Immigrants: God's Ambassadors?

Tim over at Tim's El Salvador Blog, posted a link to this provocative article in the National Catholic Reporter. The author, Father Dean Brakley, SJ, is a US-born theology professor at the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador.

http://ncronline.org/news/justice/migrants-illegals-or-gods-ambassadors

Follow-up to my last post

Chris Nelder, at his GetREALlist blog, posted some comments on the Gulf oil spill. His thoughts are more, shall I say, in-your-face than mine, but I think he makes the right point.

http://www.getreallist.com/another-wake-up-call-for-the-world%E2%80%99s-biggest-oil-junkie.html

Mining for Mithril

During the past two weeks, we have watched another environmental tragedy unfold. The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform and the subsequent oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico gives those of us old enough to remember the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska and the oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, twenty years earlier a clear sense of déjà vu. It’s also a grim reminder that Congress had a reason, back in 1981, for banning offshore drilling.

But times have changed. We seem no longer able to afford the luxury of keeping oil wells out of our continental shelves. The Deepwater Horizon disaster comes on the heels of the president’s decision to open our shorelines to oil exploration and drilling. And despite the presidential moratorium on new drilling leases imposed since the spill, and despite renewed calls for a more permanent offshore drilling ban, it’s unlikely that any new ban will be nearly as long lasting as the 1981 restrictions. What has changed?

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterwork The Lord of the Rings, we learn about a precious metal called mithril. Found only in the dwarf mines of Moria, this metal had almost magical properties. It was stronger than tempered steel but very light in weight. It had the beauty and the sheen of ordinary silver, but it never tarnished. It was easy to work and could be made into many beautiful and useful objects. While it was still mined, it fetched ten times as much as its weight in gold. It was no wonder that the dwarves in Moria sought new sources for mithril ore. According to Gandalf, the dwarves dug deeper and further underground to seek for and to retrieve the ore, until one day they dug too deeply and unleashed a horrific evil from the dim, forgotten past: a fire-and-shadow, demon-like monster called a Balrog. This monster drove the dwarves out of their historic dwelling place, Moria; thus they paid a huge price for their mithril lust.

Petroleum, although it is not a metallic substance, has many qualities in common with mithril. We take it so much for granted that most of us have never contemplated what a wondrous material it really is. But like mithril, it too has almost magical properties. It can be burned, releasing almost unimaginable amounts of energy. It can be made into many useful (though perhaps not beautiful) substances: plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, medicines. It has become indispensable to our way of life. And in our seeking for it, and in our burning of it, we have released our own Balrogs. This and earlier oil spills are an example. Air and water pollution, chemical contamination, solid waste contamination, cancers, and climate instability are others.

It’s almost impossible to overstate our dependence on petroleum. It is behind almost everything we do, and it (along with other fossil fuels) has powered and sustained the industrial and technological revolutions that our civilization depends upon.

But the last and possibly the most fearful and powerful Balrog that will emerge is the one that was easiest to foresee; indeed it had been foreseen as early as the early twentieth century. This is the fact that petroleum is a finite resource found on a finite planet, and that eventually, someday, the petroleum party would end. And long before we actually run out of the stuff, we would run out of easily accessible sources. We would no longer be able to increase supply to meet any increased demand. But for most of the twentieth century, we put these thoughts out of our minds. We were having too much fun, after all.

In recent years, however, we’ve witnessed evidence that our lust for petroleum is beginning to butt heads with its finite nature. In every year since 1981, for example, geologists have found less petroleum in newly discovered deposits than we have burned. Since 2005, world production has not increased, despite higher prices that would earlier have encouraged producers to pump more out. And despite the lowering of demand caused by the current recession and the crash in oil prices in September 2008, prices have once again been creeping upward again.

During the last few months, a couple of reports have surfaced that should make all of us concerned. This past February, the United States Joint Forces Command issued its Joint Operating Environment 2010 report. This report, issued about every two years, deals with strategic and national security trends. As the nation’s guardians, the US military forces need to be prepared for all probable and possible future threats to the nation’s security. While this report is somewhat speculative and deals with possibilities and contingencies, and while it does not represent official government policy, it does discuss trends that the military believes needs to be taken into account as they plan for future defense needs. This February report contains some sobering information about near-term petroleum supply. It predicts a possible end to surplus production capacity in 2012 and a severe oil shortage of as much as 10 million barrels per day by 2015. (One can access the report here; the discussion of energy security begins on p. 24.)

This is very sobering news; indeed it truly is news in every sense of the word. An end to surplus petroleum capacity by 2012—that’s only 19 months away. The curious thing, then, is why this report, dealing with something that will directly affect all of us, and possibly soon, has been largely ignored by the domestic media. The United Kingdom’s Guardian reported it (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply), but that’s about it.

Another report surfaced recently. Near the end of March, a Department of Energy official named Glen Sweetnam, who advises the president on petroleum issues, gave an interview to a French journalist. This interview was published online, in French. Here’s a translation: http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline-of-world-oil-production-as-of-2011/. In the interview, Sweetnam predicts worldwide production declines, beginning next year, if investment in new production doesn’t materialize. Again, this report was not picked up by the domestic media. One wonders why.

Is the last Balrog, petroleum depletion, loose? We can’t know for sure until after it actually happens. But the Deepwater Horizon disaster indicates that access to the easy-to-get-to oil is disappearing. New drilling projects are going to be increasingly risky and increasingly expensive. This can only mean higher prices for all of us, and there may come a point of diminishing returns where attempting to pump out the petroleum might simply cost too much—both in dollars and in environmental threat—to be worth doing. Like the dwarves of Moria, we have painted ourselves into a corner by building a civilization that is so dependent on a finite, limited resource. Yes, there’s plenty of petroleum left out there. But it’s going to cost us more and more to retrieve it.

One final thought about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I don’t think it does us much good to blame British Petroleum, lax government regulation, or “Big Oil,” for this disaster. As President George W. Bush said in his 2006 State of the Union address, “America is addicted to oil.” The nation that contains six percent of the world’s population burns 25 percent of its petroleum production. And our addiction is complicated by our sense of entitlement. We’re all implicated in the fouling of the Gulf of Mexico. We contribute to the dead wildlife every time we get into our cars and drive when we could have walked, bicycled, or taken public transport. We help contaminate the Gulf’s beaches by buying and wearing clothing made from petroleum-based synthetic fibers. We add to the oil slick every time we buy bottled water, milk, or soda in plastic jugs. Our lifestyles are inextricably linked to this disaster. So long as this oil addiction continues, we can count on more disasters of this kind.

Fighting a real Balrog might have been easier than untangling ourselves from our oil fix.

Arizona, Immigration, and the Demise of Manifest Destiny

By now, most of you have probably heard about Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, just signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer this past Friday. Surely this is an unjust law, by any definition. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” par. 16).

Although I believe this law is truly unjust and discriminatory, I do understand the frustrations of Arizonans at the failure of the US Congress to pass an immigration law that they and the rest of us can live with. But I’m not going to discuss this law, its implications, or the likely upcoming challenges to its constitutionality. Others have spoken more eloquently about the terrible wrongheadedness of this law, so I’ll let them speak (see here, here, and here for examples). Instead, I would rather dig deeper and discuss the topics of human migration, US history, and how our nation’s immigration policies might prepare for the future.

In a book I read recently, I came across a fascinating thought. Writer John Michael Greer writes about what he sees as the possible future of industrial society as fossil fuel energy becomes more costly. In writing about the probability of large-scale, worldwide human migration in the near future, he writes:

“The first ripples of the future flood can be seen by anyone who travels by bus through the rural United States anywhere west of the Mississippi River or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Stray from the freeways and tourist towns and culturally speaking, as often as not, you’re in Mexico instead of the United States: the billboards and window signs are in Spanish, advertising Mexican products, music and sports teams and people on the streets speak Spanish and wear Mexican fashions. It’s popular among Anglophone Americans to think of this as purely a Southwestern phenomenon, but it has become just as common in the Northwest, the mountain states and large sections of the deep South. There are some 30 million people of Mexican descent in the US legally and some very large number—no one agrees on what it is, but eight million is the lowest figure anyone mentions—who are here illegally. As the migration continues, much of what was once the United States is becoming something else.

“A great deal of angry rhetoric has flared from all sides of the current debates on immigration, but none of it deals with the driving force behind these changes— the failure of the American settlement of the West. The strategies that changed the eastern third of the country from frontier to the heartland of the United States failed to work west of the Mississippi. Today the cities and farm towns that once spread across the Great Plains are fading into memory as their economic basis vanishes and the last residents move away, while the mountain and basin regions further west survive on tourist dollars, retirement income or cash crops for distant markets—none of them viable once cheap energy becomes a thing of the past.

“Like the Mongol conquest of Russia or the Arab conquest of Spain, the American conquest of the West is proving to be temporary, and as the wave of American settlement recedes, the vacuum is being filled by the nearest society with the population and the cultural vitality to take its place. The same thing is happening in Siberia, where Chinese immigrants stream across a long and inadequately guarded border, making the Russian settlement of northern Asia look more and more like a passing historical phase. Such shifts are very common when the reach of a powerful nation turns out to exceed its grasp.” (Greer 44-45)

The American settlement of the West was a failure? This is certainly not a thought that ever came to my mind. I haven’t traveled extensively in the West, so I have no first-hand knowledge of what Greer is describing. And the deep South? Is it true that many of the good folks of Yoknapatawpha County will be celebrating Cinco de Mayo next week? I don’t know.

However, in the early 1990s, Kathleen Norris wrote about the ongoing depopulation of the high plains; for example:

“You will pass a few modest homes and farm buildings along the way, some in use, others in disrepair. The most recently abandoned, a classic two-story farmhouse, has boarded-up windows and an extensive but weed-choked corral. A house abandoned years ago is open to the elements, all its windows and most of its shingles gone. A large shelterbelt, planted in the 1930s, is now a thicket of dead trees. Once the trees are gone the house will lean with the wind until it collapses; but that will be a while.” (Norris 161)

Reports I have read and heard about this region indicate that depopulation has only increased in the eighteen or so years since Norris wrote these words. Lands in the western Great Plains given to families under the Homestead Act are proving unsuitable for sustained agriculture and are reverting to short grass prairie as the farms are abandoned.

While it’s doubtless too early to tell for sure whether Greer is right that Anglo occupation of the West is temporary (the “temporary” Arab occupation of Spain that Greer cites lasted 800 years, after all), it does make one ponder the fate of Anglo-American settlements that grew in the wake of US policies rooted in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, that nineteenth century, quasi-religious notion that the USA was destined by divine right to spread across the North American continent. One of those policies is directly relevant to the immigrant question: Manifest Destiny was used to justify going to war against Mexico in the 1840s. The most significant result of that war was the US annexation of large parts of formerly Mexican territory: Colorado, Utah, California, and most of the desert southwest, including Arizona. Opponents of the Mexican War, most famously Abraham Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau, saw it as a land grab and an attempt to expand slavery into new territories; supporters used Manifest Destiny to justify it.

However we might feel today about US control of these formerly Mexican lands and how we acquired them, it’s important to note that the US/Mexico border is and always has been an arbitrary line drawn across the desert and never a complete cultural divide. It seems to me that much of the current acrimony over illegal immigration has tended to forget this. We want to believe that nation states (including the United States, while making allowances for its ethnic diversity) are neat packages of culturally if not ethnically distinct human beings living within well-defined, secure borders, and that’s the way it’s always been. Historically this has not been the case; the fact that it has been the case for as long as anyone alive can remember is due to some unusual historical circumstances that encouraged the rise of the nation state in late Renaissance Europe. The United States was born during this period of nation state ascendancy, so we tend to think of it as normal. Like all periods of history, though, this state of affairs is certain not to continue forever, though it’s anyone’s guess as to when this particular set of circumstances might end.

For most of human history, ever since our first ancestors began migrating out of Africa on their way to populating the remotest corners of the globe, migration has been a normal state of affairs. Most of us are familiar with migration stories from history and legend: the biblical Hebrews come immediately to mind; then there were the Anglo-Saxons, who left their homes in what is now northern Germany (called Saxony to this day) to settle in southern Britain, pushing the Celtic Britons west into Wales, Brittany, and Cornwall. The Aryans migrated from an uncertain location in the Eurasian steppes and established themselves in India over 3,700 years ago, and the Celts themselves probably migrated into the westernmost outposts of Europe from the central Danube basin sometime around 500 BCE. Ancestors of the Navajo nation of the Arizona desert lived in the northwestern portions of Canada near the Great Slave Lake; they have legends of a time when their people lived in the frozen north.

The reasons for migration can be many: overpopulation, lack of sufficient resources, war, drought or famine, social pressures, religious persecution. Greer believes, and I concur with him, that many of these pressures are going to increase in the future as world population continues to grow and as resource depletion, such as fossil fuels, water, and soil, forces people once again to make these kinds of choices. And I haven’t even mentioned the potential pressure that climate upheaval may bring to bear on human populations. Already we’ve seen climate change refugees in some parts of the world.

Most Americans view illegal immigration as little more than a trespassing and economics issue, but if migratory pressures are in play here, it’s a far bigger set of circumstances than that. Whether Greer proves correct about the temporary nature of Anglo settlement of the West, it seems that migratory pressures in Mexico and other parts of Latin America may be increasing. Some have pointed to US farm subsidy policy, coupled with “free trade” agreements that allow subsidized US corn to be sold in Mexico for much less than local growers can produce it, forcing Mexican campesinos off their land and giving them an incentive to try their luck in the USA. Others point to population pressure. In the future, climate change and population may play a far larger role than economics.

The bottom line is that Arizona’s new law will fail, one way or another. Securing the borders, to the extent that we will be able to, is a federal, not a state responsibility. Congress needs to rise to the challenge and pass a comprehensive immigration law that both provides for just enforcement and accommodates the realities we face in a changing world. The longer Congress displays lack of courage to tackle this tough issue, the more excuses their inaction will offer others to take matters into their own hands, like Arizona has done.

We may be able to secure the border with a just law. But it’s also possible that future migratory pressures may become a force we cannot stop. In that case, the best we might be able to hope for is to manage the influx of refugees and migrants. Whatever happens, one thing appears certain, though: Manifest Destiny seems at last to be dead.

Works Cited

Greer, John Michael. The Ecotechnic Future. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society, 2009.

Norris, Kathleen. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.