate civilian settlements, the rest will flee to places where war is not proximal but they may be as unwelcome in that sanctuary. Then the noon hour temperature exceeds 100 °F for weeks on end, populations will get up and move. Many will die on the way, but there will be no going back nor any way to stay behind.

Whether it is social strife, religious sectarian violence, drought, flooding, famine, heat, disease or for economic opportunities there will be huge shifts in human populations in the coming decades. We have only seen the beginning of the trend, the part that is driven by sectarian violence and people taking refuge from war.

While the Middle Eastern refugees are from sectarian war, the refuges from Central America are fleeing the violence perpetrated by drug gang rivalries. Think about what it takes to motivate parents to send their children on a journey of 1000s of miles north to the American border unaccompanied in the belief that making that journey was far better than staying at home and coping with the violent culture there.

Internally in America families trekked west during the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s. Workers in large numbers left the South for northern industrial jobs. People always follow the work opportunities when they can. Today, people in Mexico and further south see the land of opportunity and arrive here to get a piece of it. They arrive with a work ethic that makes them willing to labor in the sun for starvation wages and sun up to sundown hours. They are willing to stand in building supply parking lots with the expectation that they will get the opportunity to hop on the back of a pickup truck or into a van to go to a day job and earn a few dollars for their efforts.

While some of the people who seek a better life in a new country are educated and can land a salaried job, they are not the ones who must cross deserts of foot and seas in open boats. Those people are the ones who have only the skills that are commensurate with the offering of minimum wage or less. Americans must not forget that this country is not the only one that is receiving large numbers of agrarian laborers who want to eat, sleep and be comfortable in their family units.

Now for the other side of migration. If there are 10 lifeboats floating at the scene of a sinking ship that each hold 25 people and there are 1,000 people in the water, there is a high probability that every boat will be capsized the 750 people trying to get in too. If someone doesn't arrive soon with an alternative all are likely to perish. Even when the people already in the boats risk their survival by taking on just a few more people from the water, they will not be rewarded for their generosity. There are just too many exhausted people treading water in the sea for there to be any decorum.

It is the same on land with overland migration and crowding at the borders. Countries that border war torn nations have either to accept or turn away the people who seek refuge. Even when those countries accept the refugees eventually the conditions will deteriorate into anarchy and chaos will prevail. Masses of refugees are not particularly adept at self-organizing into sustainable towns with a chart of rules for where to erect a shelter, where to defecate and urinate, how to make use of limited resources (especially when there are none to manage.)

Then there is the long-term scenario to address. The masses of displaced people cannot live in the makeshift camps forever. They must survive the winters, the summers, the lack of food and water, the communicable diseases that always erupts in such places. The hopes of the host countries is that they will eventually go home. While many would love to go home, for many there is no home to go back to.

Host Countries Must Come to Grips With Migration


As long as there is a place from which people need to flee and there is a better place to go, there will be migration. Trying to hold them back is like the story of the Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike. Eventually he will run out of fingers and arm length to save the town. The migrants come for many varied reasons and they are indeed a tide. As long as there is a shore on which to break, there will be a swell and a breaking wave that washes over the coast line. Each host country needs to devise a plan for how to accommodate that tide.

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