Re: US Immigration & Population (fwd)

   There was a rancorous debate in the Sierra Club on this a few years back.
Here is some background on the far right elements on the fringe of the
immigration restriction side. BTW, not that I agree with them, but good
friends of mine with a background in carpenters union and New Left politics
(Ca. Peace and Freedom Party) after reading the "Population Bomb, " book of
the Ehrlich's back in the 70's have been sold on the need for population
reduction. Immigration I've never discussed with them. So, while I'd have a
hunch that most espoucing such positions are on the right, I wouldn't be
surprised to find center and left-liberal or "progressive" advocates too.
                                                 Michael Pugliese
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http://www.igc.org/peg/imm_env/expose.html

Wooing the Sierra Club:
Anti-Immigration Groups Make Unlikely Suitors


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A Special Report From the Political Ecology Group

Click the URL, don't want to send all that bandwidth...


----- Original Message -----
From: Eric H. Mielants <br00668@binghamton.edu>
To: <ipe@csf.colorado.edu>
Cc: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 11:30 AM
Subject: 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
>
>
>