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“Don’t try to solve your population problem by exporting your excess people to us.”
We are not faced with a single global population problem, but, rather, with about 180 separate national population problems. All population controls must be applied locally; local governments are the agents best prepared to choose local means.
Means must fit local traditions. For one nation to attempt to impose its ethical principles on another is to violate national sovereignty and endanger international peace. The only legitimate demand that nations can make on one another is this:
“Don’t try to solve your population problem by exporting your excess people to us.”
-- There Is No Global Population Problem, by Garrett Hardin
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It’s Too Soon to Congratulate South Africa
The World Cup hosts hunker down for a wave of xenophobic violence.
By Susana Ferreira, Foreign Policy Dispatch
July 12, 2010
DIEPSLOOT, SOUTH AFRICA—Late one brisk night in mid-June, Bongani Mdiki was having a beer at Willie's Tavern in Diepsloot, a township north of Johannesburg, South Africa, when men burst in to break his head. After forcing their way in, the group of at least 15 men stripped the tiny one-room bar and its 20-odd patrons of all they had. It was the second such robbery at Willie's Tavern in a month, and this time the burglars made off with a generator, about $264 worth of Black Label beer and snacks, and $330 in cash. Then they approached Mdiki for his phone -- and that's when one of them pulled out a machete.
Mdiki, a baker who is employed off and on, is convinced the robbers were Zimbabweans -- hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of whom have come to South Africa in recent years, fleeing desperate conditions at home. "These guys aren't coming for job; they're coming for fight," Mdiki muttered, shaking his head softly. He says he could tell they were foreign by the language they spoke. And he made a dire promise: "After World Cup, [the Zimbabweans] must pack and go."
Anti-foreigner violence -- temporarily suppressed by the World Cup -- is about to boil over again. Diepsloot was an epicenter for the 2008 rash of attacks against Zimbabwean refugees that left at least 62 people dead -- a third of them technically South African -- and displaced more than 100,000 across the country. During the last few months, extra cash from World Cup jobs, as well as scrutiny from the international media and the government, kept things mostly quiet. Fans have been unanimously impressed with how few incidents of theft and assault -- both commonplace in South Africa -- there have been. But after that temporary work dries up, the foreign media leave, and the government relaxes its watch, observers fear that the brewing animosity toward foreign nationals will re-erupt. If rumors are to be believed, plans to attack the foreigners are in the works.
In fact, the first signs of violence are already apparent: Foreigners' shops were looted in the Western Cape province townships of Mbekweni, Paarl East, Wellington, and Nyanga yesterday, and police there urged the mostly Somali immigrants to stay out. The New York Times on July 9 also reported on the threats of violence. In some townships the rumor has become more like a pledge, and organized groups say they're simply waiting for a trigger -- potentially an initial outbreak, like what happened yesterday near Cape Town -- to begin beating, robbing, and burning their neighbors.
Attacks on immigrants are nothing new in South Africa, and it's very easy to see where the tension is coming from. Mdiki lives in a densely populated squatter camp known as Extension One, where South Africans and non-nationals live packed together in metal shacks, with garbage piled along the dirt paths that pass for roads and hungry dogs brooding over open sewers. Crime and lack of housing are the two biggest grievances here -- South Africans are still waiting for the four walls and electricity that were promised them after the end of apartheid. Blame for at least some of the trouble is placed on foreign-born residents. From one end of the country to the other, the complaints are the same: They steal our jobs, they steal our houses, they rob us, and so they must go. It doesn't help that local politicians, in pursuit of the popular vote, sometimes fan the flames in the lead-up to elections, using foreigners as scapegoats for social ills. And as it happens, municipal elections are set to take place in a few months.
South Africa's fraught history with migration goes back long before apartheid, when the country imported migrant labor from surrounding countries to work in mines or on farms. After the white regime fell in 1994, that steady trickle of workers became a flood. The number of asylum-seekers in South Africa reached a then record high in 2008, when more than 200,000 applications were received by the Home Affairs Department -- more than any country in the world. The numbers in 2009 were 10 percent higher. Zimbabweans accounted for roughly 150,000 of the more than 222,000; Malawians made up roughly 15,000, Ethiopians roughly 10,000, followed by several thousand each from the Bangladesh, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia. They come because, despite threats of xenophobia and a 25 percent unemployment rate, opportunities are still more bountiful than at home. And people continue to pour across the border by the hundreds every day.
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These new arrivals are governed by the 1998 Refugees Act, which affords people who apply for asylum a number of rights and freedoms, including those to work, mobility, education, and public services. "It's been described as really good policy," said Duncan Breen, an advocacy leader with the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa -- on paper, at least. The reality, however, is more difficult. Asylum-seekers are regularly denied access to services, harassed, and chased from their homes.
In Diepsloot, the sprawling black township north of the country's business capital, signs of this tension are everywhere. Down the street from the police station, two public toilets stand side by side; a message on the door on the right reads "SOUTH AFRICANS ONLY," and the door on the left reads "FOREIGNERS." Crammed close together, these two communities are still very much apart. Residents feel abandoned by their national government and don't have much confidence in the justice system; the queue to report crimes at the local satellite police station stretches on and on during most weekends. Instead of waiting, people take policing into their own hands. If suspects in a crime are identified -- by items reported stolen or by telltale blood stains on their clothes -- the perpetrators are dragged out into the open and stoned to death by a crowd.
Baldwin Meyi, 38, who lives in Diepsloot's crowded Extension One, has started to talk about getting rid of the migrants himself. "We don't like them here," he said. "I'll kick them out; I'll do anything I can to kick them out." Christopher, a 39-year-old who asked not to be identified by his last name, told me that he is part of a local group with similar ideas. "We, as a community, we must take it much further because we can't depend on government," he said. "Government, they are sitting in their offices drinking tea nicely; they can't see what's happening here. That's what gets us angry, so we must put our power back to the people."
Breen, the advocacy leader, is taking the talk of potential violence seriously. "We have heard rumors that people have held meetings, discussing how to deal with the 'problem' of foreign nationals," he said. "There have been suggestions that people have been meeting in very specific locations, talking about orchestrating violence against foreign nationals. And that's something we've heard from a variety of places, so we are very concerned."
Keenly aware of this very real possibility, South Africa's government and civil society organizations have been quick to assert that violence will not be tolerated. The country's minister of police, Nathi Mthethwa, who established an interministerial committee to deal with xenophobia, released a statement on July 1 condemning the threats. "We will not tolerate any threat or act of violence against any individual or sector of society, no matter what reasons are given to justify such threats or actions," he said. "We want to assure society that our police are on the ground to thwart these evil acts."
Mthethwa announced on July 8 that the expanded police force adopted for the World Cup would be continued and that the police response to any violence would be swift. And after seeing how effectively authorities responded to the initial violence in the Western Cape Sunday, there is hope that they can do the same elsewhere. Police in Cape Town and Johannesburg have established 24-hour mobile hotlines for reporting potential anti-foreigner attacks, and police are dispatched to the scene at the first indication of a possible attack. This is a sharp departure from how the police reacted two years ago, when, for the dozens of murders and countless assaults reported, not a single conviction was secured against those perpetrating the violence.
Still, many in the townships -- both local and foreign -- doubt that South Africa's police can stop another attack. Christopher says he isn't worried about the police. "They won't stay long," he said. And once they've left, that's when he and his colleagues in Diepsloot will make their move. Meanwhile, Abilio Jorge Quiva, a 22-year-old Mozambican Diepsloot resident who lost several members of his family in the last wave of violence, remembers: "They picked up my cousin here with my family, and they killed him." Quiva, who had been living in Cape Town at the time, fled north to escape being killed himself. "We're scared because we know it's going to happen," he said. "We're sure."
Still, many in the townships -- both local and foreign -- doubt that South Africa's police can stop another attack. Christopher says he isn't worried about the police. "They won't stay long," he said. And once they've left, that's when he and his colleagues in Diepsloot will make their move. Meanwhile, Abilio Jorge Quiva, a 22-year-old Mozambican Diepsloot resident who lost several members of his family in the last wave of violence, remembers: "They picked up my cousin here with my family, and they killed him." Quiva, who had been living in Cape Town at the time, fled north to escape being killed himself. "We're scared because we know it's going to happen," he said. "We're sure."
His neighbors, he said, are the ones threatening him, telling him regularly that he must leave after the World Cup or face the consequences. When the fighting starts again, he wants to find a way back to Mozambique. "Life is hard, but we want to live. We want to live."
Susana Ferreira and Dominic Nahr covered this story through the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
» » » » [Foreign Policy]
'They should all leave and f*** off'
By Shain Germaner, The Star
July 12, 2010
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A meeting that was meant to unite residents of the Ramaphosa informal settlement turned ugly last night when locals voiced their hatred of foreigners.
"Why should I suffer in my own country? They should all leave and f*** off," a man screamed into the microphone.
The thousand-strong audience cheered in response.
But this was just one of dozens of hateful comments, many suggesting that unless the government removes the foreigners, violence could erupt.
The meeting, led by the International Community Unifiers (ICU), community leaders and local government, was interrupted constantly by residents' stories of their terrible encounters with foreigners.
A member of the audience described his experience when he was robbed at gunpoint.
It was when ICU president Dennis Mpangane took the stage to speak to the crowd that the audience turned ugly.
He began by mentioning that he was not originally from South Africa, to which the audience responded with hundreds of shouts of "hamba" and "Go home".
Mpangane, unable to be heard over the screams of the crowd, then chose not to speak for the rest of the meeting.
A local priest, Reverend Brian Lehoko, and a police superintendent, known only as Mathebula, managed to calm the audience after the interruption.
Mathebula called on the residents to report any violent crimes, especially xenophobic attacks, to the police as soon as possible.
"The police will be here day and night," he added.
The meeting also addressed service delivery issues that resulted in a protest earlier this year, and it was during these complaints that residents began to speak against xenophobia.
"We had two agendas today: service delivery and xenophobia," announced a resident, "but service delivery projects will be put on hold if (xenophobic violence) happens."
The community was again promised by ward councillor Craig Bennetts and representatives from the Department of Housing that plans to tackle the road, sewerage and electricity issues were "on the move".
After the meeting, when the crowd dispersed, Mpangane said: "The meeting went as well as it could have. The community were angry about service delivery and I couldn't speak, but they do understand the (xenophobia) situation."
Ramaphosa residents were one of the centres of violence two years ago.
Somali shopkeeper Abdi Ismael has lived in Ramaphosa for four years, and was greatly affected by the xenophobic violence in 2008.
"I had three shops," he said, "but I had to leave (Ramaphosa) when the attacks started. When I returned (several months later), they had all been looted and vandalised."
Ismael has been threatened - again. "Come the end of the World Cup, you'll be leaving," warned a client of his.
"Others have told me 'this shop will be ours'," said Ismael.
"Of course I'm worried, but the community will try its best to be on top of the situation. I'm just hoping the words won't escalate into violence."
This article was originally published on page 2 of The Star on July 12, 2010
» » » » [IOL]
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» » [SA's Xenophobia and Scarce Resources Timebomb]
» » [World Cup 2010: Magnet for Africa's Uneducated & Impoverished]
» » [SARS, CIPRO & Illegal Immigrant Corruption Hijacking the State]
» » [Magnet for Immigration: 3 - 6 million Illegal Immigrants in South Africa]
» » [A ‘Robotoid Successful’ World-Cup-of-Bribery in Rainbow-Hypocrisy-La-La Land]
» » [Overloading Australia Update for Politicians: Why New PM says No to ‘Big Australia’]
There Is No Global Population Problem
Garret Hardin, The Social Contract / The Humanist
1989 / Fall 2001
 The interviews show some evidence for the "spiral of silence" explanation: many interviewed reporters felt that population is a hot issue, better left unmentioned.... Thus a spiral of silence about population growth may be maintained by determined pronatalists, immigration advocates, and intimidated journalists. How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection, Univ. of SW Louisiana |
Almost two hundred years have passed since Malthus disturbed the world's slumber with his celebrated Essay on Population. Today, the world has more than five times as many people in it, and the rate of population increase is nearly four times as great as it was in Malthus's day. Each year, the globe must support 90 million more people. Population control is needed.
Many plans have been proposed, and some have been half- heartedly tried. Out of these trials has come the realization that we are caught in what novelist Joseph Heller called a "Catch-22" situation: if the proposal might work, it isn't acceptable; if it is acceptable, it won't work.
Unacceptable schemes to control numbers are easy to find. We could elect a dictator and let him shoot the excess population. But we won't. Such a solution would "work" only in a theoretical, beyond politics sense. (Homo sapiens, the political animal, as Aristotle called the human, does not live "beyond politics.") Or we might take no action while waiting for gross overpopulation to produce its own cure in the form of starvation and mass disease. But who is willing to call such inaction a "solution?"
Looking at the other fork of the population Catch-22 is more productive. When we understand exactly why acceptable proposals fail, we may be able to correct them. Humanists, committed to the rational analysis of problems, are in a favorable position to ferret out workable solutions. But a real solution to overpopulation may be as painful to humanists as to others. An effective solution will not be obvious, for, as Freud taught us, the preconscious mind protects its peace by blocking off painful avenues of thought.
“High rates of population growth create unemployment faster than jobs, increase the mouths to be fed faster than the production of rice paddies, squatters faster than people housed in modern facilities, excrement faster than sewers can be built.” |
The simplest defense against dangerous thinking is to presume a natural self-correcting mechanism. Such a presumption worked perfectly well in economics in Malthus's day. Hitherto, some governments had fixed prices to keep greedy merchants from fleecing their customers. Unfortunately, price-fixing caused more harm than good. Leaving prices free to fluctuate -- "Laissez-faire economics" -- worked better. Merchants who were too greedy got less business; some of them went broke. Overall, laissez-faire benefitted the consumer by producing low prices.
Reasoning by analogy, some optimists in the Twentieth Century have argued for a laissez-faire approach toward population growth. They postulate a "demographic transition" process that automatically stops population growth before it hurts. Since European fertility fell as the Europeans became richer, it was argued that all we need to do to help today's poor countries is to try to make them rich. The past half century has shown that a laissez-faire approach toward population growth fails. The needy poor greatly outnumber the charitable rich, and the poor breed faster. Africa's numbers are increasing more than ten times as fast as Europe's.
The argument that greater prosperity produces lower fertility has some support in rich countries, where the industrialized, urbanized way of life leads many couples to prefer a better automobile to another child. In poorly industrialized, rural nations, an increase in income translates into more medicine, less infant mortality, and a faster rate of population growth. The ancient saying, "The rich get richer, and the poor get children," has more wisdom in it than does the demographic transition theory.
China may have found a way out of the population trap. What is China doing and what can we learn from its experiments? We must begin by acknowledging that we don't know as much as we would like to about that huge country. China's population is four times as great as the United States'. Government policy seems not to be very stable; outsiders need almost daily quotations to know what is going on there. Nevertheless, some parts of China are governed in such a way that ultimate population control looks like a possibility.
In the large industrialized cities, an important decision making unit is the "production group" -- individuals work together in the same factory. In attempting to control population, the government has assigned a key role to female members of the production groups. The central government tells each group what its budget is for the next year -- how many bags of rice, for instance -- as well as how many babies the group as a whole can produce. It is made perfectly clear that exceeding the baby budget will not result in any increase in the food budget, either then or later. It is left to the local group to decide which of its members will be allowed to have babies in a given year.
There is no talk in China of a woman's "right" to reproduce or of married couples' "right to privacy." Decision-making is the right of the production group because the whole group has a budget to meet. The women of a production group meet together and decide, as a group, who shall and who shall not have babies during the year. Can you imagine such a scheme working in the United States?
In China it works, apparently pretty well. Chinese traditions and cultural ideals make it easier to put the good of the group ahead of individual desires. A woman who gets pregnant without permission is pressured by her sisters to have an abortion. Westerners react with horror to this, but such coercion in the East should be compared to forcing a Westerner to pick up the litter he or she has dropped on the ground in a public park. In both instances, the environment is seen as the possession of the group; littering it (with anything) is not a right of the individual.
Why are Chinese women controllable by coercion? The answer, in a word is shame. A truly socialized individual is ashamed to go against the expressed wishes of the group he or she lives and plans with. Shame is an effective control, provided the number in the group is small.
Those numbers play a role in shaping human behavior we know from experiences of the Hutterites on our own continent. This hard-working religious group lives by the Christian-Marxist ideal expressed so well by Karl Marx in 1875: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Two centuries of experience have taught the Hutterites that his ideal works only within small groups of about -- 100 to 150 as a maximum. When the number goes beyond 150, noncooperators destroy social unity. Hutterites respond to this threat by constant, amoebalike fissioning of their communities, thus minimizing the numbers involved in decisions.
The combined experiences of the Chinese and the Hutterites tell us that a voluntary system of population control, when it is not backed by legal sanctions, can work only with small groups of people who are intimately involved with one another daily. Shame works when "everybody lives in everybody else's pocket."
So, what are the chances that American society as a whole can achieve population control by voluntary means? Essentially zero, at present. We have nothing like the Chinese production groups to build upon. If we cannot or do not want to evolve in the Chinese direction, we will have to find a means of population control that builds on the traditions of our own society.
Let's look again at the Chinese system. I don't know whether the Chinese language has any equivalent for the word coercion, but if it does I see a way the Chinese could acknowledge the propriety of their population control without cringing at the word coercion as we Westerners do. Each woman in a production group must realize that the others need to be controlled by the coercion of shame and that she herself can be no exception. The control of all is achieved by mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. Mutuality removes the sting that would come from being singled out of the group.
Can such coercion be generated in our society? Of course it can. In fact, it has been from time immemorial. "Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" is an apt description of any restrictive law passed by a democracy. I might want to rob banks, but I certainly don't want you to do so. So, since I know of no way to keep all others voluntarily from robbing banks, I will help pass a law that keeps everyone including myself from doing so.
Does mutual agreement have to be unanimous? Certainly not. Only a majority is required to pass a coercive law. In some cases, however -- remember Prohibition -- a very large majority may be required. But to demand unanimity would be to abandon all hope of a workable democracy.
By what means will Americans achieve real population control? We don't know yet. Americans are too comfortable to try hard to find an answer; poor countries -- more strongly motivated -- may beat us to it. Whatever methods prove effective must be grounded in human nature, as China's method is. Individuals must be rewarded for actions that benefit primarily the group (which includes all individuals). In China, freedom from shame is an effective reward. In America, we shall probably have to offer monetary rewards for relative sterility. For instance, we might limit the dependency deduction on income tax to two children, or maybe only one. Or the government might give an allowance to every female between the ages of twelve and twenty so long as she does not get pregnant. Ingenuity is called for.
In the meantime, one large step toward population control is already necessary and may be possible: we must bring immigration virtually to an end and do so soon. In the absence of immigration, present trends in fertility, if continued unchanged, would bring America to zero population growth in about fifty years. If needed then, the government could offer incentives to parenthood, thus producing population stability. But all that is so far in the future that there is no profit in trying to spell out the details.
It is more important that we know what continued immigration will do to America. For perspective, let us begin with a few facts. First, the United States takes in more immigrants than all the other 180-odd nations combined. Second, the United States is the highest population growth rate in the developed, industrialized world. Third, immigration to the United States is increasing, not decreasing. Fourth, when immigration is added to "natural increase" (births minus deaths), the resultant population increase shows no sign of leveling off before we are impoverished. All worries about the dangers of a decline in population are vacuous.
In recent years, the United States has taken in over a million immigrants a year. Any suggestion that we might put an end to immigration is met with the anguished cry, "But we are a nation of immigrants!" But so is every nation. The natural history of a nation is simple: first, outsiders move into a land virtually vacant of people; the land fills up; congestion is felt; then, the residents close the gates. Unrestricted immigration characterizes a new nation; restrictions are the mark of a mature nation.
Someone asks, "But is not variety a necessary component of a healthy nation?" Before we answer hastily, we should note that Japan admits essentially zero immigrants per year -- and what American would be so bold as to say that the Japanese are not doing very well in the modern world? They don't admit new bodies, but they do admit new ideas from everywhere. With modern methods of communication, ideas no longer have to be brought into a country wrapped in human bodies. A wise nation admits just the ideas, leaving the bodies to be taken care of by the nations that produced them. This is the way of survival. Patriotism is rather unfashionable in our time, but can a conscientious humanist be contemptuous of the survival of the people with whom he or she associates daily?
Lastly, someone cries, "But the population problem is a global problem. We need global solutions!" Before panicking , let us look at the word global. Some problems are certainly global. Take acid rain. Take the green house effect. Both cases involve the atmosphere, which is forever distributed and redistributed over the entire globe. Admittedly, it will be difficult to produce the global cooperation that is needed to solve such global problems, but no lesser solutions will work. Now, let's look at the potholes in the streets. There are potholes all over the civilized world, but is that any reason for setting up a global pothole authority to fix our potholes? Would the pothole in your street be filled sooner if we globalized the problem?
The moral is surely obvious: never globalize a problem if it can possibly be solved locally. It may be chic but it is not wise to tack the adjective global onto the names of problems that are merely widespread -- for example, "global hunger," "global poverty," and the global population problem."
We will make no progress with population problems, which are a root cause of both hunger and poverty, until we deglobalize them. Populations, like potholes, are produced locally, and, unlike atmospheric pollution, remain local unless some people are so unwise as to globalize them by permitting population excesses to migrate into the better-endowed countries. Marx's formula, "to each according to his needs" is a recipe for national suicide.
 Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, by Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows |
We are not faced with a single global population problem but, rather, with about 180 separate national population problems. All population controls must be applied locally; local governments are the agents best prepared to choose local means. Means must fit local traditions. For one nation to attempt to impose its ethical principles on another is to violate national sovereignty and endanger international peace. The only legitimate demand that nations can make on one another is this:
"Don't try to solve your population problem by exporting your excess people to us."
All nations should take this position, and most do. Unfortunately, many Americans seem to believe that our nation can solve everyone else's population problems.
I have presented no more than a sketch of "the population problem," but this is surely enough to show that humanists have some hard thinking to do in the near future. Humanism, like science, is a self-correcting system. Humanists should not cling to the error merely because it is traditional. With deeper insight into the nature of the world, humanists must reexamine their past attitudes toward rights in general, universal human rights, the primacy of the individual, coercion, the imperatives of the environment, human needs, generosity, and our duty toward posterity. The inquiry will be painful, but faith in the power of reason can give us strength to do what has to be done.
This article by Garrett Hardin first appeared in the July/August 1989 issue of The Humanist.
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