It is an urban legend, but I
believe it. A travelling salesman complained to a hotel that he’d
been bitten by bedbugs. He got a lengthy apology back saying that
bedbugs had never been seen on the premises or even within blocks
of the hotel. Inside the envelope he also found a note: “Send the
bedbug letter.”
I believe the story because I once had a
bedbug letter of my own. I sent it to people who wrote to tell me
that the newspaper I published was wasting its time reporting on
mining, damming and overgrazing. The real problem? Overpopulation.
My bedbug letter always sympathized with the letter
writer. I wouldn’t mind fewer people clogging up roads and trails.
But I said I didn’t know how to fight population growth except by
writing about the effects of more people pressing on forests,
rivers and open space.
Reproduction, I said, was like the
other primal emotions. We chose not to go head-to-head against
overpopulation anymore than we went head-to-head against lust and
greed or murderous hearts. That we left to the preachers. But life
got more complex during the last decade. “Overpopulation” now means
immigration into the United States, mainly by Mexican nationals. It
is no longer a matter of other Americans’ inability to control
ourselves. It is now a matter of fellow human beings of other
nationalities being unable to match their economies to their
fecundity. It has also become a matter of obeying our laws and
maintaining our borders.
But I’m also the child of
immigrants. My parents came here for the same reason people come
today: for a better life and to send money home. They didn’t expect
the streets to be paved with gold. My mother, from a village in
Poland, was astounded to see that streets were paved at all. They
came to work, and to escape a hellhole. How could I oppose others
coming here for similar reasons?
This is very personal
reasoning, and journalists, after all, are expected to weigh the
public-policy implications of immigration and come up with a
rational answer. But I’m overwhelmed by dispatches from the ground.
Americans no longer care to mow their lawns or clean their toilets
or slaughter the chickens we eat. Nor do we want to learn to do
computer programming the way Asians do. Or run the Chinese
restaurants that in the last few years have moved into even the
small-town West.
I also admit to a streak of
libertarianism that admires freedom in all its forms, including the
free-market nature of immigration. But this pro-immigration tilt
took a hit this Christmas in Mexico, thanks to a conversation with
a landscape gardener hired to turn a sandy beach close to the
Pacific Ocean into a lawn. He is the father of 11 and leads a clan
of dozens. He landscapes full time and farms full time. His own
yard is a small food factory, staffed by his growing family.
He is proud of his life, and he should be. But he was
also incredulous at our lives. He indicated that a father, mother,
son and daughter wasn’t a family at all. It was more an hors
d’oeuvre, a tapas. I’d like to think he wasn’t contemptuous of us
personally. But he was dismissive of a culture where only two
children might be the norm.
This was the other,
patriarchal face of immigration: one of the men who stands,
invisible, behind the image of a young woman, babe in arms, wading
the Rio Grande River at night.
Should I be swayed by his
attitude? Should I be swayed by knowing that some of his children
will probably come to America, or may already be here? Should I be
swayed by knowing that Mexico’s second largest source of income
after oil exports is expatriate workers sending money home?
I think I should be. When it comes to important matters,
we have no choice but to trust our emotions, tempered by our heart.
Here’s what they tell me. It would be good for Americans to clean
our toilets, write our computer programs, slaughter our chickens
and cattle, and pick our strawberries.
And it would be
good for Mexicans to cope with their population and economy without
using the United States as an overflow tank, and without using the
poor Mexican people as cash cows, to be exported as if they were
crude oil or cattle.
Ed Marston is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He a senior writer for the paper and
its former publisher.
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