No, really – Haitians are eating dirt. Fucking dirt?!?!?!?

The hand of a woman is covered in mud as she makes mud cookies on the roof of Fort Dimanche, once a prison, in Port-au-Prince, Friday, Nov. 30, 2007.

First let me just say that this is the reason we, the richest nation in the world, have immigration issues. People aren’t coming here to steal our jobs and lazily exploit our “entitlement programs”; they come here because they don’t want to eat fucking dirt anymore. They just want honest work, honest pay and for Christ’s sake, honest food.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, it makes me sad to read this:

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt

By JONATHAN M. KATZ

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.

One reporter was brave enough to eat a Haitian dirt cake:

A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.

Can you blame people emigrating from literally dirt-poor countries by any means necessary? Would you give a flying flip about immigration laws if you ate dirt three meals a day while nursing a child? Some answer that we in America can’t help everyone. Why should we be the promised land? Why can’t these governments take care of their own people? The truth, if anyone is willing to engage the facts and not oversimplify the situation, is that America is partly responsible for the terrible economic conditions in many Caribbean and Latin American countries.

Poor nations seek relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which are controlled by the US and other western economic hegemonic nations. In exchange for loans, the borrowing nations must agree to structural adjustment programs that liberalize their economies; this basically allows US corporations to enter and flex their immense economic muscle in the poor nations’ markets, leading to corruption and economic exploitation of the nation. The economic stats look good, the US can say “we helped”, but the fundamental material conditions of everyday people rarely improve. If the US didn’t only look out for the economic best interests of its corporations in such deals, if they secured human rights and worked to eliminate the poverty in places like Haiti and Jamaica (and Mexico and Honduras), the people of those countries wouldn’t be so quick to come to your city or town and take up residence. Let people live like humans in their own countries and fewer people will be desperate enough to risk their security and lives to come to our country.

The solution to America’s issue with immigration is not to build some retarded-ass fence, it’s to get people to stop eating shit burgers three times a day and get some real food in their bellies. It’s to promote education in impoverished areas and spread sex-education and contraception so 16-year-old children aren’t nursing babies while being nourished by mud. It’s to guarantee health and security of person to the people who live in such dire economic and politically explosive conditions.

Also worth mentioning, foreign aid to Israel is $2.5 billion, 15-times more than US aid to Haiti. I don’t see any Israelis eating dirt.