Friday, June 7, 2013
Golden Venture aground 20 years ago
Today, Storycorps has a 20th anniversary vignette from one of the most revealing episodes in American immigration history, the Golden Venture. Restricting immigration here supports forced depopulation there. "There," of course, varies -- sometimes China, sometimes Africa, most often today latin America. Anti-immigration propaganda encourages Americans to feel that we are crowded and being pushed beyond our capacity to help, even though we the richest country in the world with a population density that is about 2/3 of the global average. If we are over-crowded, then the world is tremendously over-populated! But beyond the propaganda, when we refuse to accept immigrants and refuse to offer an escape, we are complicit in the brutal depopulation policies of emigrant nations.
http://www.npr.org/2013/06/07/189222117/finding-an-anchor-for-a-life-set-adrift-by-a-shipwreck