i’m sorry, we have to take care of those that already live here first. its our home and we are allowed to control who comes in. if you don’t believe as such perhaps you should open your house to whoever wants to live in your house or apartment. even if it cuts into your childrens meal rations, you just have no right to say no. your house ownership is just an artifical construct after all.

right, its easy for you to say when you live rather far from the problem. i’d imagine you’d have a different opinion if we allowed unlimited immigration into washington and strained your social support systems to the breaking point and drove your wages down to the point where americans woudln’t do those jobs. i think you’d have a different take on unlimited compassion. never mind the enviromental impacts massive migration causes. sorry, these people aren’t buying prius’s when they get here thats for sure, its a pickup truck, even after they gain wealth. all your liberal efforts to fight for the enviroment will be canceled out. an issue thats staring us straight in the face, but can’t address because of white guilt. even the sierra club voted toput their heads in the sand on this issue.

i think you need to read that white guilt book by shelby steele. every land is stolen at some point. mexico didn’t exist for all eternity either.

Sincerely, Mike in Seattle Washington

But I do not agree, at all, with sidewalker that “There is no riddle, only a lack of will and heart.�

And, to an extent, I think Sen agrees. In discussing Easterly’s criticism of the World Bank, Sen writes:

To be sure, these organizations have often imposed terrible policies on developing countries, and Easterly is right to criticize their sometimes insensitive agendas, overly grand designs, and lack of engagement with the way the wretched themselves see their problems.

And my own experience living for four years a short walk (at low tide) from the squalid living conditions on Ebeye, a square mile island in the central Pacific, confirm in my mind that it is not just a matter of “will and heart,� but also a matter of “what and how.�

Also, is it fair to only talk about the flow of people? Sure, the immediate presence of newcomers, some with different colours, customs and tongues, induces an emotional response. But what about the uneven flows of capital, information, goods, technology, military, etc, which can be often far more devastating to a social landscape?

Furthermore, should we call it an “immigration crisis”? Or should we speak of a crisis of wealth distribution? A crisis of the international economic order?

What does it mean to speak of development in a world:

Where “The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined?”

http://mondediplo.com/1998/11/01leader

Where “51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.”

http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/top200.htm

Where “The 48 poorest countries account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports.�

http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2000/en/

Where “A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people.”

http://www.panos.org.uk/global/reportdownload.asp?type=report&id=1000&reportid=1006

If the crisis is not immigration but equity, then we would have to say the flip side of the “modernized” and “wealthy” few is the impoverished many. There is no Pareto optimality here. Development and growth over there will mean giving up something here. There is no riddle, only a lack of will and heart.