Shouldn't sending more water to Mexico be part of the immigration debate?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.counterpunch.org/colorado.html

Why the Colorado River Doesn't Meet the Sea

Fifty years ago Aldo Leopold hailed the Colorado River delta as North America's greatest oasis: Two million acres of wetlands, cienegas, lagoons, tidal pools, jaguars and mesquite scrublands. Today it's a wasteland.

The mighty Colorado River no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez. Its entire annual flow has diverted and spit out into hay fields, water fountains in front of Vegas hotels and thousands of golf courses. The Colorado has been sucked up to the last drop.

It's once lush delta is now a salt flat, as barren as Carthage after Scipio Africanus took his revenge on Hannibal's homeland. This estuary used to be one of the wonders of the world: a vast wetland, teeming with more than 400 species of plants and animals. In fact, like the Nile, another desert river, nearly 80 percent of the riparian habitat for the entire Colorado River was once clustered near the mouth of the river. The shallow lagoons in the delta region are home to the Vacquita dolphin, at four feet in length the world's smallest, which is now on the brink of extinction, with only 100 animals known to exist. Dozens of other endemic species are in the same shape.

And not just animals are in trouble. The delta was once the cultural mecca of the Copacha Indians, who made a good living fishing the estuary. But these days the fishing boats are beached and the Indians and Mexican residents are in grinding poverty, forced to work multiple jobs in distant tortilla factories, maquiladoras and wheat fields.

Perhaps, the only legal framework as mind-numbing as the Law of Sea is the Law of the Colorado River. This thicket of deals, trade-offs, set-asides, subsidies and politically sanctioned thievery is nearly impenetrable to even the most seasoned and cyncial observer. But from the Mexican side of the border, the law is devastatingly simple: The US retains 95 percent of the Colorado River's water and Mexico gets what's left over. Most years this is about 1.5 million acre feet, roughly the same amount that Sonoran desert farmers were using to irrigate their bean and onion fields in 1922.

[Inland]

1. No.

It should be part of a water debate. It's got zero to do with immigration.

[Lars39]

2. You could at least bother to read the four paragraphs.

[Inland]

3. Okay. No.

None of the four have anything to do with immigration.

[Cleita]

7. Maybe you need to read it again if you don't see the connection.n/t

[Inland]

8. Okay. No.

Can I cut this short by reading it a fourth time? Okay. No.

[tocqueville]

6. you could imagine that if Mexicans were getting their share of water

they would be richer and grow stuff on the other side of the border. Thus less need to emigrate to survive

[Inland]

9. Um......

So how many people farmed the Colorado water? Nobody will say, of course, because that wouldn't exactly support the concept of each and every Mexican having a right to immigrate, and we would find that if we were to base rights on whether the US has screwed somebody, a few thou mexicans and several million Iraqis would have immigration rights.

So no. Not a thing.

[Cleita]

4. Thanks for posting this. I hope others read it.

The last time I was passing through Las Vegas, I thought about the artificial environment there. It really doesn't belong and it's obvious that the tons of water and energy it's using is excessive for the natural environment that surrounds it. If you look at the landscape of the hills surrounding it it's obvious that it's over many earthquake faults that will probably bring it tumbling down some day.

On the other hand, if we ever decide to colonize the moon or other planets, Las Vegas is a good petrie dish to study in how to bring an artificial environment to those places.

[OzarkDem]

5. Good point

The bigger issue should be about Mexico's economic self-sufficiency. Exporting their poverty to the US is no solution.