Bigfoot in Mexico

I’ve come up with my own numbers. And I will stand by these numbers. The annual gross cost to US taxpayers to provide schooling, hospitalization, and whatever plethoric benefits are out there for the 30 million illegal aliens is approximately $400 billion per year funded by bona fide U.S. taxpayers.

Image:Luz Montero

Americans consume about five times as many resources as Mexicans.

– Jim Gilchrist, co-founder, the Minuteman Project, quoted on Frontpagemag.com

Hysterical claims like Gilchrist’s are a staple of the anti-immigration movement in the US. But after spending a few weeks in the gringo retirement belt along Mexico’s largest lake, it seems to me that most of their arguments can be applied as well to expatriates living in Mexico.

About 50,000 US citizens reside in the Lake Chapala - Guadalajara area.

Many enjoy roughly the same standard of living they had at home on a much lower budget. Others are spending about what they would in the US but living a more luxurious life.

Either way, the expatriate community is plopping down its characteristically massive ecological footprint, and letting the locals pay the tab.

Bigfoot spotted in Mexico

The Oakland-based think tank Redefining Progress compiles per capita resource consumption, waste generation and ecosystem destruction for every country in the world, and converts it all into a per person measurement called an ecological ‘footprint’.

By their reckoning, the ecological footprint of the average US resident is almost five times as heavy as that of the average Mexican.

The impact of this difference is clear along the shores of Lake Chapala.

A flood of immigrants with a high-consumption lifestyle flocking to its shores is the last thing that the already ecologically devastated lake needs.

According to NASA, the lake has dropped about 75% from its historic level, with two thirds of that happening in the last twenty years. Enough dry ground has been laid bare to accommodate the city of Washington, DC. And because of pollution in the water, to quote an article written by AARP (American Association for Retired People), “The lake is now a view, nothing more.”