The Upside of Down by Charles Kenny

Author:Charles Kenny [Kenny, Charles]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465069798
Publisher: Basic Books

BECAUSE THE WEST’S TREATMENT of visitors and migrants alike gets worse and worse, there was much discussion a few years back over the fact that the average cow in the West got a considerably bigger government transfer than the average person in Africa got in Western aid. But that debate missed a big part of the story. It isn’t just domestic cows that get better treatment than do foreign humans; foreign cows get treated better than foreign humans too.

In fact, cows are overrunning America’s borders with the complicity of the US government. There are no caps on the number of cattle allowed in each year, and permanent bovine immigration into the United States has dwarfed human immigration of late. Two million cattle entered the country in 2009, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Only a little over one million human immigrants became permanent residents in 2009, while the undocumented immigrant population actually fell that year. That suggests the net flow of humans was about one-tenth the inflow of cattle.

And if you think you were treated as cattle by the immigration and customs authorities on your last trip, you live in a dream world. Cows can travel across global borders with relative impunity—covered by the umbrella of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). When violence in Mexico made it more dangerous for US government officials to travel across the border to preprocess bovine immigrants, the US Department of Agriculture immediately responded by opening up additional facilities inside the United States to ensure that the relocation of the cows wasn’t delayed.

And the benefits of being bovine don’t stop at the border. Once in the United States, Canadian or Mexican cattle have to be treated just as a native-born cow and can’t be labeled differently. Canadian people have no such luck. One implication of this favoritism is that cows get immediate access to the US welfare system. The nine million US dairy cows alone got $1.35 billion in subsidies in 2009. Per bovine household (aka herd, which averages around 133 cows), that’s about $20,000 a year. And pretty much every dairy cow is a welfare queen, native and immigrant alike.19 Meanwhile, annual payments for the average human household on welfare are only around $16,800—and of course, the great majority of immigrants aren’t on welfare at all, while undocumented and nonpermanent human residents aren’t even eligible.20

At first glance, then, it might appear to be good news that some in the US government are seeking closer bovine-human equality in treatment. Sadly, it looks as though the attempts are toward equality at the lowest common denominator. Congressman Steve King noted about his proposal to put an electric fence between the US and Mexico to stop human immigrants, “we do this with livestock all the time.”21 In the same vein, federal authorities have started attaching radio-frequency ID tags like those used on livestock to students from India.

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