I recently came across an interesting argument on the pseudonymous blog, “The Philosopher’s Beard,” titled Liberalism requires immigration controls.

“Immigration controls by rich countries are mean,” it begins:

“They close out the poor and vulnerable who only want the chance to make a better life. They are characterised by arbitrary rules whose effects can be inhumane – breaking up families, locking up children, deporting good people to uncertain futures in godforsaken countries, etc. So liberals are quite comfortable blaming conservatives for the whole idea. But in reality, liberals need immigration controls for their cherished welfare state to function. They’re just happy to let the conservatives take the rap.”

“Liberals find cultural conservatism hard to understand and morally repugnant,” the author continues:

“They find conservative pronouncements of cultural superiority and distaste/disgust for peoples from other cultures invidious and an offence to the core liberal principle of universal respect for human dignity. But liberals are necessarily just as committed to immigration control as conservatives, because of their commitment to the realistic utopia of a decent society with a safety net for all citizens. One cannot build such a welfare state in which everyone in our society has the right to health care, education, unemployment protection, disability support, pensions, etc without building a wall to keep some people out.”

The anonymous author then goes on to detail the numerous, important ways that a strong, functioning social safety net depends on limiting immigration. He or she finally concludes:

“It is not surprising that the political success of the liberal project – as seen in the growth of welfare states in scale and ambition through the 20th century – was accompanied by the growth of immigration controls. The viability, legitimacy, and decency of any welfare state depends upon controlling membership to the society it is created to serve. That’s what a real social contract looks like. Liberals are always criticising the racist motivations for and practical inhumanity of the immigration controls demanded by conservatives, but their objections are superficial. Conservative orthodoxy allows liberals to get away with the hypocrisy of depending on immigration controls while pretending that they are against them.”

For the full article, see http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2011/08/liberalism-requires-immigration.html

Britain’s Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific organization, has published a new report on the environmental impacts of overpopulation, titled People and the Planet. The report notes that “rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption, present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing, and the natural environment.”

Perhaps anticipating Stephen Colbert’s foray into demography this week, the report’s authors note that: “The sustainable development debate has, over recent years, been typified by those who argue that population growth is the source of current unsustainable trends, and those who believe that consumption is the primary culprit. This artificial distinction is unhelpful as it can lead to argument over whether policy should focus on reducing population growth or on improving the sustainability of consumption, while both are clearly important” (p.60).

Of course, those who took and passed high school geometry probably remember that the area of a rectangle equals its length times its height. Increase either, and the area increases. In a similar way, increasing either per capita consumption, or the number of capitas, will lead to increased environmental impact. As my students would say, “duh.”

In general, the report is written from an anthropocentric perspective, focused nearly exclusively on the “carrying capacity” of Earth to sustain human beings. It fails to ask whether it is fair or just for us to fill the whole world up with ourselves and our economic support systems, crowding out the other ten million species. The report is titled People and the Planet, not People, Polar Bears, Wombats, Redwoods, Noctuid Moths etc. and the Planet.

Still, even from this narrow and selfish perspective, focused just on human well-being, the report suggests that human population growth needs to end. The Earth is finite, according to its authors, and can only sustain a finite number of people.

Among the reports nine major recommendations are the following:

“The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels.” (recommendation 2)

“Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally.” (recommendation 3)

“Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning.” (recommendation 4)

To all of which, we at PFIR say, “amen!” Wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. government took these recommendations to heart, and applied them to energy policy, transportation policy, immigration policy, and the whole range of government decisionmaking?

People and the Planet, the full report, can be found at http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/people-planet/2012-04-25-PeoplePlanet.pdf

The immigration / population /environment connection has been in the news in this past week, or at least in the “news.” The group Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) began running this advertisement on California TV, which alerts viewers to the connection between mass immigration and increased greenhouse gas emissions, in the U.S. and worldwide.

The ad was subsequently mocked by Stephen Colbert, star of the Colbert Report, on his evening faux news show.

Colbert gets in some funny shots on hoggish Americans who want to keep over-consuming resources while blaming environmental impacts on immigrants. But he stacks the deck against his opponents, by cutting the original ad, to avoid any mention or discussion of how immigration increases the U.S. population.

The original advertisement runs as follows:

Concerned about America’s huge carbon footprint? Then you should be concerned about immigration. Sound crazy? Immigrants’ produce four times more carbon emissions in the U.S. than in their home countries. Left alone, immigration will drive a population increase equal to the entire [population of] the American West, in just thirty years. Reducing immigration won’t solve global warming, but it is part of the solution. We’ve got some tough choices to make. Go to capsweb.org and tell us what you’d do.

As presented, the ad makes two key points. First, that moving people (and their descendants) from low emissions to high emissions countries leads to higher overall global greenhouse gas emissions. Second, that mass immigration is driving a huge U.S. population increase (which, by implication, is bad for the American environment). It also says, honestly, that there are tough choices to make on immigration policy: that any policy will have winners and losers, and that some policies will be better, some worse, for protecting the environment.

As edited by the producers of the Colbert Report, the CAPS advertisement now says:

Concerned about America’s huge carbon footprint? Then you should be concerned about immigration. Sound crazy? Immigrants’ produce four times more carbon emissions in the U.S. than in their home countries. Reducing immigration won’t solve immigration, but it is part of the solution.

This leaves out any mention of how high immigration levels are driving rapid U.S. population growth—the main concern of most environmentalists who want to reduce immigration. It also leaves out any mention of “hard choices.” Thus amended, Colbert’s bloviating alter ego is free to define the main message of the ad as “Immigrants cause global warming,” and he’s off to the races.

Funny, right? Well, yes and no. If there really wasn’t any connection between U.S. immigration and increased worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, or any connection between U.S. population growth and American environmental problems, then it would be easy to laugh along. But those connections exist, as shown, for example, by this report on Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Ending population growth is a sine qua non for dealing effectively with our environmental problems and living up to our global environmental responsibilities.

When all is said and done, most of the tens of millions of Americans who laughed along to the Colbert Report a few nights ago probably went to bed just as ignorant of demographic realities as they woke up that day. And that’s not so funny.

Still, we salute our friends at CAPS for their efforts to educate their fellow citizens! Even though they took some hard knocks from Stephen C, I bet CAPS’ moment in the national media spotlight led to many “aha” moments on the population / environment connection. They are doing their part to fight innumeracy among progressives, and we stand with them in that effort.

The NY Times April 21st article by Mike McIntyre on the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC tells us of a conservative non profit with extraordinary skill and proven success at influencing legislation.

As its author reports, “Desperate for new revenue, Ohio lawmakers introduced legislation last year that would make it easier to recover money from businesses that defraud the state. It was quickly flagged at the Washington headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business-backed group that views such “false claims” laws as encouraging frivolous lawsuits. ALEC’s membership includes not only corporations, but nearly 2,000 state legislators across the country – including dozens who would vote on the Ohio bill.

One of them, Bill Seitz, a prominent Republican state senator, wrote to a fellow senior lawmaker to relay ALEC’s concerns about “the recent upsurge” in false-claims legislation nationwide. “While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved,” he said in a private memorandum.

The legislation was reworked to ease some of ALEC’s concerns, making it one of many bills the group has influenced by mobilizing its lawmaker members, a vast majority of them Republicans.

Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules. Amid the controversies, several companies, including Coca-Cola, Intuit and Kraft Foods, have left the group.

Of course, I can think of other so called non profits who are constantly seeking to influence public policy. For example, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the powerful voice of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) in the US, which has long pushed for more immigration.

However, with power so skewed in favor of the rich and powerful, the RCC and ALEC are just two of many examples. How about the ability of large donors to influence our elections with unlimited contributions? That Fortune 500 CEO’s now earn 50 or more times as much as their average employees speaks volumes about that imbalance.

You might say that obtaining non profit status provides a double edge sword to destroy the fabric of our delicate and unique brand of government so remarkably put together by our founding fathers over two centuries ago.

The difference between non profit and for profit is so blurred that the power of money has simply made the political playing field so un-level as to be ludicrous and truly dangerous to the future of our beloved republic.

A recent book “Why Nations Fail” was reviewed in the April 22nd Sunday Washington Post by Warren Bass. His review, entitled, “If your country stinks, who do you blame?” describes the book as “a sweeping attempt to explain the gut-wrenching poverty that leaves 1.29 billion people in the developing world struggling to live on less than $1.25 a day. You might expect it to be a bleak, numbing read. It’s not. It’s bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece.

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, two energetic, widely respected development scholars, start with a bit of perspective: Even in today’s glum economic climate, the average American is seven times as prosperous as the average Mexican, 10 times as prosperous as the average Peruvian, about 20 times as prosperous as the average inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa and about 40 times as prosperous as the average citizen of such particularly desperate African countries as Mali, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone. What explains such stupefying disparities?

The authors’ answer is simple: “institutions, institutions, institutions.” They are impatient with traditional social-science arguments for the persistence of poverty, which variously chalk it up to bad geographic luck, hobbling cultural patterns, or ignorant leaders and technocrats. Instead, “Why Nations Fail” focuses on the historical currents and critical junctures that mold modern polities: the processes of institutional drift that produce political and economic institutions that can be either inclusive – focused on power-sharing, productivity, education, technological advances and the well-being of the nation as a whole; or extractive – bent on grabbing wealth and resources away from one part of society to benefit another.”

The authors go into substantial detail on the dictatorships around the world which give their citizens no recourse against the vicious and total greed of their leaders. To quote reviewer Bass, “To understand what extractive institutions look like, consider les Grosses Legumes (the Big Vegetables), the sardonic Congolese nickname for the obscenely pampered clique around Mobutu Sese Seko, the strongman who ruled what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. When Mobutu decreed that he wanted a palace built for himself at his birthplace, the authors note, he made sure that the airport had a landing strip big enough to accommodate the Concordes he liked to rent from Air France. Mobutu and the Big Vegetables weren’t interested in developing Congo. They were interested in strip-mining it, sucking out its vast mineral wealth for themselves. They were, at best, vampire capitalists.

But the roots of Congo’s nightmarish poverty and strife go back centuries. Before the arrival of European imperialists, what was then known as the Kingdom of Kongo was ruled by the oligarchic forerunners of the Big Vegetables, who drew their staggering wealth from arbitrary taxation and a busy slave trade. And when the European colonists showed up, they made a dreadful situation even worse – especially under the rapacious rule of King Leopold II of Belgium.” The facts of this latter worthy’s rape of the Congo between 1985 and 1908 were fully exposed by information gathered in the 1980’s in another masterpiece book published in 1998 by Adam Hochschild, “King Leopold’s Ghost”.

And don’t think it could not happen here. The greatest asset of our America system is the balance offered our fragile form of government by the creativity and freedom of our middle class, which has been badly attacked and diminished by the trend toward concentration of wealth and influence toward the tiny sliver of the most wealthy and thereby politically most powerful.

If the rich and powerful want legislation, they write it, pay elected officials with campaign donations and get their way. Or if they don’t want legislation they block it, amend bills and pocket needed reforms. Perfect examples are rife, perhaps the best one currently is allowing unlimited immigration, despite the absence of needed additional people which began with the open border creating legislation of 1965. Since then over 150 million new immigrants and their children have arrived, most of them poor and uneducated. A US population grown from 132 million in 1940 to over 320 million today will likely enlarge to 500 million by mid 21st Century with all the distresses of today enlarged and exacerbated.

It’s your call folks, but the noose on our republican form of government will soon close if we fail to make elected officials feel the sting of our ire about this massive, greedy power play by the few against the many.

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About the Author: Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, is Co-Chair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). His views are his own.

According to Democratic sources, several big green groups like the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Environment America are slated to announce their endorsement of President Barack Obama today for the upcoming 2012 presidential election. While it’s no surprise the greens will back Obama, many Americans are feeling a bit disappointed about the direction America is heading in this arena.  Read more »

Lucky me, born in the Great Depression, raised too young to go to WW II, and ready for adult life and work just as the Korean War was ending, and the massive baby boomers were not yet out of diapers. No employment problems for me.

Then of course came the unfortunate legislation of 1965 that changed our immigration laws and opened U.S. borders to millions of mostly uneducated aliens that our rapidly automating society did not need. But our greedy businesses lapped up cheap foreign workers like a cat on cream. Even farm worker legend Cesar Chavez foresaw how destructive those imports would prove.

A lot of selective businesses got very rich on cheap labor at huge taxpayer expense. The irony of course, is that a massive surge of great innovation (automation that reduced the need for less skilled labor) and prosperity, came from our technological advances symbolized by the high tech folks in Silicon Valley.

These titans took in many smart foreign students who were graduates of California’s outstanding universities. Not a problem, when done in moderate, legal and reasonable numbers, but of course Bill Gates and other titans would like every foreign technological student who graduates from an American college or university to have a green card stapled to his or her diploma.

Now many of the Silicon billionaires want to go further, presumably to assuage their guilty consciences if they have any. I guess when you get rich enough you get guilty, or even worse yet, lose your sense of gravity so that you can float in your own little world of noblesse oblige, almost like on a drug high, feeling that you and your similarly minded pals are above the law, and above the mere bonds of common sense, notwithstanding that you are a citizen of a sovereign nation where 25 million of your fellow citizens are out of work, under employed, or have stopped looking for work altogether.

This strikes me as fully descriptive of the folks identified in Miriam Jordan’s page one story on March 7, 2012, in the WSJ entitled, Tech Titans Fund Students. She begins,

“A group of Silicon Valley technology leaders, impatient with attempts to rewrite immigration laws, is funding efforts to help undocumented youths attend college, find jobs and stay in the country despite their illegal status.

The group includes Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot; and the family foundations of Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel Corp.; and Mark Leslie, founder of the former Veritas Software Corp. Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, has for years supported undocumented students through her organizations that help low-income high-school students.”

I suppose if U.S. immigration laws are not being enforced, were someone potentially a big political donor, he or she could comfortably ignore the law, especially if they feel that many of these kids came to the U.S. through no fault of their own.

The dismissal state of real immigration reform reminds one of the famous Joseph Welch imprecations to Red baiter Senator Joe McCarthy at the U.S. Army communist hunt hearings on June 9, 1954. “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Having had 2 granddaughters graduate from colleges within the past year, I know firsthand the trouble they have had finding work. Both are now marginally employed, one as a receptionist another as a gopher in a Congressional office in Washington, DC. Great, at least they are on the bottom rung of a possible career ladder, but we know many such college grads are not so lucky.

And how about those kids who aren’t college grads, legal American kids, looking for work? Guess the Silicon folks put them second to the illegal kids they are funding with such gusto and arrogant hubris. As James Hagerty’s March 6th piece Young Adults See Their Pay Decline reports, “Young people entering the job market are taking the brunt of the downward pressure on wages caused by high unemployment, according to a new analysis of pay trends.

In data compiled for a coming report, the Economic Policy Institute, a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C. found that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for male college graduates aged 23 to 29 dropped 11% over the past decade to $21.68 in 2011. For female college graduates of the same age, the average wage is down 7.6% to $18.80.

‘New college graduates have been losing ground for 10 years,’ said Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute, which derived the figures from regular government wage surveys. The drop in average wages for young adults is in contrast to U.S. government figures showing that average inflation-adjusted hourly wages for production and non-supervisory workers of all ages and education levels are up 3% from a decade ago.”

Immigration reform requires bi-partisan action. Even though the failed amnesty of 1986 keeps resurfacing as Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), the sheer weight of American citizen voter anger has defeated amnesty legislation 3 times over the past few years. However, all versions of this CIR legislation, never properly vetted for real legal safeguards such as a permanent E verify authorization or careful enforcement, will be coming back again and with the full support from these same folks who want a few high tech marvels and are willing to flood the USA with millions of low skill aliens to pan the few gold nuggets from this massive river of alien humanity. Virtually every nation on earth has careful ID cards that restrict the kind of access the USA has allowed for decades.

And then, now, they assuage their perfidy by supporting illegal alien children over children from their own country. Bet many of them would say they are world citizens and that mere national sovereignty is a concept beneath them. Is it too late to fix our broken system? Maybe.

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About the Author: Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, is Co-Chair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). His views are his own.

Here is a fascinating TED Talk by Paul Gilding, arguing that The Earth is Full and that creating the best possible future for humanity depends on facing this, rather than trying to squeeze a few more years of growth out of a system that is showing signs that it is reaching its ecological limits. The video has been seen over 350,000 times.

Population is ‘our biggest challenge’ says government chief scientist Sir John Beddington. That’s the headline of a recent article by Tom Levitt in The Ecologist, Britain’s pre-eminent popular environmental journal. You see, in the United Kingdom, population issues — including immigration rates — are the subject of vigorous debate. Although British environmentalists may not agree on the answers, they do all seem to agree that population matters, and appear able to discuss population issues with minimal acrimony. Levitt writes:

While many commentators look ahead to 9 billion by 2050, there is a more immediate statistic that ‘frightens’ the UK government’s chief scientist: 1 billion extra people in the next 13 years.

Speaking at a joint WWF and Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) event last week, which looked ahead to the Rio+20 conference in June, John Beddington told an audience that half of that population increase would come from Asia and most of the other half from Africa. Based on the UN’s projections, he said Africa’s population would grow ‘frighteningly fast’ from 1 billion today to 1.5 billion by 2025-2030.

He went on to lament the issue of population as ‘under thought’ and ‘our biggest challenge’ as it exacerbates existing problems over access to water and other resources.

The article goes on to discuss the question of whether population or consumption growth is humanity’s greatest environmental challenge, quoting PFIR Board President Phil Cafaro that “both are critically important and that tackling population growth is not a reason for inaction on overconsumption. A reasonable approach to environmental risk and a decent respect for human rights argue just as strongly for reining in harmful consumption as they do for avoiding over-population,” says Cafaro.

The full article can be found here.

PFIR Board President Philip Cafaro has published a new study in the January/February issue of the prestigious journal WIRES: Climate Change. Titled, Climate Ethics and Population Policy, it analyses the contribution stabilizing population could make to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reviews the failure of the international community to act on this knowledge, considers reasons for this failure, and discusses the moral imperative to limit population growth and pass on a flourishing natural world to future generations.

The full article can be accessed here; here is the abstract:

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, human population growth is one of the two primary causes of increased greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating global climate change. Slowing or ending population growth could be a cost effective, environmentally advantageous means to mitigate climate change, providing important benefits to both human and natural communities. Yet population policy has attracted relatively little attention from ethicists, policy analysts, or policymakers dealing with this issue. In part, this is because addressing population matters means wading into a host of contentious ethical issues, including family planning, abortion, and immigration. This article reviews the scientific literature regarding voluntary population control’s potential contribution to climate change mitigation. It considers possible reasons for the failure of climate ethicists, analysts, and policy makers to adequately assess that contribution or implement policies that take advantage of it, with particular reference to the resistance to accepting limits to growth. It explores some of the ethical issues at stake, considering arguments for and against non-coercive population control and asking whether coercive population policies are ever morally justified. It also argues that three consensus positions in the climate ethics literature regarding acceptable levels of risk, unacceptable harms, and a putative right to economic development, necessarily imply support for voluntary population control.

Underneath the emotionally charged immigration debate is a more complex and damning population crisis that affects not only the US, but all of the world. While population growth rates may have slowed since its peak in the 1960s, growth still presents a major problem for the planet’s environmental health. In fact, at current rates of birth and death, the world’s population is on a trajectory to reach 9 billion people by 2050. [i] Massive growth accelerates deforestation, increases sprawl, strains our water supply and intensifies our dependence on fossil fuels.

At the crux of the environmental conundrum facing the planet is the nexus between population growth and migration patterns towards industrialized countries. Essentially, high rates of fertility in less developed countries greatly multiply the number of working-age residents within such countries. Labor supply in such countries often does not match labor demand and thus population growth will ultimately drive migration patterns to more stable economic regions. [ii] One of the most classic examples of this phenomenon occurred in Mexico during the previous few decades.

In the 1960s and the early 1970s Mexico experienced extremely high rates of fertility (fertility in the peak year of 1965 was 7 children per woman), and thus witnessed an enormous increase in the number of young people looking to enter the labor force by the 1980s. The economy began to stagnate in the 1980s, which simply compounded pressures to emigrate abroad. [iii] In a 2008 study, academics Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh found that that declining labor supply in Mexican states accounted for 30 percent of the country’s labor exodus between 1975 and 2000. [iv]

Only by addressing population growth within nations can we address future environmental predicaments. There has been significant progress in a host of nations. For example, Mexico’s fertility rate plummeted from 7 to 2.5 between the years 1965 to 2000. As a middle-income country Mexico’s birthrate of 2.5 children is higher than all OCED nations, but far less than most third world developing countries. [v]

Fertility rates are much higher within Central American countries that also have persistently high patterns of the migration to the US. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, the average fertility rate is 2.7. This rate has not experienced the same level of decline as Mexico. [vi] Analysts project that these countries will be unable to absorb excess labor in coming decades and thus will likely present immigration challenges to both Mexico and the US.

Mass immigration also entails major fiscal costs upon the host nation. Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector measured the net costs of immigration by measuring the tax burden of low-skill immigrant households, in a 2004 study. Low-skill immigrant households paid more than $10,000 in all taxes but utilized more than $30,000 of social services. [vii]

Implications abound, policy developers should take a closer look at migratory patterns from domestic and international fronts. So doing allows for deeper insight into how demographic trends of various migratory groups impact the host nation’s population. For instance, at current unemployment rates, the US should closely consider the impact of allowing large numbers of immigrants into a market that cannot accommodate the current labor force.

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i Malcolm Potts and Leah Marsh. “The Population Factor: How does it Relate to Climate Change.” February 2010. Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability UC Berkeley, Retrieved January 11, 2012. Pg. 2

ii Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh. “The Demography of Mexican Migration to the US.” December 2008. UCSD. Retrieved January 10, 2012. Pg. 2

iii Hanson and McIntosh, Pg. 3

iv Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh. “The Great Mexican Emigration.” December 2007. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper. Pg. 2

v Hanson and McIntosh, Pg. 3

vi Associated Press. “Baby Boomlet Pushes US Birth Rates to 45 Year High.” January 15, 2008. Retrieved January 11, 2012.

vii Mark Krikorian. The New Case Against Immigration. (New York: Sentinel Press, 1998). Pg. 178-179.