by Ibon » Thu 14 Aug 2008, 12:02:25
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('VMarcHart', ' ')I'm advocating immigration --and much less our cities being "inundated with Mexicans and South Americans"-- is not the cause of peak oil or overshooting.
I am not an advocate of immigration at the scale we see in Europe and North America for reasons I explained
[url=http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic33890-0-asc-855.html]here
[/url]It is important to see this issue from the perspective of what happens in the source countries when immigration becomes such a dominant force in their politics and economy.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'f') we look at the Philippines for example after world war II they had one of the strongest economies in southeast asia and today they are one of the most corrupt countries. Their biggest export product is their people. You cant find a qualified nurse or doctor in the country because they all leave to work overseas so you have this huge brain drain. The escape valve of exporting their excess population to work overseas makes their government corrupt and the remittances they get from overseas filipinos sending their money back home provides such a large percentage of their GDP that the government isn't pressured to address their corruption. Then you have the irony of the catholic church who would fight child labor on the one hand while telling people condoms are evil.
I would be an advocate of much more strict immigration policy as in the long run this would create such enormous economic and social pressures in a country like the philippines that this could bust their endless cycle of corruption and maybe also break the hold their religious institutions have on fighting against family planning and contraceptive.
A lot of the anti immigration rhetoric out there is from a xenophobic or racist mind set or one that is generated from protecting the interests of the host nations in dealing with their own resource constraints. It is seldom mentioned how severely limiting immigration to poor nations can actually provide benefits for them as well