VivirLatino

All of us here at VL are very aware of how especially Latin@ immigrants are targeted as the “reason” the economy is so horrible here in the U.S. (all the Mexican mamis are on welfare! And having babies! And not paying for them! *SCREAM!!!*)

Well, what happens when we start looking at “anti-fat” hysteria in combination with anti-immigrant hysteria? You get articles like this–all posted under the excellent headline– “Immigration and overpopulation: you can eat too much and grow too fat”:

That next 100 million will overwhelm our ability to maintain water, energy, food and a balanced environment. It will lift out of reach any chance for a stable and sustainable population within the USA. It will also create horrific water shortages and exacerbate the energy and climate destabilization crises.

Therefore, it boils down to choices. So what logical and rational action can we take? Can we keep adding 2.4 million legal and illegal immigrants annually, (what we’ve been doing for 20 years), from a line that grows by 77 million annually? Do we think we can add another 100 million, and another 100 million after that, without pause? Do we want to be like China or India or Mexico? Mexico City houses a horrid 22 million in an air polluted, water scarce and poverty ridden quagmire of so many problems—no one can solve them so everyone lives degraded lives. What happens when our civilization becomes overwhelmed by sheer hyper-population overshoot? What about quality of life?

Clearly, there is a very clear idea in this article of WHO is eating too much and growing too fat. Clue: it’s not white U.S. citizens. Immigrants are over indulgent, dirty, lazy, lecherous, and ultimately unwilling to do the hard work of “losing weight.”

U.S. citizens are the skinny people forced to sit next to Fatty Mc Fatster on the airplane.

These arguments exhaust me. Besides the fact that they are patently wrong (U.S. citizens use more resources than any other citizen in the world), they also ALWAYS, without FAIL, refuse to acknowledge the role the creation of “nation/states” have in creating overpopulation and immigration problems to begin with.

Borders are not natural. They are not something that have existed for eternity. They were, for the most part, fairly recent inventions with many countries in the Arab and Persian world only being officially created within the past 40-60 years.

If we are so fucking scared of turning into the fat Mexkins–can we at least *question* what role “borders” and “nation/state” has on enforcing a false and unrealistic sense of immobility? Or what role those same things had in creating a type of migration that is based on the movement of capital rather than historic tribal needs?

We don’t even have to think about the role that capitalism has had in furthering globalization (i.e.everybody move to where the companies need them to be!) for now. We can just start with the role of the nation/state.

Immigration is SO much more complicated than far too many people are willing to acknowledge. Fixing immigration is going to require a much more nuanced approach than “encourage countries to take responsibility for themselves.”

It may even require that U.S. citizens do a little internal critiquing on themselves.

Egad.