US Immigration & Population (fwd)

hope this will add more spice to the debate, without people resorting to
'ad hominem' attacks...

eric mielants
sociology dept
SUNY-Binghamton

June 15, 2000

Seattle Times

Immigration's Dire Effect On The Environment

by B. Meredith Burke

 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/editorial/html98/burk15_20000615.html

Editors decide daily which stories to print and how much space to give
them. If unbiased, they lead with the important points, subordinate all
others. Discerning the important from the trivial is a judgment call.

The recent resignation of David Brower from the board of the Sierra Club
was unarguably newsworthy. The San Francisco-based organization has
600,000 members and ranks among the most influential environmental
advocacy groups.

Brower joined the club in 1933, was its first executive director in the
1950s and 1960s, and is ranked after John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt as a
signal environmentalist.

Yet on May 18 he resigned from the board "with no regret and a bit of
desperation."

Fittingly, Brower's act received its fullest coverage in the San
Francisco Chronicle. A surprisingly large number of papers, including
the Atlanta Constitution, chose not to run it at all. Others edited out
what prompted Brower's act.

Brower asserted that "the planet is being trashed, but the board has no
real sense of urgency." He protested the board's support of federal
government proposals that he felt would contravene the club's original
mandate to protect the California Sierras. He further chastised the
club's leadership for not taking a strong stance on U.S. population
growth and immigration.

"Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and
immigration is part of the problem. It has to be addressed," he said.

Even retaining this admonition left the casual reader ill-informed about
the severity of the country's overpopulation problem. Shortly after the
first Earth Day in 1970, the President's Commission on Population Growth
and America's Future urged Congress to act with alacrity to stabilize
the population of 200 million. Ecologists such as Paul and Anne Ehrlich
of Stanford University peg 150 million as the maximum level consonant
with long-term habitat preservation.

Congress rejected demographic accountability. Instead, it adopted
policies that have added 75 million people in a scant three decades.

This January, the Census Bureau updated its historically conservative
projections of future growth. Finally falling in line with academic
demographers, the Bureau conceded that with unchanged immigration
policies we are likely to add 300 million persons by the year 2100! If
immigration policies - including our family reunification, refugee
asylum, and H-1B visa programs - are liberalized, we could approach one
billion.

At that level we will menace both our survival and the world's with our
rapacious appetite for resources, renewable and nonrenewable. At our
current level we are the world's largest consumer and polluter.

Not just Brower, but Earth Day co-founder and former Wisconsin Senator
Gaylord Nelson, Harvard professor and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, and
Dave Foreman, chairman of the Wildlands Project and co-founder of Earth
First, all urge scrutiny of the demographic and environmental effects of
current immigration policies. Post-1970 immigration - both entrants and
their descendants - is the sole force fueling 21st century American
population growth.

Identifying causality is not assigning moral "blame." However, political
pressure groups have sought to intimidate those correctly linking
environmental degradation, population growth, and immigration by hurling
such spiteful epithets as "racists" or "nativists." They would have us
believe that trying to deflect this country from a path leading to a
scenario resembling present-day China has become an unpatriotic act.

This intimidation has succeeded. Journalists are so loath to cover
population stories that a dishearteningly small number attended the
population session at the Society for Environmental Journalists' annual
convention last fall.

It is a truism that the strength of a democracy depends upon
well-informed voters. If overpopulation is the threat to local,
national, and world survival that Brower and I both contend, public
policies made in ignorance - a deliberately-imposed ignorance - can only
result in a disastrous environmental breakdown.

If this is how a public act by an environmental icon is covered, I know
that the pre-Democratic Convention population conference sponsored by
Los Angeles-based Californians for Population Stabilization will be
ignored - despite a speaker list that includes all the above luminaries.

Demography drives human destiny. David Brower knows this; our
politicians discount it.

B. Meredith Burke is senior fellow at Negative Population Growth, a
Washington, D.C.-based organization.

Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company


-- 

Michael J. Hudak, Ph.D.
38 Oliver Street
Binghamton, NY 13904-1516
email: mhudak@attglobal.net