**Uniqueness 2 Generic Links 16
Turn – Recession hurts immigrants
Download 0.75 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Impacts- Econ Bad- Extinction
Turn – Recession hurts immigrantsImmigrants are more vulnerable to economic downturns due to lack of available public services Migration Policy Institute 9 [Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis: Research Evidence, Policy Challenges, and Implications 2009, www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/lmi_recessionJan09.pdf] Beyond demographic and labor force characteristics, public policies may also make migrants more likely to feel the effects of downturns much more deeply than other populations. Since the implementation of 1996 welfare law, known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA), many legal immigrants who are not citizens and have been in the United States for less than five years are exclude from access to major federal public benefit programs, such as cash welfare and food stamps, which are important sources of support during periods of job loss, underemployment, or other economic hardship. Some states, including California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and new Jersey have restored state-based coverage to these recent legal immigrants although collapsing tax revenues have spread the economic pain throughout the country and state governments are scrambling to cover ever widening deficits. This new fiscal reality in most states makes immigrants who lose their jobs particularly vulnerable regardless of whether a state has formally restored benefits to them or not. Except for a specified group of emergency services, unauthorized immigrants are generally ineligible for federal benefits and services. For instance, unauthorized immigrants are ineligible for unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps and Medicaid. Overall, public benefits permit low-wage natives and naturalized citizens to survive periodic economic downturns by providing a stable source of emergency income. For low-skilled noncitizens without access to these public benefits, periodic or even just short-term unemployment can lead to greater economic hardship. **Economic Growth Bad** Impacts- Econ Bad- ExtinctionEconomic growth causes extinction Nadeau 95 (“spaceship earth Homo economicus and the Environmental Crisis”, http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:JQ2B0zSVoeAJ:www.earthscape.org/p3/ES15351/NADEAU_CH_1.pdf+nadeau_ch_1.pdf&hl=en&gl=us, CH) In physics, in the years following , attempts to understand the non- linear dynamics of living systems would reveal a relationship between parts (organisms) and whole (ecosystem) in which the stability of the whole is mediated and sustained by interactions within and between the parts. In biology, the old mechanistic model of evolution as a linear pro- gression from “lower” atomized organisms to more complex atomized organisms would be displaced by a model in which all parts (organisms) exist in interdependent and interactive relation to the whole (life). In envi- ronmental science, researchers would not only discover that all parts (organisms) exist in embedded relation to the whole (ecosystem or bios- phere) and that the interactions within and between parts function as self- regulating properties of the whole. They would also reach the dire con- clusion that continued disruptions of the complex web of interactions between these parts by human economic activity could eventually threaten the survival of our species Impacts- Econ Bad- ExtinctionEconomic growth destroys ability to survive- extinction Nadeau 95 (“spaceship earth Homo economicus and the Environmental Crisis”, http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:JQ2B0zSVoeAJ:www.earthscape.org/p3/ES15351/NADEAU_CH_1.pdf+nadeau_ch_1.pdf&hl=en&gl=us, CH) As E. O. Wilson points out, our species is the “greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite landed near the Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago.”6 The claim that human impacts on the global ecological system are leading us down the path to large-scale disruptions of this system is accurate. And the infer- ence that our species, like that of the great dinosaurs, may become extinct in the process should be taken quite seriously. If the cold war is in fact over and we manage to prevent any future use of nuclear weapons, the three menacing and interrelated problems that must be resolved in the interest of human survival are overpopulation, global warming, and loss of species diversity. The following is Wilson’s overview of the population problem: The global population is precariously large, and will become much more so before peaking some time around. Humanity overall is improv- ing per capital production, health, and longevity. But it is doing so by eating up the planet’s capital, including natural resources and biological diversity millions of years old. Homo sapiens is approaching the limit of its food and water supply. Unlike any species that lived before, it is also changing the world’s atmosphere and climate, lowering and polluting water tables, shrinking forests, and spreading deserts. Most of the stress originates directly or indirectly from a handful of industrialized coun- tries. Their proven formulas for prosperity are being eagerly adopted by 12 the rest of the world. The emulation cannot be sustained, not with the same levels of consumption and waste. Even if the industrialization of developing countries is only partly successful, the environmental after- shock will dwarf the population explosion that preceded it.7 In the global human population was roughly half a billion, in our numbers had grown to two billion, and in the count was six bil-lion and increasing at the rate of each day. This exponential increase means that people born in were the first to witness a dou- bling of the human population in their own lifetime, from billion to more than six billion. The problem faced in predicting future increases in the global human population is that the estimates are extremely sen-sitive to the replacement number or the average number of children born to each woman. In each woman bore an average of chil- dren, but by that number had declined to If this number declined to, it is estimated that there would be billion people on earth in and a leveling off of the human population at billion in If the number decreased slightly to, the population would peak at billion and then decline to billion by But if the number of these births is estimates are that the global human pop- ulation would be billion in and billion in Even if the human birth rate were to decrease to one child per woman, the global human population would not peak for one or two generations. Because estimates of the number of people that can be sustained in the biosphere over an indefinite period tend to fall between five and sixteen billion, most experts agree that what is required is not merely zero population growth but negative population growth.8 Download 0.75 Mb. Share with your friends:
|