Finding the Trimtab

"Finding the Trimtab" is a talk by Jonette Christian, presented at the the third annual environmental conference on Global Environmental and Social Issues in Aspen, CO, hosted by the Sopris Foundation and the Worldwatch Institute during July 12-14, 2002.

This is a wonderful and insightful talk explaining the dysfunctionality of our society that refuses to examine the multiple and significant impacts of mass immigration. It is very worthwhile reading:

Our situation is serious. Global emissions of CO2 have quadrupled since 1950 and the climate of our planet is rapidly changing in perilous ways. Although a well designed effort to educate world elites is gradually producing results this movement is much much too slow. The solution to our problem is more complex than simply educating leaders. In short, the behavior, the expectations, and the thinking patterns of 6 billion people must change, and they must change rapidly in billions of unforeseeable ways. It is commonly said that we need leadership that is capable of thinking outside the box but ideas that come from outside of the box are jarring and uncomfortable and that is why they are outside of the box - and we only consider them unless we are absolutely forced to do so.

Twenty years ago I was introduced to a metaphor from Buckminster Fuller, called the "trimtab factor". Imagine you are on the deck of an ocean liner with l000 people. Rocks are looming ahead and you must find a way to steer the boat to safety. One person stands in the bow, pointing out the rocks, and the passengers try to steer the ship with their weight, running from side to side in response to the guide's gestures. It's a clumsy method with a doubtful outcome. However, in the steering mechanism of a real ocean liner is a piece of metal 6 inches square called a trimtab. One person moving the trimtab can steer an ocean liner more effectively than even 10,000 people running back and forth on the deck. As individuals, the problems confronting us are enormous and tremendously complex. Therefore, it is vital that we look for the trimtab - that place to take action which will maximize our leverage on the course of human history.

Many changes are essential in building a sustainable future, but our job right now is to find the action that is most powerful for this particular moment. We need to find a trimtab.

Twenty years ago I believed that the trimtab for a sustainable economy lay in a global commitment to ending world hunger a commitment which might shape all of our decisions in light of this one great unifying purpose. This goal would require long term planning, it would demand a whole new relationship with the environment, to natural resources and to each other. We would be forced to think differently, to look for new solutions and most important, it would unify humanity in achieving our most important purpose to feed our children. So I joined multiple hunger organizations, taught a mini course on the problems in developing countries, recruited friends and family to become monthly contributors to hunger organizations, and wrote many letters. I believed that we needed to live this goal seven days a week. And every year on the birthday of my children I fasted and gave more money to remind myself of this commitment.

I was a little short on the details of how the plan would work, but I made up for it with passion. And in any case, shooting from my good liberal hip, I was pretty certain I had the big picture right. It is a common failing of idealists that we sometimes become infatuated with the moral beauty of our vision for the world, and the moral beauty of ourselves working for that vision. It was hard for this global idealist to humble herself - to think small and to think locally but eventually I made the transition. And I consider it no small achievement to have successfully resisted that beguiling temptation to believe that I was chosen to save the world.

Today I see things very differently. I am still committed to a world with a sustainable future, but I am no longer a global idealist and I no longer believe that simply calling for the end of world hunger will lead mankind in some new and glorious direction. Today, I'm an older woman and more experienced with people. Today I believe that the trimtab meaning the place to put my weight to maximize my leverage lies right here in my native land, the land I feel most closely connected to, the land where I speak the language, pay the taxes and vote. I am working to stabilize the population of the United States because continuous population growth is simply not sustainable. We need to shrink our consumption and our footprint upon the world, to reduce our growth by moderating the predominant factor driving that growth immigration - to teach our people the importance of sustainable planning for our own descendants, to become responsible stewards of the land we inherited, and to bring the attention of this nation back inward to the needs of our own people. In short, I have downsized. In the media and among academics and globalist elites, people like me are dismissed as "nativist" or "xenophobic". But among the people I work with, we see our work as community activism directed toward preserving the local economy; livable wages for local people, and the local culture.

I started Mainers for Immigration Reform while working with Maine loggers who were being replaced by Canadian and Mexican workers. The lumber companies didn't have to pay health insurance for the Canadians, and both Canadians and Mexicans were willing to work for less because their dollar denominated wages bought more when sent home. The lumber companies were happy; the international workers were happy. Too bad for Maine loggers and their communities, who for generations had earned modest but livable wages performing this dangerous work. . Nearly all Maine loggers have now migrated out of state to find jobs to support their families they were told that in the service of a global economy, they must find better jobs by learning computer skills and leave their old jobs to foreign workers willing to work for much less. This chaos is called "efficiency" in a global labor market.

I wish I could report that Mainers organized on behalf of their loggers, many of whose families have lived in our state for generations, but in fact, the only group of Maine people who got involved was the local progressive community. Applying their tired old agenda rather than analyzing the current situation, they framed the conflict as workers against bosses and tried to organize a coalition of immigrant workers and loggers. Not surprisingly, the loggers were insulted; the effort failed, and it didn't build good feelings.

What happened to Maine loggers has happened all over this country in one industry after another: poultry processing, garment making, food processing, construction and agriculture. In l979 Iowa slaughterhouse workers made solid middle class incomes, and no company had trouble remaining profitable while treating its workers well. These jobs sustained whole communities and were jealously handed down through generations. Expressed in present dollars, these workers were making $18.32 an hour. By 2000, average wages had fallen to $10.32 an hour, and entry level wages were as low as $6 an hour.

Congress rewrote our immigration laws in l965, which led to spiraling family chain migration and introduced massive refugee resettlement operations swelling the pool of low wage workers. In the early l980's the meat packing industry was completely reorganized in response to the availability of cheap foreign workers.

Newly formed nonunion companies, like IOWA Beef Processors, took advantage of abundant foreign labor by slashing pay, speeding up the processing lines, and allowing safety conditions to deteriorate to an appalling level.

The old companies that had paid good wages, like Armour, Hormel, Swift and Wilson could not compete. They slashed wages or declared bankruptcy and Iowa Beef Processors acquired one third of the national red meat slaughter market.

Americans were not accustomed to such low wages and shameful working conditions. But immigrants, legal and illegal, were willing to take these jobs. And so the story was told that we needed immigrants to do the "jobs that Americans wont do". Just as Mainers used to cut their own trees, so Americans always slaughtered their own meat and earned a living wage doing it until Congress decided to rig the system for nonunion companies by swamping the labor market with millions of new workers. Dr. George Borjas, Harvard economist and this nation's most acknowledged expert on the labor impact of immigration, estimates that native born American workers are losing $160 billion a year due to competition from immigrant labor. The savings to business from cheap labor travels upwards to the employers and stockholders, contributing to the glaring income disparities we have today.

I am certain that if we were importing a million and half lawyers every year, shrinking their hourly billing rates, Congress would be passing legislation to reduce immigration before the day was over. But the fact is, immigration predominately impacts the working poor who do not have the political clout to determine policy.

In a recent New York Times story, Allan Greenspan made the following candid remarks regarding his support for immigration: "Unless immigration is uncapped . . . wage increases must rise above even impressive gains in productivity. This would intensify inflationary pressures or squeeze profit margins." In other words, a continual supply of cheap foreign labor is necessary to keep wages low and profit margins high. This economy is not designed to meet the needs of our people. We have created a behemoth that is requiring people to service it. Our government is rapidly pursing policies to dissolve our borders, and turn all workers into migrating economic units, each searching for a job with a livable wage. There is nothing kind or compassionate or even rational about this policy it is a vicious and shameful weapon against the working poor, forcing common laborers, minorities, and recent immigrants to compete against each other in a race to the bottom and those who mistakenly believe that we are "sharing America's wealth with the poor" are not the ones who do the sharing. Post l970 immigrants and their descendants have added more than 55 million people to our country; this is the equivalent of absorbing all of Central America in thirty years. To quote Voltaire: "The rich will always require an abundant supply of the poor".

And where will this breath taking population growth lead a nation of high consuming people and how will it impact the world? According to the Census Bureau, if we continue to grow at the current rate, we will DOUBLE our population in the lifetime of our children, and at least 70% of this growth will be due to just one government policy: our immigration policy. What legacy do we leave to the future when we have deliberately doubled the population of every American city, doubled the need for highways and petroleum, houses, shopping malls, schools, hospitals, prisons? Even if we manage to cut consumption in half we have achieved nothing if we allow this growth to happen. It is irrational to think that any consumption based plan, such as the Kyoto Treaty, could possibly succeed in the absence of a simultaneous reduction in population growth.

One of the consequences of our infatuation with global idealism is that America is no longer comfortable discussing our own welfare. We have been shamed and intimidated by past errors of Western civilization; the harm we have caused in other parts of the world; the greed of our corporations, and we feel enormous guilt for this wrong doing. And increasingly it seems that our success has become an illusion. Our children have grown obese and highly medicated for depression and hyper activity. We pay strangers to cook our meals, clean our homes, mow our lawns and perform the most intimate care of our loved ones. Our families are disconnected. We are stressed out, over worked, and lonely. We continually berate ourselves for materialism even as we slavishly enable the very policies which continue it. We teach our youth to sneer at the "dead white men" who founded their country and to idealize foreign people and foreign cultures, gushing and cooing about all kinds of diversity, and how foreign people will improve us, enrich us, and revitalize our communities- and we think nothing of how insulting and hostile that message really is.

Recently I read a story about a New York City school with many immigrant children. And the administrators reported that immigrant children were much better behaved, more respectful and hardworking. Studies are now indicating that as immigrant children assimilate they acquire the same level of teenage pregnancy, school drop out, obesity and drug addiction as their America peers. The point is, we have a problem which must be solved from within.

The guilt that we bear for America's history will not be absolved by pursuing a policy of mass immigration today. Our grandchildren do not deserve to be punished for the errors of their grandparents, and no global mission, no matter how altruistic, absolves us of responsibility to our own people

The world grew by 78 million last year, most of it coming from impoverished nations. The United States admitted about 1 million legal immigrants and 700,000 illegal immigrants. In terms of saving people from poverty, it was a trifle a little something to alleviate our western guilt which accomplished nothing for most of the world. The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a cruel hoax to promote the fantasy that we will take in the world's huddled masses, because we cant..

As a family therapist, I work with families who are trapped in dysfunctional patterns: domestic violence, alcoholism, abusive parenting, and poverty. These are not bad people. They were brought to their misery by a long series of disastrous choices with unintended consequences, and they do not see how to free themselves from the results they produce. What I bring to this conference on sustainability is my experience working with dysfunctional families which may have bearing upon the larger problem of dysfunction that concerns us today.

I will list a few basic observations which I believe are pertinent to our discussion.

First, there is a difference between saving people and building a relationship in which people see for themselves what they need to do to change. Much of our foreign policy in the third world has vacillated between using other people and generating grand plans to save them. Ultimately, neither response is helpful. They will see more clearly what they need to do, when we see what we need to do. We need to put our own house in order and build sustainability into national planning for this country.

Second, How people treat each other within a group will largely determine what result that group will produce. This is true for families, and it is true in nations. Poverty, overpopulation, authoritarian government, political corruption and high infant mortality rates are the product of cultures in which neither women nor children are truly valued or have a voice in group decisions. Having more children than you can care for is the product of a dysfunctional set of beliefs, and having many children is not the same thing as valuing children.

A third observation. Dysfunctional groups are dominated by what they don't talk about. Since l990 we have added 38 million people to America's population, and if we continue to grow at this rate, we will double ourselves in less than 70 years. And we are not talking about it! A recent study of media coverage of environmental problems, such as water shortages and loss of wildlife, found that fewer than l1% of these stories mentioned population growth as a cause and none of them suggested none-that stabilizing population could be part of the solution. This is lunacy. We are responding like deer with headlights in our eyes paralyzed or else indifferent and we would rather talk about almost anything else: urban sprawl, pollution, traffic, falling water tables, declining fish stocks, women's empowerment, housing shortages, economic justice anything to avoid blunt speech about population numbers and the painfully obvious connection between these numbers and nearly every problem we are trying to solve. How can we be so dense? Speaking as a therapist, this is the speech pattern of dysfunctional groups - avoiding or minimizing the "pink elephant" in the living room at all costs, and exhausting themselves in a flurry of chatter around peripheral matters. We have agitated and deluded ourselves with the illusion that we are being overwhelmed by many many problems, when in fact, we have primarily only one.

Fourth point. Dysfunctional families commonly take in outsiders in what appears to be a breathtaking gesture of generosity. A closer examination of this behavior often reveals that this generosity is not driven by kindness; it is not nice, it is not what it seems to be, it is a ploy to dominate and control other members within a family; and these relationships rarely last. America's current immigration policies have this nation engaged in a breathtaking gesture of self sacrifice and generosity to outsiders. But look carefully, this policy is destroying the living standard and the political power of working class Americans. Dysfunction commonly masquerades as something it is not, and that is why it is so difficult to see what it really is. But you will know it by the result it produces. Number five. In dysfunctional families everyone is responsible for every one else's business, and no one is responsible for any business of his own. We call it a boundary problem, and it always produces chaos and paralysis. Environmentalists often describe population as a "global" problem with a "global solution" meaning no one in particular is responsible for any piece of it because we're all responsible for it -- therefore no one ends up being responsible for any of it. This is dysfunction masquerading as a high moral plane.

Some comments about race and my sixth point. Race is the problem that never seems to go away, and it is always shaping and affecting our thoughts in subtle ways. In l970 when Earth Day gave birth to the environmental movement and America's population growth was primarily driven by the fertility rate of anglo-european Americans, we had no trouble speaking openly about the need to reduce our numbers . According to Senator Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, stabilizing the population of the United States was one of our top environmental priorities in 1970. Within a few years our fertility rates had declined, and we were on the road to stabilization. But when immigration became the primary source of population growth in this country, the environmental movement grew timid about the need to reduce our own numbers. Today, there are more than 60 environmental organizations in Washington, and almost none of them is working to stabilize the population of this country. 90% of our immigrants are coming from non-European countries. If immigration were driven by Europeans, we would be having a straight forward national debate about numbers and their impact on our society, just as we did in l970. And why cant we do that now? Stabilizing our population benefits everyone who lives here regardless of their race or national origin.

The eerie silence of the environmental movement over the past fifteen years concerning population growth has been disastrous. Just as we ask today, what did Germans know, when did they know it, and what were they talking about when that holocaust was looming on their horizon, so our descendants will ask, what did we know about population growth over the past three decades and what were we talking about. This silence has been especially cruel for the continent of Africa. Despite dumping billions of dollars of aid into Africa by Western nations over the past three decades, the population doubling rate today is about 30 years and the per capita protein consumption is less than it was in l970. The population juggernaut in Africa has been carefully documented and widely known for decades we cannot plead ignorance. We deliberately chose to minimize the subject.

If you see someone you care about barreling toward a cliff at 100 miles an hours, wouldn't you want to wave every red flag you could find, wouldn't you be jumping up and down pointing to that cliff, and would you give a damm because some people told you to mind your own business? Western people were told that the fertility rate of Africans was none of our business. And we went mute. Had we been motivated purely by compassion, we might have protested and responded with conviction: No way. Stabilizing population is about child survival, and it has nothing to do with race . People may not want to hear it. But that is no reason to stop talking about it. People don't want to talk about women's rights in Pakistan, and that is not a reason to be quiet or to minimize the subject. As long as we are intimidated by the word "racist" or "elitist" and we are still trying to prove that we aren't, we are not really free to speak the truth, or to act from pure compassion. And the accusation of racism will not go away until we face it down.

Number 7. About ending poverty. Experience has shown us that the most successful anti-poverty programs are those directed at educating women, supporting local community organization, and micro-enterprise at the grass roots level. We call it community empowerment. In other words, the dead opposite of the current bi-national plan to end poverty in Mexico which is focused on building gambling casinos, luxurious tourist resorts, maquiladoras and promoting the migration of poor people into a rich country causing unrealistic expectations, chaos and disconnection for communities in both countries. This is a plan concocted by oligarchs on both sides of the border to their mutual advantage. We need to take back our country, and they need to take back theirs.

And finally. The difference between an internationalist and a globalist boils down to this: an internationalist feels deeply connected and responsible to a particular group of people and a particular piece of land. He is respectful and generous to others; he is not an isolationist. A globalist feels no particular connection to any piece of land or any group of people, and he mistakenly believes that he has arrived at a higher moral understanding.

A few final thoughts:

This country was founded by English colonists whose feet were firmly planted in the Age of Enlightenment. They did not set out to save the world. They simply wanted to design the game plan for a nation that would be stable and wisely self governed, based on the ideal that all men are created equal before the law. These English colonists were mindful of the choices before them and how those choices would affect future generations. George Washington used the word "posterity" nine times in one of his speeches, and after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his beloved wife Abigail, "I do not know what will be the outcome of this. We may pay a very high price. But it is certain that posterity will profit from our sacrifice." With our welfare in mind, these men wrote the most brilliant Constitution for self-government the world has ever known. And today, passages from this document are found in the constitutions of democratic governments all over the world. We have been the very fortunate beneficiaries of their wisdom and humility, and the world has been inspired and changed forever by their brilliance. And now the torch has passed to us. Our descendants will live with the choices we are making for them today. And without a doubt, the single most important and timely choice before us is how populous this nation will become. We must decide are we a family of people with an obligation to ourselves and our descendants to plan for the long term well being of our nation or are we simply a rapidly expanding global mass? A mass is not a family.

Sustainability will be achieved in pieces, and America is our piece. And this alone will be a breathtaking challenge. Like territorial animals in nature, order is established by marking the borders and dividing national responsibilities. We cannot handle our piece, if we have open borders, multiple agendas, and global missions. We disempower ourselves when we assume more than we can possibly handle.

Human beings will solve the problem of sustainability within groups. The solutions will vary - there will be no all-purpose Walmart solution. The history and the culture of each group, including our own, must be respected. We will not build sustainability by turning ourselves into a multilingual regional mass. In a mass we are too numerous and too diverse to have meaningful conversation. We have tough choices before us, and these choices will not be reduced to neat little slogans for mass consumption. Sustainability will require exceptionally thoughtful discussion and most important: group cohesion. If we destroy group cohesion, we destroy our ability to act intelligently.

The world will save itself, and it will happen much quicker when America is clearly focused on saving herself. We must build a sustainable future in this country, and set the example for others. Just as we gave the world the game plan for democracy by building it for ourselves, we have inspired the world with a civil rights movement, a woman's movement, an environmental movement, a human rights movement, a men's movement,- where else would you find that one? -a labor movement, and even the movement to end world hunger was created and funded by middle class people in Western countries, and not the educated elites from poor countries who currently flock to this nation for high paying jobs. Whenever Americans have changed themselves and acted on their own behalf, the world has taken note.

Polls show that large majorities of Americans already support greatly reduced levels of immigration, and this support increases as we go down the economic ladder. Over the past five years there have been multiple bills in Congress calling for reductions in immigration we have one in Congress right now all we need to do is pass it or we can continue to move toward open borders, spiraling population growth, spiraling consumption, turning ourselves into a vast "economic region" of migrating multi-lingual economic units, as globalists are promoting, and thereby completely destroying our cohesion as a group and the capacity to determine our future.

If mankind is like the frogs in the boiling water who slowly boil to death because they don't recognize what is happening to themselves, and if nature is not going to give us a wake up call in the form of some electrifying event, then we must supply that event ourselves. A substantial reduction in immigration is the wisest decision for ourselves, and it will have an electrifying effect on the rest of the world. It won't be popular with many. But it will remind the world that we are only one country among many, that running from the problems in your native land is no longer a solution, that the world, and even America, has limits. We do not have a plan for saving the world, and it is time we told people the truth. That illusion must end. The behavior, the thinking patterns, and the expectations of 6 billion people must radically change, and they must change very very soon. The trimtab is here.

Jonette Christian is a practicing family therapist, founder of Mainers for Immigration Reform, Maine, and has been an advisor to CAIRCO.

Copyright 2002 Jonette Christian. Reprinted with permission.