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Five. Controlling Borders and Babies: John Tanton, ZPG, and Racial Anxiety over Mexican-Origin Women’s Fertility
- University of Texas Press
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Chapter Five Controlling Borders and Babies John Tanton, zpg, and Racial Anxiety over Mexican-Origin Women’s Fertility Across the southern border of the United States are 67 million Mexicans. They are poor and Americans are rich. They speak Spanish and we speak English. They are brown and we are white. They want it and we’ve got it: jobs, prosperity, the Ladies Home Journal-Playboy lifestyle. As a result we are being invaded by a horde of illegal immigrants from Mexico. . . . The furor has attracted the attention of bigots and bureaucrats as well as concerned citizens who ask: If we are limiting our family sizes so that our children can inherit a better nation, why should we throw open our doors to over-reproducers? Paul Ehrlich et al., The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States S o begins the preface to Paul Ehrlich’s 1979 book The Golden Door, written with his wife, Anne, and Loy Bilderback. Published eleven years after Paul Ehrlich’s first treatise, The Population Bomb (1968), the new book identified a different problem plaguing the nation—the arrival of super-fertile Mexican immigrants. In Chapter Two I demonstrated that discussions about population and immigration developed as overlapping discourses throughout the 1970s, particularly in California. Here I argue that as concern about the so-called population problem abated after demographers began issuing reports of a declining U.S. birthrate (which many population control activists attributed to their efforts to change American attitudes about fertility and family size), population control experts identified a new adversary: the Mexican immigrant. Experts described Mexican immigrants as invariably bringing other family members to the United States and engaging in excessive T4292.indb 73 T4292.indb 73 7/27/07 7:22:47 AM 7/27/07 7:22:47 AM fertile matters 74 reproduction, thereby depleting the nation’s resources.1 Through publicizing their concerns in the media, advocates such as Erlich invited the public to imagine irrepressible, job-snatching Mexican immigrants whose arrival was thwarting efforts to stabilize the nation’s population. The magnitude of this issue is conveyed throughout The Golden Door. The authors documented growing public concern about the contribution of immigration to the nation’s population growth, a phenomenon they described as stemming not only from the rising numbers of immigrants crossing the border, but also from their high fertility. The Golden Door insisted that increasing rates of immigration spoiled successful efforts to slow population growth through a decreased national birthrate, and encouraged population control activists to deter immigration with even greater fervor. The public response to The Golden Door was so intense in part because it was received by a reading public that the mainstream media had been conditioning for years. For example, a cover headline of U.S. News and World Report warned: “Time Bomb in Mexico: Why There’ll Be No End to the Invasion of Illegals.” The article described the threat of Mexico’s high birthrate and the country’s lack of jobs. Government officials also contributed generously to public education. A 1974 report of the commissioner of immigration and naturalization stressed the threat of excessive populations invading from the south: Latin American nations, including Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic, which are the principal sources of illegal immigration into the United States, have some of the highest population growth rates in the world. Population in these nations is increasing about 3.5 percent per year, compared to 0.5 percent in the United States, and labor forces in these nations are rapidly outpacing the creation of new jobs.2 Recent scholarship has argued that it was primarily during the 1980s and 1990s that “the greening of hate” transpired.3 However, as this chapter will show, the lobbies concerned about links between population growth, immigration , and nativism were seeded in the 1970s. I specifically focus on how a racializing discourse about illegal Mexican immigrants and their fertility rates took shape during the 1970s in one of the oldest, largest, and most aggressive population control lobbies in the nation—Zero Population Growth, Inc. (zpg). Many segments of the population control lobby, such as the Sierra Club, considered involvement in halting immigration but were wary of advocating federal legislation for fear of the consequences of its “racial T4292.indb 74 T4292.indb 74 7/27/07 7:22:47 AM 7/27/07 7:22:47 AM [44.221.46.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:48 GMT) john tanton...