Most great civilizations in history were brought down by the "barbarians" of their days, whose military conquest of their wealthy neighbors was preceded by insidious invasion in such numbers that it destroyed the fiber of the society of their hosts. The newest wave of immigrants to Miami is just the beginning; there are 400 million Latin Americans who are just as desperate as the Nicaraguans. (Miami Herald in Portes and Stepik 1993; 161)
While publicly decrying china's one child population control policy, the American powers that be are working to implement less obvious control structures of their own. The issue in this country, however, centers not around how many children are born within the borders, but around who is bearing those children.
The American collective unconscious pictures the poor and the dark-skinned (particularly women) as a human tide of poverty and disease that will overcome the first world if they continue to breed out of control. The physical consequences of these imaginings include California's proposition 187, which states that no legal or illegal immigrant "shall receive any public social services to which he or she may otherwise be entitled until the legal status of that person has been verified." On the homefront, republican policy makers recently proposed a set of welfare "reforms" that would prohibit states from using federal funds to aid children born to welfare recipients, deny welfare to unwed parents under 18, reduce welfare checks for mothers who cannot establish the paternity of their children (except in cases of rape or incest), and reduce aid for disabled children.
Both proposition 187 and the welfare reforms were conceived with the aim of reducing the birthrates of certain dependent groups (Black "welfare queens" and Latina immigrants in particular) that are seen to be breeding out of control. The idea is that the taxpayers must exert some sort of behavioral control over these women who procreate partly because they can't control their own sexuality, and partly because they want the "extra" money. Meanwhile, the same GOP policy makers approved a $500 per-child tax credit for middle and upper class families. A higher education tax credit is also being discussed.
When I express my suspicions about welfare reforms, I am not denying that ideally, people should work (and be given the opportunity to work) to feed and clothe and house themselves. I think we have to be careful, though, when we begin punishing people for living off the system. At the very least we should try to punish all people equally. Sometimes I wonder who is a bigger leach on the leg of our national and global prosperity: The welfare mother who receives food stamps from the government or the sports superstar who takes millions of dollars in prosecution funds? The sick child of a migrant worker or the billionaire that always winds his way out of paying taxes? A homeless man who asks for a place to sleep or a defense department that gets far more than it asks for? Sometimes, I think about re-evaluating my alliances, particularly when I realize who consumes the most square miles of ocean/rainforest/landfill/oil field in relation to their actual physical size and number . Does Bill Gates have children?