Gumballs and Immigration

Have you see the Gumballs, World Poverty and Immigration video that's making the rounds lately?

This examination of the immigration problem, from 2010, hit my social media pages a few times in the days since things boiled over with the Trump Administration's policy of zero tolerance and family separation at our southern border.

The cases where it's been shared with me (or directed at me, in one case) were to defend the Trump practice of arresting people crossing the border illegally, and taking their children from them, holding them someplace (NY? Minnesota? Washington State?) other than even anywhere near their parents.  The point the video is supposedly making, if I listen to the folks who have shared this, is that the video clearly shows America can't take in everyone who wants to come here and we have to stop taking them, unless they're willing to come in legally.

The unspoken reason to share this is a whole 'us vs. them' thing. As in, "I have no money, my kids have nothing, I have to work and pay taxes so they can have free health insurance, why are we spending all this money on them?" There's also a little bit of "they are coming here and taking our jobs," which I'll believe only on the day I see 50 - 75 white folks lined up at the crack of dawn for the chance to hop in the back of a rickety pickup truck to go out into a field and pick something or plant something.

If you stick with it past the first couple of minutes, you see pretty quickly that the video makes a completely different argument - one that the president does not appear to believe in and, to be honest, one that the people who shared the video have yet to acknowledge.

This issue? There will always be more people living in abject poverty in other countries than the US can take in. And that is true, no question about that. From the video:

The impossibility of making even a dent is actually worse than it looks here because, last year when we took in one million immigrants, these countries added, birth over death, 80 million more people into the impoverished population. And this year, Congress is bringing in a million legal immigrants.

And this year, according to the United Nations, these countries are expected to add another 80 million people... 

We can take 5 million a year but we'd never get ahead of what's happening in these countries. Not in this century. 

Can't argue with that, right? One million is less than 80 million,Captain Obvious, whether you're talking about legal immigrants, people who sneak across a border, or gumballs. Or Skittles.

But you can argue about our immigration system, which was never designed to solve world poverty or (equally obviously) to allow every single person who wants to come to America to actually come to America. That's never been our goal, because immigration and world poverty are vastly different things. Equating them is as absurd as is thinking that we'd be able to handle a few million immigrants each year.

Here are a couple of other key points in the video that seem to be overlooked when it's shared:

And we may be really hurting the impoverished people in the world, because the million that we do take are amongst the most energetic, often the better educated, certainly the most dissatisfied people that if they did not immigrate would be the agents for change to improve the lot of all the people of these countries.

The true heroes in the global humanitarian field are the people in these countries who have the wherewithal to emigrate to another country, but instead stay in their countries to apply their skills to help their fellow countrymen. Unfortunately our immigration system tends to entice this very type of people to abandon their countrymen.

Wow - our way is a bad way? Someone should tell the Trumpsters, who would love us to have only the best and brightest come in - you know, doctors, scientists, economists, supermodels and the like - via a merit-based immigration system. And they're not alone: you'll recall Mitt Romney talking about stapling a green card to the diplomas of these foreign students, keeping them here to do good, and to do well.

Don't they know that's the opposite of what we need to be doing? Back to the video for reinforcements:

Don't you see?

Immigration can never be an effective or significant way to deal with the suffering people in the world. They have to be helped where they live. 99.9% of them will never be able to immigrate to a rich country. There is no hope for that. They have to bloom where they're planted. They only place that 99.9% of these people can be helped is where they live.

Let's help them there.

Well, OK, let's do that. I'm all for it! I'll buy what the video is selling!

Except, the Trump administration, in pushing their #AmericaFirst, borderline isolationist agenda, is looking to cut foreign aid to other countries, because everyone else is not doing their fair share and because we have to take care of our own by also proposing huge cuts in national programs, but hey, we're not supposed to pay attention to that, right?)

Knowing that the aid we provide amounts to about 1% of the total budget, which is really a handful of gumballs in the overall scheme of things, here are some of the changes recommended or implemented in the past 18 months or so:

• there was the proposed slashing of 1/3 of the US AID budget;
• there was the 'friends only' proposal, where we would give aid only to specific countries that abide by our ideology or or something;
• there was the 'cut everything that has anything to do with contraception' plan, because we're a bunch of Puritans still, 240 odd years since our founding certainly family planning wouldn't have any impact on that annual 80 million birth-over-death figure; and
• the expansion of the global gag rule.

There's more, but you get the drift. So, let's review.

Trump wants the best and brightest to come here, and we don't want to pay to help other countries so much, at the same time we brag about how great our economy is, and how big our heart is.

And we in particular are directing cuts to the very things that could help the most - family planning efforts, including contraception and yes, safe abortions and referrals, in the countries where those options are critical to helping reduce poverty, population, health crises, climate crises, environmental crises, human rights violations, and more.

So yes, let's share cute videos of gumballs, and ignore the most important message: that we're going about this whole immigration thing all wrong.