Progressives for Immigration Reform

Alan Kuper & Ross McCluney
29 May 2008

1. Evidence of U.S. overpopulation piles up: water shortages, congestion, pollution, unemployment, urban sprawl and loss of farmland, shortage of waste-disposal sites, loss of natural areas, accelerated species extinctions, cost of expanding infrastructure, more housing, more sewers, more landfills, more schools, more prisons, MORE EVERYTHING! Voters must be informed that the quadrupling of U.S. population in the 20th century to over 300 million cannot continue in the 21st century. The environmental message is clear: The natural systems on which humans depend have limited capacity to renew. The “carrying capacity” cannot be exceeded for long without disaster to the human species.

2. Global Warming is the greatest example of what can happen when human overpopulation exceeds carrying capacity, in this case threatening human survival and that of many other species!

3. Increasing per capita consumption, added to overpopulation, means that growing demand for limited resources produces steadily increasing prices. For example, China and India are on the move into rapid industrialization, producing increasing demand for fossil fuels, more carbon released into the atmosphere, stress on world energy markets, and ever higher prices for fossil fuels.

4. While population stabilization is being approached in many industrialized countries, the U.S. stands out as the only one with a rapidly growing population, its high population growth even rivaling the very high rates of many less-developed countries.

5. According to U.S. Census Bureau data[i], most U.S. population growth is now the result of legal and illegal immigration, plus the higher-than-replacement fertility of most the recent immigrants. This is fact, not hyperbole, and has nothing to do, in principle, with who the immigrants are or where they come from. Environmentalists are not, therefore, concerned with status or country of origin, per se, of immigrants, because it is only human numbers and consumption that produce the environmental impact of concern.

6. So, to achieve population stability in the U.S., immigration must be limited by public policy to historic replacement levels. Elimination of illegal immigration and a cap on legal immigration are necessary.

7. It’s a matter of the numbers, not who the immigrants are. Most environmentalists are supportive of a diverse society, with a variety of cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, as long as newcomers strive to fully assimilate into American life, as the great majority of immigrants have done in the past.

8. Environmentalists support rational, science-based, environmental policies that discourage population growth attributable to both natural increase (births minus deaths) and net immigration (immigration minus emigration) as a necessary condition to achieve a sustainable economy for the benefit of future generations in the U.S. and the world. This must be accompanied by reduced consumption to achieve a truly sustainable lifestyle. This reduction in consumption can come from a combination of technological improvements and behavior changes, so that the quality of life improves, or remains approximately the same. Today Americans have the greatest average per capita consumption of fossil fuel energy and have the greatest per capita environmental impact of any nation on Earth. So limiting our numbers is important both for the planet’s sake and as an example for poor countries with high population growth rates that have long received aid for their family planning programs from western, industrialized nations and Japan.

9. A recent Census Bureau announcement[ii] notes that our nation’s rapid population growth is now mainly the result of immigration of Spanish-speakers, mostly from Mexico. Many can now vote. The Census Bureau has estimated that U.S. Hispanic population now tops 45 million, making it the country’s largest minority, a group responsible for most of the current, historically high population growth. As their voting numbers grow, politicians are likely to be increasingly friendly to Hispanic interests and less and less receptive to requests for replacement-level immigration, or even the less-than-replacement level now required to reduce U.S. population to a sustainable level for the sake of the U.S. and the entire biosphere.

10. The first priority of most elected officials, like other people, is to keep their jobs; only secondarily is it to pay attention to the state of the nation after they retire. Such short-term thinking prolongs the country’s unsustainable population growth.

11. Political realities in the U.S. may be working against the environmental message, but the growing evidence of U.S. overpopulation, the strain on the U.S. economy, and the opprobrium of the rest of the world’s people inevitably will win over more and more voters, including newly-arrived citizens. Let’s hope it won’t be too late.

The late Alan Kuper was President of CUSP – Comprehensive (approach to) U.S. Sustainable Population – www.uscongress-enviroscore.org. Ross McCluney, is a member of the Advisory Board, Floridians for a Sustainable Population www.flsuspop.org.

[i] www.census.gov/population/projections/nation/summary/np-t1.txt

www.numbersusa.com/overpopulation/posters.html

[ii] www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/011910.html

Filed under: Environmental Issues
Treading on a Taboo

Population Press – by Jack Hart

Each Tuesday I carry the recycling to the curb and look out over a city bristling with light rail, streetcars, bicycles, eco-roofs, and little yellow bins like mine. The greenest of the green, my city styles itself, filled with good citizens leading the way to Earth’s salvation.

If only it were true. The sad fact is that unless we do something drastic, out-of-control population growth will wipe out the gains made by the most ambitious recycling and conservation programs, both here and across the planet.