Migration

The Actual Migration Issue: Genocide

Nov. 24—The only way to solve the migrant crisis besetting the United States and Europe is to stop the intentional economic genocide being carried out against the nations of the Global South by the policies of the City of London and Wall Street. Exemplary of that Malthusian policy is the infamous 1975 statement by the influential agronomist and Brzezinski protégé William Paddock, who stated about Mexico: “Shut the border and watch them scream…. They have to reduce their population by half anyway. Seal the border and watch them scream.” Asked how population would fall so drastically, Paddock explained: “By the usual means—famine, war and pestilence.”

What is driving today’s migrant flows is the intentional destruction of the physical economies of the nations of the Global South. Their ability to maintain a growing population at a rising standard of living—what Lyndon LaRouche called Potential Relative Population Density—has been systematically reduced to levels lower than their current population, setting the stage for hunger, disease, war, and forced mass exodus.

Let us first cut through the media hype by considering some basic demographics. As of 2023, there were about 47.8 million immigrants in the United States, out of a total U.S. population of 335 million—about 14.3% of the total. That percentage has been steadily increasing since 1970, when it was 4.7% of the total, but it is by no means a historic high. During the major influx of immigrants from 1860 to 1910, a peak of 14.8% of the total population was reached in 1890. The U.S. was clearly able to absorb—and benefit from—a large flow of immigrants back then. Why not now?

Of today’s total of 47.8 million immigrants, fewer than a quarter—11 million—are “unauthorized immigrants” (or “undocumented” or “illegal aliens”). That number—which reflects the inflow of new migrants, outflow, deaths, and legalization of some of those already in the U.S.—reached a peak of 12.2 million in 2007; then with the 2008 crash, the number fell steadily down to 10.2 million in 2019. It then resumed growth until today. But the numbers are not uniform across different countries: The drop starting in 2008 was due almost entirely to Mexicans, falling sharply during this period (from 6.9 million to 4.0 million), while the number of immigrants from the rest of the world continued to rise significantly.

Furthermore, in 2023 an additional 3.2 million migrants were stopped at the border and prevented from entering the U.S., up from 2.8 million in 2022 and 2.0 million in 2021. A growing majority of those detained—perhaps as many as 90%—are Central Americans coming from the so-called Northern Triangle nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras).

They are fleeing from hell. According to a study published in 2019 in the Mexican daily El Economista, in El Salvador in 2018, 66% of workers were employed in the informal economy; in Guatemala, it was 71%; and Honduras 72%. The “informal” sector is just a polite way of saying the drugs-and-gangs-dominated black economy in general—where “employment” often means prostitution, street peddling and begging, and the like. From the standpoint of a productive physical economy, it is, in fact, disguised unemployment. The real unemployment rate in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America ranges from 50 to 80%. In Honduras, a whopping 51% of its population lives in extreme poverty, 46% in Guatemala, and 13% in El Salvador.

Violence, resulting from drug cartel and gang-related activity, is another key factor in the desperate migration. In 2023, Honduras’s murder rate stood at 31 per 100,000 inhabitants; Guatemala’s rate was about 17 per 100,000; in El Salvador it was 20 per 100,000 in the year 2020, but has dropped significantly since then. The totality of circumstances in the region constitutes intentional genocide.

Now consider Mexico, focusing in on just one key aspect of that country’s physical economy: food production, measured in physical units (kg per capita), not monetary terms, of four basic staples of the Mexican diet. After relative stability from 1960 to 1980, Mexican production of these staples (and agricultural production more broadly) began to plunge after the nationalist government of José López Portillo (1976-1982) was replaced by a string of presidents obedient to Wall Street’s free trade policies. As Figure 1 shows, taking the 1981 index = 100, from 1981 to 2022, per capita bean production fell by 59%, rice by 81%, and wheat by 39%! Only corn had a tiny increase of 3%. This reflects a stunning destruction of Mexicans’ ability to produce enough food to feed themselves.

Even when we factor in food imports, total consumption of these same staples plummeted between 1981 and 2022 (the green and pink bars in Figure 2): beans by 68%, rice by 49%, and wheat by 6%. Only corn consumption per capita rose, by 37%, due to substantial imports.

Small wonder, then, that millions of desperate Mexicans have been driven across the border to try to keep themselves and their families alive. In fact, the third, red bar in Figure 2 projects what consumption per capita would have been had millions of Mexican migrants, legal and illegal alike, not been driven out of their country by Wall Street’s economic looting of that nation over the last 30-40 years (see Figure 3).

The findings are dramatic. In the case of Mexico, over 11 million first-generation Mexicans are in the U.S., which is 8.6% of Mexico’s 2023 population of 128.5 million. When you add in second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans (reflecting earlier migrant flows), we are talking about a total of 38 million people—nearly 30% of the total population of Mexicans. El Salvador is an even more extreme case: About a quarter of first-generation Salvadorans are in the U.S., and when all three generations are considered, the total rises above 40%.

By way of contrast, think of what the region would look like if the United States, China, and other nations had already jointly broken ground on building a high-speed railroad from Panama, through Central America, and into Mexico and the United States, as the backbone of an industrial development corridor that would provide millions of productive jobs to the region’s desperate population—as the LaRouche movement has long advocated. Consider what other joint great development projects could be launched throughout the Caribbean Basin and all of South America—such as the Chancay Port complex just inaugurated in Peru—if the U.S. and China were to jointly take up that task. The vast majority of Mexicans and Central Americans who are fleeing their countries would certainly prefer to stay home to help their nations develop and feed their families. And this would also lead to a sharp increase in U.S. capital goods exports to the region, and the return to the U.S. of well-paying productive jobs needed to produce those exports.

In short, a moral solution to the migrant crisis is also best in terms of the science of physical economy.