This transcript appears in the September 22, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Dope, Inc. and the Migrant Crisis
[Print version of this transcript]
The following is an edited transcript of a presentation made by EIR Ibero-America Intelligence Director Dennis Small on the Aug. 18 New York Symposium of Diane Sare. Mrs. Sare is currently an independent LaRouche candidate for U.S. Senate from New York. The title of the symposium was, “Dope Inc. and the Migrant Crisis: What’s the Problem and What’s the Solution.” Subheads have been added. The entire Symposium can be watched here.
Aug. 18—To take up tonight’s topic let me just first state what should be obvious, which is that if you plan to solve a problem it usually is a pretty good idea to figure out what the actual cause of the problem is. Because if you solve the cause of the problem you can solve it; if you don’t, no matter how vehement you protest against the effects of the problem you’re not going to actually solve it. In fact what you do could backfire; you could be making fatal mistakes simply to not understand the causality of what’s going on.
You know I was thinking about this a little earlier and I was reminded of what happens in Rigoletto where Rigoletto is—the joy, the pride of his life is his daughter Gilda and the Duke is seducing her. So Rigoletto hires an assassin to assassinate the Duke, except that the assassin assassinates Gilda instead. And when Rigoletto realizes this—he realizes that he has made quite a big mistake; he’s killed his own daughter—he blames it on the maledizione [curse]. But it’s not that. There’s something far more fundamental going on and there’s a problem with that kind of thinking; where you don’t go to the root of the problem. And the vehemence of the response does not necessarily mean that people are correct.
The ‘Wall’ Won’t Solve the Problem
I’m being very specific: The idea that the wall—building a wall between Mexico and the United States will somehow solve either the drug problem or the migrant problem is a total mistake. First because it misunderstands what the actual cause of the problem is. Secondly, were you aware of the fact that most of the drugs, like 80 to 90% of the drugs entering the United States from Mexico don’t come across the Rio Grande or anything like that? They come across the major transit points, the entry points of the United States where there are plenty of walls and there are border police and there are all sorts of things. But that’s where the drugs come through: in the false bottoms of cars and trucks and vans and containers and so on and so forth. That, by the way, is not some secret information. That’s the information of the Drug Enforcement Administration. You can read this in DEA publications.
What’s the cause then? Now this is going to take thinking about some big problems. The actual cause of the migrant problem which has created such a disastrous mess both in the countries where these migrants are coming from—driving them to this kind of desperate fleeing across borders and oceans in which many people are killed or become virtual slaves of a slave trade or become mules of the drug trade—equally bad is the result in American cities or European cities where there’s a huge migration issue as well: where these desperate people are found on the streets; there’s no care for them; there’s nothing going on; the kind of circumstances Diane was just describing.
Potential Relative Population Density
The problem however is due to the fact that the entire global economy of the Trans-Atlantic sector has been under break-even, not from a financial standpoint but from the standpoint of Lyndon LaRouche’s physical economy, which is to say from the standpoint of potential relative population density. Potential relative population density simply means the power of a society to maintain a growing population at a higher standard of living with better processes of development and access to science and culture. When your economy, because of the speculative bubble and the looting and the debt and the derivatives and all that stuff—thank you, Fed; thank you, Wall Street; thank you, City of London—when that takes over, the cancer takes over and the physical economy dips under the actual existing population and its ability to support that, that’s when you have an absolute catastrophe.
I want to show you and share my screen of the first slide here (Figure 1) just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about here with potential relative population density. If the actual population is the red curve or arrow, so long as the economy’s power to produce, the blue line, potential relative population density is greater and rising more rapidly than the actual population, you’ll have what successful growth has been throughout the history of our species. Population grows, it lives longer, there’s a better standard of living, technology advances, potential relative population density increases and so population can grow. If you slam on the brakes of the physical economy as we did beginning in particular about 1970—really after the murder of John F. Kennedy but in particular with 1971 and what happened with the beginning of the floating exchange rate system, the physical economy has in fact been taken down, and at a certain point you reach, for example, in 2020 a situation where the ability of the whole physical economy to maintain the population is less than that actual population.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
What happens when that occurs? Well many different things can happen and that depends on political and other factors. You can unleash pandemics and diseases old and new which take over and destroy the population. You can have wars which are unleashed, as they have been most recently as a result of this. It’s the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Or you can also have mass migration of people who are living in countries where they do not have the basis to survive and therefore they are driven to migrate desperately.
And then, of course, those who are running the speculative bubble, the cancer and so on, run the drug trade—they run the traffic in migrants as well. They herd and transport these desperate people, charge them an arm and a leg, and then often dump them across the river or dump them across the border. If it’s the case of Europe, they load them on boats on the African shores of the Mediterranean; on boats that are probably designed mainly to sink after, of course, they pay their bills.
So we’ve had massive flows of population as a result. The cause here is the drop of the potential relative population density and that’s what has to be solved. If you try to wall off the United States under these conditions from the rest of the world you will destroy those people in the rest of the world—[the people] Wall Street and the City of London are already destroying—and you will destroy the United States, because you’re not solving the underlying problem. You have to come up with a solution which is what [Nicholas of] Cusa would call the Coincidence of Opposites; the higher solution which solves both problems without saying: “Screw them. I’m going to solve my problem.” Because you won’t solve their problem, your problem, you’ll make the whole thing worse.
Human Trafficking and the Drug Trade
Now the trafficking in migrants is very closely connected to the drug trade. The drug trade is a one trillion dollar per year business; that’s one trillion in just the drugs. When you add in the slave trade, when you add in the arms trade, and so on and so forth, it’s probably about two trillion. It’s a significant support for the financial bubble. This is a map (Figure 2)—this is from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime—it’s a UN map showing what the cocaine trafficking routes are from South America to West Africa and from there into Europe. Now there’s a few interesting things here. These happen to be the exact same routes that are used for trafficking people across the Mediterranean to places like Lampedusa in Italy, if they’re lucky enough to actually survive. And the drug runners and the migrant traffickers are run at the top by the same people, which are the City of London and the Wall Street banking apparatus.
The other thing that’s quite interesting if you look at this—I mean you could just overlay a map of migrant flows on this and it would be almost identical. But it’s quite interesting if you look at this to just think for a moment what Diane was referring to about what’s going on in Niger, who basically said we’re not going to be a French colony anymore—and the same thing has happened in Mali, and the same thing with Burkina Faso. Now you can see among the other reasons why the Dope Inc. apparatus, the City of London apparatus would not be happy about this, besides the straightforward political side of this that they don’t want people standing on their own hind legs and saying we’re going to develop, the hell with you.
Now I am not saying that with these changes in governments this is automatically going to put an end to the drug trade. I wish it were that simple. These are very complex situations in each country but if you just look at the basic politics of the roots here I think you can learn a lot about what it means if Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and so on basically become allies of the Belt and Road [China’s Belt and Road Initiative—ed.] as opposed to the cocaine trafficking and the human trafficking networks as well.
Remittances and Money Laundering
Let’s turn finally to the question of migration per se. I just want to put a number of ideas on the table here for the discussion. One of the key issues in migration is remittances. People travel to other countries to send money home to their families so that they don’t starve and their kids don’t starve. The size of the remittances is huge, absolutely huge. I was just updating the numbers of this a few moments ago. As of now the total global remittances on a yearly basis are somewhere between 800 billion and one trillion dollars; money that people earn and send back to their countries which are being looted by the same banks that have produced this problem. Now this has grown from the year 2000: it was only 126 billion, so it was from 2000. Twenty years later it’s grown from 126 billion to a trillion dollars in remittances. And the remittances, flowing back and forth, happens to be also one of the ways in which drug money is laundered—that’s another story.
Now recently in the United States what has been much in the news is there has been a lot of what are called enforcement actions by the border patrol of the United States on the Mexican border. Enforcement actions are either arresting people, deterring them from entering, [or other] encounters. There have been seven million of these between 2021 and 2023. One of the important changes here is that it’s not mainly, or it’s not only Mexicans, Central Americans and so on. But there is an increasing number of Africans who have been brought in, equally from the Caribbean who have been brought in, directly to traffic them from Haiti, also Asians and so on and so forth. So you’ve got a huge flow and pressure going on at the border, and the same kind of thing is going on across the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean deaths are far more known in the news than what happens on the U.S. border, but it’s the same kind of thing. In a five-year period—and this is a while ago: 2013 to 2018—internationally 31,000 people died trying to migrate; died in the process of crossing the border or getting across the Mediterranean and so on. Today in 2020—I don’t have statistics for 2023—there are according to official statistics of the United Nations approximately 281 million international migrants. That’s about 3.6% of the world population. I’ll bet you a dime to a dollar that the real numbers are twice that. We’re investigating this. We have an EIR research team working on this. We will be producing more in-depth studies. But I’m positive that it’s substantially more than those numbers—maybe double.
The Problem Is Getting Radically Worse
This now becomes interesting because where are these people located? Which are the main host countries? This is the final graphic (Figure 3) which I wanted to show you which is—these are again UN numbers—these are the countries where they go to. Now, one would think perhaps that the United States, North America is the largest. It is not. The largest is Europe. There are about 87 million immigrants in Europe. That corresponds to 12% of the total population [of Europe]. And by and large this is not voluntary migration. Again to be clear: these are people who are desperate to survive. They’ve migrated because the potential relative population density in their countries is below survival.
Then after Europe it’s Asia with 86 million people, which is very high. North America is only in third place with about 59 million. However in the case of North America—it’s Canada, but it’s really mainly in the United States—that’s 16% of the population [of North America]. So if you’re wondering why this is a problem which is there for everyone to see, it’s because it’s 16% of the population. Now this is all migrants; this is not only the people who you see on the streets, the desperate people or anything like that. But nonetheless it gives you an idea of the flow that has been driven by this collapse of the international economy.
If you look at the growth rates on this stuff—I mean you can just see by looking at the curves—but in the case of Europe it only grew from 1990 to 2020, a 30-year period, by 74%; from 50 million to 86.7 million. In the case of North America it grew from 28 million to 58.7 million. That’s a 110% increase. So what we’re looking at here is a problem that is getting radically worse. It’s occurring at the same time as, and caused by, the collapse of the international financial system; the destruction that that collapse is producing in the physical economies of countries, emphatically including the United States.
That makes it impossible given the financial constraints imposed upon us to simply handle and take care of people in need. It’s what we always used to do in this country, where we’re fond of saying that this is a country of migrants. Very few of our grandparents and great-grandparents came over on the Mayflower. Most did not. And it’s because the United States was in the past and must become again the kind of economy which is flourishing, and can make it a home for those who desire to migrate at the same time that we’ve developed the rest of the world. Those are the things that are at stake in the upcoming BRICS meeting [15th BRICS Summit—ed.] and the policies that we’ll be having to hash out in the United States at the same time.
