Your editor’s recent editorial, “You and Me, Us and Them,” really got me thinking, and this is my reply:
What most folks in the “developed” world don’t seem to understand is that the world is at a threshold of a very uncertain future. Among many other paramount issues, the rapidly increasing population on this planet is, in my opinion, one of the major problems we will face. Is it, therefore, any surprise that people from overpopulated countries want to move to places where there is still room or at least safety from the chaos in their countries?
As to our continent, there are currently 200 million people living in Mexico and Central America, and a good percentage of those would love to live in United States and even Canada. Can we accommodate such masses of humanity? Besides all kinds of other problems in such case, what about the resulting change of demographics?
Yes, the U.S. treated the migrants rather harshly when hundreds tried to storm their borders by force, but what is the alternative? Open the flood gates? What if we had 10,000 totally unskilled folks at the Osoyoos border? Would we open the gates to such people — when our children are going to school without having had breakfast, when more and more families survive on food banks (that’s what the papers report), and when even our medical facilities are stretched to the limits already? The editor in his or her editorial deplored the situation, but failed miserably to come up with a truly viable alternative.
Gunther Hoernig
Penticton