Who is ready for some fun with numbers? I know I am.
BuzzFeed became the target of online ridicule this week following the publication of an opinion article titled, “America Has 14,000 Golf Courses And 6,000 Refugees Waiting At The Border.”
From an editorial standpoint, that’s just a bad headline. One’s mind is left immediately to wonder whether the author is going to propose that asylum seekers be given their own own golf courses or, at the very least, golf lessons. Then you read the article and see that, yes, the author does indeed argue that there are enough golf courses to go around for everyone.
“Though it may not feel this way to its many inhabitants who struggle to get by, the United States is a place of plenty, not scarcity. One illustration of the country’s wealth is the number of golf courses it boasts,” writes BuzzFeed’s Khury Petersen-Smith. “There are, astoundingly, 14,794 golf courses in the United States, according to the National Golf Foundation — more than twice the number of the roughly 6,000 individuals currently in Tijuana seeking asylum.”
The author adds, “Yes, there are enough golf courses in the United States for every adult and child asylum-seeker in Tijuana to have their own entire course — and there would still be nearly 9,000 left over.”
For good measure, he reiterated later:
It’s as if the author loosely remembered Rodney Dangerfield saying in “Caddyshack” that “country clubs and cemeteries are the biggest wastes of prime real estate,” and thought the gag line was more alarming than humorous. While we’re at it, there are also more than 14,000 Starbucks stores in the United States. Surely, we can afford to give each asylum seeker his own Starbucks store, right? I mean, what kind of monsters are we anyway?
More seriously, behind the author’s bizarre marshaling of numbers, there’s an actual point that he’s trying to make, and it’s not an explicitly terrible one. His goal is to argue that there is a strain on the country’s public services, but that immigrants are not to blame for it. Further, he adds, the country could easily alleviate said strains on hospitals, public infrastructure, etc. were it to redirect the millions and billions of public dollars we spend on border security and defense spending.
“Unaffordable cities, struggling schools, and deteriorating infrastructure are problems in the United States,” he writes. “But they’re not caused by refugees. Those vexing features of American life sit alongside incredible excess.”
He’s not wrong. The problem, however, is that it while his op-ed does a lot to identify the “Why?” of why immigrants come to the United States (yes, we’re very wealthy), it comes up short when addressing the obvious question of “How should that be done?”
