In today’s society there are powerful elements seeking to gain as much ground as they can in an attempt to pass steps like the Sensenbrenner bill in the new future. We cannot allow the system free reign to reinforce racist stereotypes against our people at any level, much less to carry out them against us at the point of the gun called law, however “comprehensive” their aim.
Our enemies will take advantage of anything that advances developments in the direction of a publicly fascist state that targets and scapegoats the Other. One of the least discussed in the immigration debate is the link of anti-immigration groups to anti-life beliefs. Many of these “experts” on immigration reform have obtained funds or have other connections to organizations and people that advocate anti-life measures, such as population control, sterilization, abortion and euthanasia.
Not long ago I received an e-mail from John Seager, President of Population Connection informing me that I was wrong in assuming that his group had anything to do with eugenics in a recent post I did, Texas The Anti-Brown State.
In his e-mail, Mr. Seager wrote:
I hope you’ll take a closer look at Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth). We are not now, nor have we ever been, a eugenics group, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve provided below the text of an op ed we distributed last year that should give you some sense of our perspective.
I’m sure you want to make sure, as we do, that the information you put forward is as accurate as possible.
I understand Seager’s concern about his organization being considered as a eugenics group. When one mentions “eugenics” to many Americans, they associate it with racial purification policies used by Hitler and Nazi Germany, which included implementing practices of racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of undesired population groups. Therefore, just mentioning “eugenics” such notions as racial purity, racial superiority, and the heritability of information, virtue, or vice comes to mind. But before we get on to politics, lets follow the theory of eugenics as it developed into the idea of population control, creating a frightening snowball effect throughout the world.
Although eugenics is associated with Hitler, but the truth is, eugenic thinking has been part of Western intellectual history since the 1860’s. Francis Galton, one of Darwin’s disciples and cousin, used his cousin’s work to create Eugenics, a term that he coined which means, “the cultivation of race.” Galton believed that the ruling classes ought to take it upon themselves to guide the development of the human genetic heritage by thinning out the weaknesses in a species, since nature couldn’t do it. Galton said:
I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.
Under the philosophies of Galton, Eugenists began building their cause. By the turn of the 20th century, such ideas were commonplace. In fact, in the US, the American Breeders Association (ABA) devoted itself to exploring issues that would have interested Sir Francis Galton. With a committee focusing on the presumed hereditary differences between human races, the ABA popularized the themes of selective breeding of superior stock, the biological menace of “inferior types,” and the need for recording and controlling human heredity. At one time, 33 states had a domestic policy of eugenics, sterilizing over 60,000 citizens who were considered unfit to reproduce. A bitter pill must be swallowed; despite all the admiration Margaret Sanger has received for establishing the American birth control movement and being the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood Federation of America). The truth is, she was a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society and a proponent of eugenics, which she pushed the idea of “race hygiene” through “negative eugenics.” Even though the current Planned Parenthood Federation of America does recognize this view unacceptable and outmoded, it is hard to argue against historical fact. In her book The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger wrote:
There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile.
…
The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.
It is clear that Sanger advocated the mandatory sterilization of the “insane” and “feeble-minded.” Ultimately, Sanger concluded that: “only 13,500,000 will ever show superior intelligence.” Thus, only 13.5% of the population would be allowed to reproduce. Meanwhile, the rest would be incarcerated for orderly disposal.
After the discoveries of the Nazi atrocities shortly after World War II, Planned Parenthood acted as a conduit for the entry of the eugenics movement into the post-war world. Sanger toned down her racist rhetoric from “race betterment” to “family planning” for the benefit of the poor and racial minorities, the organization’s prime goal of controlling population growth rate among “undesirables” never really changed.
Planned Parenthood would contend that this would be an effort to discredit the family planning movement because Sanger was not perfect mode. True, this should NOT diminish her legacy as the central force in the birth control movement; however, it does raise some questions. Given the facts of many American icons, how do we judge historical figures? And, how do we separate their personal views and action to their contributions to American society?
From Eugenics to Environmentalism
Population control has always been historically connected to the eugenics movement. Margaret Sanger’s eugenically tradition continued and maintained late into the twentieth century. Either John Seager is not aware of his organization’s history or he is trying to revise his organization’s own history. After the war, eugenicists instituted various strategies to cover up the continued joint development of the German, American, and English eugenic agendas. Therefore, the principal vehicle for Malthusian fears became, instead, the threat of environmental catastrophe. This new shift culminated in 1968.
In 1968, one of the most powerful ventures that marked this new line of outlook was Garrett Hardin’s essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin argued that if people are granted to right to reproduce freely, their children would all be given equal rights to a limited commons, the world would be locked “into a tragic course of action” leading to environmental destruction. Hardin believed that only private ownership of vital resources and an inegalitarian distribution of the right to reproduce could avoid the “tragedy” which he predicted was the inevitable result of a democratic and egalitarian society. Hardin also argued that projects as the welfare state and land reform in developing countries were pointless because the problem with what Hardin called “a commons in breeding” was that the impoverished had too many children and made excessive claims on public resources:
If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own ‘punishment’ to the germ line – then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families.
It is this article that embodies the way in which post-war environmentalism became a vehicle not only for the more ideological aspects of Malthusian thinking, but also for eugenic convictions. The central point in “The Tragedy of the Commons” was that only private property could protect the environment against over-population, a claim that has become a cardinal view of contemporary neo-liberal dogma. The passion with which this conviction has been accepted by conservative policy institutes and multinational corporations is evidence that this ideology is not the fundamental reason to conserve nature or control population growth, but their loophole to legitimize an unrelenting process of privatization and enclosure.
In the same year, Zero Population Growth was founded in 1968 by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, which was commissioned and published by the Sierra Club. It was not until 2002 when ZPG changed their name to Population Connection. In 1968, in his book, Ehrlich predicted:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…
To counter this plague of global starvation, Ehrlich advises overtly authoritarian measures: “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” By 1978, an eminent biologist was claiming that “ecology’s first social law should be written: ‘All poverty is caused by the continued growth of population.'” Whether or not Ehrlich actually believed the overpopulation fables that he peddled, they still provided the ruling class with an immediately exploitable threat.
Although Ehrlich’s inaccurate predictions should have qualified the man as a certifiable phony, his claims were still given credence by certain factions of the elite and government think tanks. In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin noted that during George H. W. Bush’s congressional career, Bush founded and chaired the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. Bush’s task force subscribed to a neo-Malthusian view about population control and provided Ehrlich with an audience.
Comprised of over 20 Republican Congressman, Bush’s task force was a kind of Malthusian vanguard organization, which heard testimony from assorted “race scientists,” sponsored legislation, and otherwise propagandized the zero-growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years, the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley, to the key zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy.
Thomas Robert Malthus is the 19th century cleric and professor of political economy who believed a population time bomb threatened the existence of the human race. He viewed social problems such as poverty, deprivation and hunger as evidence of this “population crisis.” Malthus believed that charity and other forms of benevolence only exacerbated the problems. His answer was to restrict population growth of certain groups of people. His theories of population growth and economic stability became the basis for national and international social policy.
Ehrlich suggested a “tough foreign policy,” which comprised of terminating food aid to “starving nations” who declined to comply. Ehrlich further suggested that domestic population control include “the addition of … mass sterilization agents” to America’s water and food supplies. Such ideas were given serious credence, which is not surprising, considering the make-up of Bush’s committee.
One of Ehrlich’s fellow traveler is William Shockley, who already had created a substantial amount of controversy by endorsing his already refuted thesis that black people were mentally and cognitively inferior to white people. In the same year that the GOP task force provided him with a congressional platform, Shockley wrote:
“Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics – retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged…. We fear that ‘fatuous beliefs’ in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society.”
Just because ZPG has changed its name, this does not allow John Seager to revise the organizations eugenic past. Mr. Seager, by just saying it doesn’t make it so.
It is in this environmental language that most Malthusian or dysgenic fears about immigration are now being expressed. Former member of ZPG and founder of the anti-immigration organization, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), John Tanton, is claiming that the degradation of our environmental resources can be blamed either to the reproductive pressures in the Third World or to the reproductive tendencies of immigrants and their descendants. What makes Tanton dangerous, he is a “self-described progressive, ex-Sierra Club member, Planned Parenthood supporter and harsh critic of neoclassical economists.”
In Tanton’s view, society would have to reconstitute itself to promote conservation over growth.
As early as the ’50s, he avidly read reports from the Population Reference Bureau, and by the time Ehrlich’s book was published, he and Mary Lou had already started work on the first Northern Michigan chapter of Planned Parenthood. “I believed in the multiplication tables,” says Tanton. “Since I was a physician and could do something about birth control, it struck me that this was where I could make my contribution to the conservation movement.”
It seems Mr. Seager also has a memory lapse regarding his predecessors because Tanton was not just one of ZPG’s most active members, he also was the organization’s president in 1975.
Even though, John Seager talks about applying a “global approach” when it comes to immigration by supporting female literacy, access to birth control and family-planning services in the developing world, their Mission Statement on addressing the immigration issue is very reflective of a neo-Malthusian ideology with the new rhetoric of “sustainable development.”
We, therefore, call on the United States to focus its foreign aid on population, environmental, social, education, and sustainable development programs. Changing political conditions present opportunities to work cooperatively with other nations to address the root causes of international migration.
The “Sustainable Development” Facade
When the environmental wing of the anti-immigrant forces emerged from the zero-population movement of the 1960s and 1970s, sustainable development became a term that was designed to sound like something everyone wants. Sustainable development, as defined from the Our Common Future report (known as the Brundtland Report), is development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The promises was to defuse the longstanding tensions between environmental protection and economic growth; and during the ’90s, nearly everyone favors it, including individuals, firms, national and local governments, militaries, and the range of non-state actors. However, sustainable development has been stripped of its critical content and has been transformed and reconfigured for compatibility with the larger priorities of the post-Cold War era.
Sustainable development appeals to those preoccupied with the tendencies of capitalist development to lay waste to the world in its haste to convert anything and everything into commodities, which could be sold for a profit. Advocates of sustainable development seemed to reason within Western traditions that see humans as stewards of Nature, with responsibility for its protection. Competitive capitalism has long required explanations for why people are impoverished and expendable and through sustainable development. However, whenever a global environmental crisis emerges, Third World poverty or world hunger instantly becomes an issue to economists, demographers, planners, corporate financiers, and political pundits.
Today, population activists do realize the value of poverty reduction; however, their center is on the value of family planning. As population growth rates fall around the world, demography is focusing once again on ‘quality’ concerns such as the differential fertility of competing ethnic groups and the problems surrounding an aging population. While eugenic ideologies and practices have changed over time, they have hardly gone away.
Little has been done to challenge the problematic assumptions, language and perceptions that make American environmentalism particularly susceptible to eugenic influences. Notions of natural and cultural purity blended together reinforce make racism and ethnic prejudice more acceptable in the process and are leading to a resurgence of nativism.
Biological Determinism
Biological determinism is much in current these days as the media bombards us with ideas that we are, in the end, mainly a function of our genes or hormones. Gender and sexuality are being re-centered in the body rather than in social relations. The fact that we as a society are obsessed on our body’s aesthetics in hopes of achieving physical perfection is a manifestation of the idea of finding the ideal body type that took place in the heyday of eugenics in the 1930s.
According to Betsy Hartman, aesthetic is taking a variety of forms – from paying blond, blue-eyed Ivy League women to be egg donors to the pages of fashion magazines. One of the most forms is the growing prevalence of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia among young women searching for an elusive physical perfection, sense of control and in some cases hyperathletic physical efficiency. Hartman writes:
Although eating disorders have complex causes, we should not underestimate the legacy of eugenics in breeding the psychological monster of perfectionism that terrorizes so many women. The current mass marketing of hormonal birth control pills like Seasonale that have the ‘liberating’ side effect of stopping your periods also plays on the eugenic aesthetic of a clean, efficient female body.
Through neoliberal ideologies and policies, complementary eugenics is closely tied to the shrinking of the welfare state that casts more and more people as drains on the economy and the state – not just the poor and people of color, but also elderly people and people with disabilities. Therefore, it is not surprising then that one can recognize signs of negative eugenics in population control measures and technologies aimed at impoverished women. Even though complementary eugenics can be found in neoliberal ideologies, conservative ideologues have manipulated the fears of scarcity in order to cast impoverished people as burdens and to foment racist assaults on immigrants and people of color.
This climate helps foster and legitimize eugenic thinking. According to conservative population growth lies at the heart of most environmental problems such as energy use, the depletion of natural resources, and deforestation. The prevailing notion of carrying capacity claims that population growth naturally entails increased resource consumption. This prepares the groundwork for blaming the poor for the destruction carried out by big landowners, transnational companies, and mega-projects financed by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, whose purpose is to export natural resources to feed consumption and production in the US.
Organizations like Population Connection take the political, economic and social dynamics out of the equation, which govern the relationships between human beings and nature. Blaming powerless women from countries such as Mexico will not stop the negative impacts of unsustainable patterns of production and spending that feed the dominant economic development model. John Seager may not fit into the typical mold of an anti-immigrationist like Tanton, but the goal he is trying achieve is same just the message is reframed.
Stereotypes and labels prevent understanding of the intensifying immigration debate in the US. The debate is sharply divided into two sides. On one side, there are those who believe that immigration should be controlled but at levels that reflect the reality of both emigration pressures outside the country and labor needs within it. On the other side of the immigration debate, there are those who believe that immigration flows should be dramatically restricted. These groups are commonly described as being immigration restrictionists.
Although immigration restrictionists share a common agenda, they do not operate as a unified political bloc. Anti-immigration forces comprise of partisans both political parties as well as supporters of parties and movements on the political left and right that fall outside mainstream political thinking.
Contrary to popular belief, thanks to the media, many restrictionist groups are really not espousing the rhetoric that is often heard from citizen militias, white supremacists, and more nationalist institutes, which is explicitly dedicated to “preserving our common heritage as Americans.” Many of them are framing their views in the policy language of environmental protection, access to jobs, anti-corporate sentiment, and population control.
True most immigration restrictionists are found within the political right, but there are some who can be found within the political left. Because much of the argument is dominated by xenophobic rhetoric and calls for draconian border controls and legislation, there is a common belief that anything else should be viewed as liberal ideology, such as ideas about population control, environmentalism, and labor issues.
John Seager’s views are in line with a neoliberal ideology, so it is not surprising that Seager is taking great pains to refrain rhetoric that sound xenophobic and racist, which is being voiced by groups like FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). In Seager’s recent article, he has provided both the religious- and pro-life right reactionaries with additional reasons for groups like them to continue kicking up bogus hysteria that every liberal in the US are hysterical screeds that have little regard for the sanctity of life.
Globally, at least 350 million couples lack family planning services. Here in the United States, one-third of all births are unplanned. And the Bush administration’s family-planning failures, from its global gag rule against abortion to ideologically driven abstinence-only programs, contribute directly to millions of unwanted and unplanned births. If we could cut in half the number of unwanted births in the U.S. alone, we’d have about 5 million fewer births over 20 years.
It’s vital to focus on thorny technical issues such as tax credits, energy alternatives and emissions trading programs. These efforts are especially important here in the United States, where less than 5 percent of the world’s population produces about one-quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
So it is not surprising to hear pro-life reactionaries within the anti-immigration camp – paleoconservatives, traditionalists and social conservatives – criticize Seager for espousing secular and liberal ideas. But if one were to look closely where he really stands, his views are not much different from the strongest proponents of immigration who are found within the ranks of the Republican Party.
John Seager is endorsing market-based corporatist approaches to environmental and social policy. Emissions trading to reduce their production of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions amounts to an elaborate shell game that threatens to undercut the goal of stemming global warming. Living here in Texas, I have witnessed the failure of this environmental policy that was put in place by then-Gov Bush. Emissions trading does little to solve pollution problems and only proves that buying and selling carbon dioxide credits will deliver only illusory emission reductions, invite fraud and result in disproportionate health and economic impacts on poor communities. The only thing being sustained are the profit margins for big landowners, transnational companies, and mega-projects financed by multilateral institutions.
The problem we are currently having is the perception of “neoliberalism” – a term that’s particularly confusing to people in the US who associate liberalism with socially progressive policies. The theory of neoliberalism:
…the view that individual liberty and freedom are the high point of civilization and then goes on to argue that individual liberty and freedom can best be protected and achieved by an institutional structure, made up of strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade: a world in which individual initiative can flourish. The implication of that is that the state should not be involved in the economy too much, but it should use its power to preserve private property rights and the institutions of the market and promote those on the global stage if necessary.
As policies of “free trade,” open capital markets, and unrestricted and unregulated investment are enforced, the inconsistencies of capitalist development become more intense. The recent rhetoric of “sustainable development” and “globalization” cannot entirely obscure how the new economic regime is exacerbating, rather than resolving, social and environmental problems in the Latin America, while accelerating economic and ideological polarization.
The reason families are migrating more now as never before is due to commercial development that continues to withhold and deprive people secure access to fundamental productive resources. These resources increasingly are being exploited by transnational corporations for the use and profit of developed nations. The Malthusian argument that migration must be curbed in the interest of maintaining the lifestyles of the affluent ignores the realism that both migration movement and sustaining our lifestyles share a single origin. The alternative is structural change. Only in a society in which resources are more equitably apportioned will we be able to go beyond Malthusian politics of “population control” to a true consideration of human reproductive rights and needs.
