Policy Brief #10-1 | March 2010 Leon Kolankiewicz

Executive Summary

Mass immigration is increasing America’s Ecological Footprint (EF), pushing our country deeper into ecological deficit. Approaching 310 million, U.S. population currently exceeds the carrying capacity of our land and resource base. Nevertheless, high immigration levels exacerbate these trends by pushing our population to ever more precarious heights, preventing U.S. population stabilization, forcing annual growth rates to more than three million net new residents, and driving our numbers to a projected 440 million by 2050. If these projections hold true, by 2050 America’s population will grow faster than it is today, and the United States will be on a trajectory toward a billion or more by 2100. EF analysis provides additional scientific evidence that indeed, “numbers count,” and that today’s America, to say nothing of tomorrow’s, is vastly overpopulated as well as over-consuming.

The Ecological Footprint is a measure of aggregate human demands, or the human load, imposed on the biosphere, or “ecosphere.” When all is said and done, the human economy, all production and consumption of goods and services, depends entirely on the Earth’s natural capital — on arable soils, forests, croplands, pasturelands, fishing grounds, clean waters and air, the atmosphere, ozone layer, climate, fossil fuels, and minerals — to perform the ecological services and provide the materials and energy “sources” and waste “sinks” that sustain civilization.

Drawing on natural capital beyond its regenerative capacity leads to drawdown, or depletion of the capital stock, just as drawing down the principal of a savings account or inheritance will eventually exhaust it. When humankind began to exploit fossil fuels at the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, drawdown began to accelerate. This drawdown expanded exponentially in the 20th century and continues today virtually unabated.

EF compares the demands of the human economy, or subsets of it, with Earth’s (or a given country’s) ecological capacity for regeneration and renewal, thus its “biocapacity.” EF represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a given human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless, or assimilate the corresponding waste or residuals it generates.

In the two decades since EF analysis emerged at the University of British Columbia on Canada’s west coast, it has evolved and matured. Today the Global Footprint Network, with more than 100 partner organizations around the world, continues to improve the scientific rigor and transparency of EF methodology.

Among the three most important findings of EF analysis are that:

1. Some countries and regions have an EF that exceeds their biocapacity, while other countries have an EF that is less than their available biocapacity. The first set of countries are said to have a deficit, while the second are understood to have a surplus or reserve of biocapacity.

2. Since the late 1970s, humanity as a whole has not been living within the ecological means of the planet; that is, we are already in overshoot, an unstable, and unsustainable condition.
3. Even as humanity’s aggregate EF continues to increase, the Earth’s biocapacity is decreasing simultaneously; biocapacity is being degraded. The global EF now exceeds global biocapacity, which, as just noted, is not sustainable

.

In 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, the Global Footprint Network reported the United States had an Ecological Footprint of 22.3 global acres (nine global hectares) per person (per capita). This level was the third highest per capita EF in the world, exceeded only by two small oil-producing Middle-Eastern countries: the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. In 2006, the total biocapacity of the United States was 10.9 global acres (4.4 global hectares) per capita. The difference between the country’s EF and biocapacity was its ecological deficit — 11.3 global acres (4.6 global hectares) per capita. At that time the United States had the sixth highest ecological deficit in the world.

Rapid population growth, driven primarily by a persistently high immigration rate, is aggravating this country’s ecological deficit. Over-consuming and overpopulated America is living beyond its ecological means. If environmentalists are serious about living up to their name and facing the challenge of environmental sustainability, they must address the threat of unsustainable U.S. population growth. Although changing technologies and challenging over-consumption and waste are crucial in our pursuit of sustainability, so is the need for population stabilization, nationally and globally. And nationally, population stabilization cannot happen without immigration reduction. As the Population and Consumption Task Force of President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development concluded in 1996: “reducing current immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States.”¹

Introduction — Evolution of the Ecological Footprint: Insights Emerge from Ecotopia and Bigfoot’s Homeland

In 1975, Ernest Callenbach published the utopian novel Ecotopia, about a fictional, ecologically enlightened country in the Pacific Northwest that broke away from the United States in 1980. Joel Garreau’s 1981 best-seller The Nine Nations of North America, gave a nod to Callenbach by naming one of his socioeconomic/cultural “nations” Ecotopia. Garreau said Ecotopia encompassed northern California, Oregon and Washington west of the Cascades, coastal British Columbia, and southeast Alaska, the fjord-riven, island-clustered Alaska panhandle.

As one who has lived among the tree-worshipping druids in the rainforests of western Washington, coastal British Columbia, and southeast Alaska, I’d say Callenbach and Garreau were onto something. I earned my Master of Science degree at one of Ecotopia’s foremost universities.

From 1977-1981, I had the good fortune to pursue graduate studies on a college campus blessed with arguably the most spectacular natural setting and views of any in North America, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. From the stately fragrant rose garden, one gazed north across the shimmering waters of the North Pacific toward snowcapped crests in the rugged, wild B.C. Coast Range, a crumpled mass of mountains, glaciers, forests, and fjords stretching hundreds of miles along the fabled Inside Passage to Alaska. The legendary Sasquatch or Bigfoot reputedly stalks the deep, dripping forests of Douglas fir, western red cedar, salal, and impenetrable devil’s club thickets along these fjords and fastnesses. Blue-tongued glaciers, not yet emasculated by a warming climate, hug many a mountain slope; frozen and seemingly inert, in fact they gouge out valleys and transfigure the landscape, dynamic symbols of restless geology in action and the ever-changing face of Mother Earth.

This setting seemed fitting for one majoring, as I was, in environmental planning and natural resources management. Whenever I needed inspiration from the drudgery of drafting my master’s thesis on pollution control in the Fraser, one of Western Canada’s most important salmon rivers, all I had to do was stroll over to the rose garden, sniff the flowers, and savor the view. My thesis advisor, Dr. William E. Rees or Bill to us grad students, also enjoyed this view from his office on the fourth floor of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Perhaps this vision and others of “Ecotopia” inspired him as well, because with this view as a backdrop, he and one of his Ph.D. students, Swiss-born Mathis Wackernagel, created the concept of Ecological Footprint (EF), one of the more important ecological insights and analytical tools of recent decades.

While the evocative term Ecological Footprint was not coined until after I had already graduated and left UBC for untamed Alaska, I remember that Bill was moving toward the notion of the EF in his lectures and research even back while I was taking coursework from him. I recall him lecturing that in terms of materials and energy stocks and flows, all cities and human settlements were not self-sufficient unto themselves, but rather in an important sense were dependent, or even parasitic on resources furnished by the surrounding landscape or hinterland. Bill argued that cities imported or took in low-entropy resources and exported or expelled high-entropy wastes over a much wider area than the relatively small, built-up space occupied by buildings and pavement.

In his popular column “On Language” published in The New York Times, the late writer William Safire described how Professor Rees hit upon the term “ecological footprint”:

Computers, which usually don’t have any feet, take up room on a desk; they used to lie flat, leaving little room for a telephone, a spouse’s picture, souvenir coasters and other desktop doodads. But a generation ago, spaced-in designers thought of turning the machine on its side, making a “mini-tower.” When the University of British Columbia issued one of these space savers in 1992 to William Rees, that regional planning professor — working on a paper about “regional capsules” recalls telling a doctoral student that he especially liked its “smaller footprint” on his desk. Then the idea hit him: “It took just a few seconds to replace every reference to ‘regional capsule’ in the paper with ‘ecological footprint.’”²

Bill Rees published his first scholarly article on EF — “Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity” in 1992 in the journal Environment and Urbanization. In this paper, he used the concepts of human carrying capacity and natural capital to argue that, “prevailing economic assumptions regarding urbanization and the sustainability of cities must be revised in light of global ecological change:”³

While we are used to thinking of cities as geographically discrete places, most of the land “occupied” by their residents lies far beyond their borders. The total area of land required to sustain an urban region (its “ecological footprint”) is typically at least an order of magnitude greater than that contained within municipal boundaries or the associated built-up area. In effect, through trade and natural flows of ecological goods and services, all urban regions appropriate the carrying capacity of distant “elsewheres,” creating dependencies that may not be ecologically or geopolitically stable or secure.⁴

In 1996 Wackernagel and Rees published Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers).⁵ Filled with clever illustrations and succinct explanations, this small and engaging book described their insights and the rationale and methodology behind calculating EF. It began the process of popularizing the EF concept.

One of the people fascinated by EF and its potential to graphically quantify humanity’s aggregate demands on Mother Earth was the distinguished entomologist, conservation biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author E.O. Wilson.⁶ Professor Wilson put in a good word for EF to America’s most elite scientific body, the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2002, he edited a paper on EF by Wackernagel and co-authors entitled “Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy” for publication in the Academy’s prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.⁷ In less than a decade, EF had emerged from ecotopian obscurity to being embraced by America’s scientific establishment, and later the world’s. At the same time, EF, and a derivative, the Carbon Footprint, began to achieve popular acceptance by environmental advocacy groups, national governments, the U.N., the news media, and the public at large.

Today, Rees continues his work at the University of British Columbia. In 2003, Wackernagel established the Global Footprint Network, based in Oakland, California. Since its founding more than 15 years ago, EF has matured and continued to evolve. With growing recognition of its utility in measuring human demands on nature, and nature’s capacity to meet these demands, this metric has increasingly been adopted by world governments, businesses, and environmental/conservation organizations. The Global Footprint Network, with more than 100 partner organizations around the world, works to improve the scientific rigor and transparency of EF methodology. At the heart of their efforts are the National Footprint Accounts, which furnish a detailed accounting of ecological resource demand and supply for all countries with populations above one million. This international NGO also supports the movement for sustainability by working to make ecological limits central to economic and environmental decision-making. The ultimate goal is to assure human well being by reversing “ecological overshoot” and reducing pressure on critical ecosystems so they remain robust, even as they continue to provide humanity with essential ecological services.⁸

As shown graphically in Figure 1, ecological overshoot refers to the phenomenon by which the population of a species, whether Homo sapiens or some other organism, may temporarily exceed the carrying capacity of its environment.⁹ When overshoot occurs, the organism in question degrades the quality of its habitat, reducing carrying capacity and thus the ability of the environment to support a given population in the future. Many environmental scientists fear that human beings, now over 300 million strong in the United States and nearly seven billion strong on Earth, are already in overshoot mode, and that population reduction in this century is all but inevitable.¹⁰ Yet this notion of an inevitable decline is exceedingly “politically incorrect,” as well as counter-intuitive, since the United States and global populations continue to grow annually by some three million and 80 million, respectively. Most of the scientists and population activists who believe demographic decline is unavoidable also believe that enlightened population policies can still make a tremendous difference. How? By cushioning the fall and making it more palatable and humane than if nature were allowed to run its course and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ran roughshod over civilized mores.

How did we human beings, with all our vaunted intelligence and technology, fall into the overshoot trap? Wasn’t this trap laid for witless brutes like the reindeer on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea,¹¹ rather than the precocious ape with opposable thumbs, that after leaving behind the limited horizons of quadrupeds, began walking toward vast new horizons so many eons ago? Didn’t the execrable Malthus, rebuked by everyone from Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, opine mistakenly two centuries back that our population would be controlled by misery and vice? Since our numbers have grown eight-fold since his erroneous and callous calculations, hasn’t the reviled Malthus been utterly discredited?

Well, in the words of another “discredited” writer, biologist and Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, humanity discovered a one-time “treasure trove” of finite, non-renewable resources, chief among them the fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. It is no coincidence that the human population explosion began in earnest alongside the industrial revolution, powered by fuels that are destined to disappear. Escalating human influence over the ecosphere has now become so profound and pervasive that some leading scientists have wondered in print whether humans are now “overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature.”¹² One prominent scientist has even proposed the naming of a new geologic epoch to describe the age we’re not only in, but have wrought ourselves: the Anthropocene, or the Age of Man.¹³

Yet our dilemma is not just that human population may have been boosted to unsustainable heights by the fossil fuel boon. We have also used up or degraded other natural capital, both renewable and non-renewable natural resources including forests, soils, fisheries, wildlife, minerals, water, wetlands, mangroves, marshes, coral reefs, estuaries, airsheds, and we have spread toxic contaminants far and wide over, under and across the Earth. Moreover, the climate change we are inadvertently and apparently causing may be toward a state that effectively reduces the human carrying capacity of the Earth both by disrupting agricultural output (soil moisture and crop stress) and reducing habitable land area from coastal flooding.¹⁴

The Methodology of Ecological Footprint: How Humans Diminish the Earth’s Natural Capital

In essence, the Ecological Footprint is a measure of aggregate human demands, or the human load imposed on the biosphere in this Anthropocene Age. When all is said and done, the human economy, which entails the production and consumption of all goods and services, depends entirely on Earth’s natural capital, which provides all the ecological services and natural resources that sustain civilization. Consuming natural capital at a rate that exceeds nature’s ability to regenerate it will draw down and eventually exhaust the capital stock,¹⁵ just as siphoning funds from the principal of a savings account faster than the interest rate builds those funds will eventually drain it dry. In the 19th century, when humanity began extracting and combusting first coal, then oil, and finally natural gas, drawdown began in earnest. This drawdown accelerated exponentially in the 20th century and in the 21st century continues apace.

EF analysis explicitly compares and contrasts the resource consumption of the human economy with the biosphere’s capacity for renewal and regeneration of those same natural resources. EF is a measure of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a given human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless, or assimilate, the corresponding waste or residuals it generates. Resources are obtained from environmental “sources” and wastes are discarded or discharged into environmental “sinks.” Environmental sources and sinks that begin to run dry and overflow are signals the system is overloaded.

EF and other measures of humanity’s impacts on natural resources and ecological processes are predicated on the following assumptions:

• It is possible to keep track of most of the resources humanity consumes and the wastes humanity generates.
• Most of these resource and waste flows can be measured in terms of the biologically productive area necessary to maintain these flows (those resource and waste flows that cannot are excluded from the assessment).
• By weighting each area in proportion to its usable biomass productivity (its potential production of biomass that is of economic interest to people), the different areas can be expressed in standardized hectares (a metric unit of area equal to approximately 2.5 acres). These standardized hectares, called “global hectares,” represent hectares with biomass productivity equal to the world average productivity that year.
• Because these areas stand for mutually exclusive uses, and each global hectare represents the same amount of usable biomass production for a given year, they can be added up to a total representing the aggregate human demand.
• Nature’s supply of ecological services can also be expressed in global hectares of biologically productive space.
• Area demand can exceed area supply. For example, a forest harvested at twice its regeneration rate appears in EF accounts at twice its area, a phenomenon that is an example of the “ecological overshoot” described above.¹⁶

EF accounts include six human activities that require ecologically productive spaces. All of these activities take place in the United States and are crucial to Americans both economically and ecologically. They include all of agriculture (both crop cultivation and livestock production), fisheries, and forestry that supply Americans with all of our domestically-produced food and much of our fiber, water, and energy. Conventional profiles of advanced, affluent, “post-industrial” and “information-based” economies like that of America’s tend to minimize the role of these activities as a percentage of the economy, both in terms of the number of jobs they represent and their contribution to our GDP. This famously misled Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist to declare that “the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.”

Yet these resources and the productive economic activities that make them available for our consumption are the underpinnings of the vast, complex economic enterprise we have so painstakingly built up over the last century or two. Without food, water, and a stable climate, the economic engines of Silicon Valley, Main Street, Wall Street, the Pentagon, Madison Avenue, and the Federal Government would collapse, just as surely as our bodies would collapse were we denied the steady breaths of fresh air that we take for granted. Below I briefly discuss the six human activities that require ecologically productive spaces as characterized by developers of the EF.¹⁷

1. Growing crops for human food, animal feed, fiber, oil, and rubber. The Cropland Footprint is a measure of the land area necessary to grow all crops consumed by humans and livestock. It includes land used for agricultural products, market animal feed, and grasses cropped and fed to livestock.¹⁸ This category requires the most bioproductive land of all. It includes approximately 1.6 billion hectares of cropland worldwide, consisting of both cultivated crops and unharvested land that supports temporary pastures and fallow land, failed plantings, as well as shoulders, shelterbelts, and other uncultivated patches.

   One shortcoming of Cropland Footprint calculations is that they do not account for the extent to which farming techniques or unsustainable agricultural practices cause long-term degradation of soil.¹⁹ As the research of Cornell University’s David Pimentel and numerous agencies and other agricultural scientists has documented over many years, losses due to erosion, water-logging, salinization, and degraded fertility are substantial,²⁰ though highly variable from site to site. In 2000, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) estimated that 108 million acres of cropland in the United States have excessive soil erosion (an area equal to California, our third-largest state), with 1.3 billion tons of soil eroded annually.²¹ In any case, while necessary to simplify EF analysis, the assumption of no soil degradation is highly optimistic and unrealistic.

2. Grazing animals for meat, hides, wool, and milk. Animal grazing to raise livestock for meat, dairy, hide, and wool products requires pastureland.²² Currently, there are about 3.4 billion hectares of pasture worldwide, defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) as “land used permanently (five years or more) for herbaceous forage crops, either cultivated or growing wild (wild prairie or grazing land).”
3. Harvesting timber for wood, fiber, and fuel. Timber harvest depends on managed or unmanaged forests or plantations.²³ According to the FAO, there are about 3.9 billion hectares of such forests worldwide, although many areas, especially tropical rain and dry forests, are in the process of being deforested. Timber productivity estimates are based on the UN Economic Commission for Europe and FAO’s “Temperate and Boreal Forest Resource Assessment,” and “Global Fiber Supply Model,” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and provide a world average yield of 1.81 m3 of harvestable underbark (wood) per hectare per year. These sources also furnish information on plantation type, coverage, timber yield, and areas of protected and economically inaccessible forest.²⁴
4. Marine and freshwater fishing. Out of the entire vast ocean area, only a small fraction concentrated largely along the world’s coasts — the continental shelves — provides more than 95 percent of the marine catch. The Fishing Grounds Footprint is calculated using estimates of the maximum sustainable catch for 1,439 different marine species and more than 268 freshwater species of fish. These sustainable catch estimates are converted into an estimate of the primary production requirement, calculated from the average trophic level of the species in question. Fish that feed higher on the food chain (at higher trophic levels) require more primary production input and as such are associated with a higher Footprint of consumption. In turn, this is then divided among the world’s continental shelf areas. Globally, there were 2.4 billion hectares of continental shelf and 433 million hectares of inland water areas in 2006.²⁵
5. Accommodating infrastructure for housing, transportation, industrial production, and hydro-electric power. These artificial structures constitute built-up land that largely eliminates biologically productive habitat through the process of “development.” Built-up land occupied 167 million hectares of land worldwide in 2006, and presumably occupies what would previously have been cropland. This assumption is based on the fact that human settlements are generally situated in highly fertile, flat areas.²⁶
6. Forests for carbon dioxide uptake from the burning of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuel injects carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, destabilizing the Earth’s climate. EF calculates the area requirement by estimating the biologically productive area needed to sequester (take up and assimilate into plant matter) enough carbon emissions to avoid an increase in atmospheric CO2. Because the world’s oceans absorb about one-third of the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion, EF accounts only for the remaining two-thirds, based on each year’s capacity of world-average forests to sequester carbon. Eventually, mature forests become saturated, so that the net rate of CO2 uptake goes to zero.

An alternative to the sequestration approach is to estimate the area requirement for a fossil fuel substitute from biomass — such as ethanol or methanol — using current technology. This leads to similar or even larger area demands. The equivalent energy from fuelwood grown on forest land with world average productivity would produce roughly the same area as the sequestration approach, whereas replacing liquid fossil fuel with the same amount of unrefined biomass energy would require an area 56 percent larger.²⁷

The EF is measured in units called “global hectares.” EF analysis weights or scales different land and water categories to account for variations in their productivities. These “equivalence factors” and “yield factors” convert actual areas of different land use types (measured in hectares) into their global hectare equivalents. Equivalence and yield factors are applied both to EF and “biocapacity” calculations. Yield factors account for differences in the productivity of a given land-use type between a given country and the global average.

Equivalence factors translate a specific type of land use (e.g., world average cropland, forest) into a universal unit of biologically productive area — the aforementioned global hectare. In 2006, for example, grazing land had an equivalence factor of 0.51 (Table 1), indicating that, on average, the productivity of the world’s grazing land was approximately half the average productivity for all land (and water) categories combined. The equivalence factor for built-up land is assumed equal to that for cropland because so much developed land is on or near fertile cropland areas.²⁸

EF measures the summed area of biologically productive lands and waters needed to produce all the resources an individual, population (city, region, state, country, continent, etc.), or activity consumes, and to absorb the carbon dioxide waste it generates, given prevailing technology and resource management practices. This area can then be compared with the biological capacity (”biocapacity”) of the same city, state, region, or country; that is, the amount of biologically productive area available to generate the resources consumed — and to sequester the CO2 emitted by that city’s, state’s, region’s or country’s population. If a land or water area provides more than one of these services it is only counted once, so as not to exaggerate the amount of productive area actually available.

Biocapacity Assessment

A national biocapacity calculation begins with the total amount of ecologically productive (”bioproductive”) land available. “Bioproductive” refers to those lands and waters supporting plant populations dense or large enough to carry out significant photosynthetic activity and accumulation of biomass, or what ecologists call “net primary production.” Using energy supplied by the sun, photosynthesis taking place inside the chloroplasts of green plants converts water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air into the organic compound glucose (C6H12O6, a simple sugar) and eventually more complex organic substances.

Barren areas, such as deserts, glaciers, ice fields, rocky mountains, and alpine tundra of low or dispersed productivity are ignored in biocapacity assessments, because they are relatively unproductive biologically. This is not intended to minimize their ecological and aesthetic importance or their important diversity, but merely to recognize that their biological productivity and biomass accumulation are negligible. As the Global Footprint Network emphasizes, areas such as the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, or Alpine mountaintops do indeed support wildlife — both plant and animal life, but their production is simply too scant and/or too dispersed to be directly and economically harvestable by humans on any significant scale.²⁹

Biocapacity is an aggregate measure of the area of available land, weighted by the productivity of that land. It signifies the capacity of the biosphere to provide crops, livestock (pasture), timber products (forest), and fish, as well as to take up CO2 in forests. It also accounts for how much of this regenerative capacity is occupied by built-up or developed land, both infrastructure such as streets, roads, and parking lots, and other structures such as houses, office buildings, schools, and factories. In essence, in EF analysis, biocapacity is a measure of the ability of available terrestrial and aquatic areas to provide ecological services.³⁰

National Footprint Accounts: The Global Context

Perhaps the three most important conclusions to be drawn from Ecological Footprint analysis over the years are that:

1. Some countries and regions have an EF that exceeds their biocapacity, while other countries have an EF that is less than their available biocapacity. The first set of countries are said to have a deficit and the second set a surplus or reserve of biocapacity.
2. Since about the 1970s or 1980s, humanity as a whole has not been living within the ecological means of the planet; that is, we are already in overshoot, an unstable and unsustainable condition.³¹ See Figures 2-5.
3. Even as humanity’s aggregate EF continues to increase, the Earth’s biocapacity is decreasing simultaneously; biocapacity is being degraded. The global EF now exceeds global biocapacity, which, as just noted, is not sustainable (Figure 4).

In 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, the total worldwide EF was 17.1 billion global hectares (gha). With a world population then at 6.6 billion people (now 6.8 billion and continuing to climb in 2010), the average person’s (or per capita) EF was 2.6 gha. Notwithstanding these data, in that year there were only 11.9 billion gha of biocapacity available, or 1.8 gha per capita. This overshoot of nearly 40 percent means that in 2006, humanity used the equivalent of 1.4 Earths to support its consumption. As the Global Footprint Network says, “it took the Earth approximately a year and four months to regenerate the resources used by humanity in that year.”³²

Figures 3-5 are graphs showing the global situation from several different perspectives.

Figure 6 compares the total global EF with the total global biocapacity in 2006, disaggregating each by land/water type. One particularly striking feature of this graph is the world’s enormous carbon footprint, which comprises about half the overall EF. Again, the Carbon Footprint refers to the amount of forestland needed to absorb or sequester anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (to prevent its accumulation in the atmosphere and enhanced uptake by the ocean). If this were ignored in the EF vs. biocapacity comparison, the entire world would still be operating at an ecological surplus rather than at a deficit, but humanity continues to ignore these emissions and mounting CO2 levels in the atmosphere, at its — and the ecosphere’s — peril.

Table 2 (Click here for Table 2) compares the EF’s and biocapacities of selected regions, income groupings, and countries of the world. Of the more than 100 major countries surveyed in the most recent Global Footprint Network analyses, based on 2006 statistics and data, the United States had the third highest per capita EF, exceeded only by two small oil-producing Middle-Eastern countries, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. What really counts, however, is the deficit between the per capita EF and the per capita biocapacity. Table 3 ranks the top 21 countries by the size of their per capita ecological deficit. The U.S. ranks sixth on this list. That means we have the sixth greatest gap between what our ecosystems produce and what our nation consumes. The difference is made up by a combination of imports (appropriated carrying capacity) and, in the case of CO2 emissions, imposing our climate-forcing pollutants on the rest of the world and the ecosphere as a whole.

Immigration, Population Growth, and America’s Enormous Ecological Footprint

As of early 2010, the United States has a rapidly growing population of 308 million.³³ In the 1990s, U.S. population expanded by nearly 33 million, the largest single decade of growth in American history since the decennial national censuses began in 1790. The 1990s exceeded even the peak decade of the Baby Boom, the 1950s by nearly five million (Figure 7). The 2001-2010 decade now drawing to a close will approach this record increment. Far from coasting to a stop or cessation in growth, U.S. population remains stubbornly and persistently high, and is literally growing with no end in sight. At current growth rates, every year more than three million net new residents are added to the U.S. population.³⁴

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2050, the population of the United States will have grown to 439 million. This is an increase of 131 million, or 43 percent, over our current population of 308 million. In 2050, if the Census Bureau’s current projections come to pass, the U.S. population would still be adding 3.45 million residents a year (more than today, though the annual growth rate will have declined somewhat), and there would be 5.7 million births compared to 4.3 million annual births today.³⁵

Yet it is misleading to imply that increased births would be the dominant force behind this massive population growth. That is because many of those births would not occur, or at least would not occur in the United States, were it not for the persistently high levels of net immigration that are assumed by the Census Bureau in these projections. In 2050, the Bureau’s projections assume “net international migration” (immigration minus emigration) of 2.05 million, an increase from 1.34 million in 2010. This assumption reflects the Bureau’s professional judgment that domestic and international pressures to further increase already high immigration rates will only intensify. If the factors behind demographic change are divided between “net natural increase” (births minus deaths) and “net migration” (immigration minus emigration), then in 2050, 41 percent of the annual increment of 3.45 million would be attributable to net natural increase, and 59 percent would be due to net migration.

However, even this breakdown understates the decisive influence that the level of immigration has in determining America’s demographic future. The full impact of immigration on demographic trends only becomes apparent when the U.S.-born descendents of immigrants are accounted for because, after all, these U.S. births would not have occurred but for the prior acts of migration by eventual parents that made them possible. When births to immigrants are accounted for, demographers at the Pew Research Center calculated recently that:

If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82 percent of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants.³⁶ [emphasis added]

Figures 8-10 graphically illustrate the powerful role of immigration policy in shaping current and future U.S. demographic trends. Figure 8 shows U.S. population growth from 1790 to 1970; the steepening curve, one characterized by larger and larger increments over time is a shape characteristic of all phenomena experiencing exponential growth. If, however, the 1970 levels of demographic components (net immigration, fertility or birth rates, and mortality rates) had been maintained over the decades that followed, the growth trajectory would have appeared more like that of the curve in Figure 9, rather than the much steeper curve in Figure 8.

At the time of the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970, young environmentalists who had just finished reading Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb and listening to one of Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson’s moving speeches believed whole-heartedly in the cause and necessity of U.S. and global population stabilization. They endorsed the view of popular cartoonist Walt Kelly’s character Pogo that, “We have met the enemy and he is us” (a play on words of the famous line by Commodore Perry: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours”). In other words, the more of “us” there are, the more “enemies,” or at least environmental burdens Mother Earth faces. If this generation had been able to realize its vision of slowing and then stopping U.S. population growth and reining in the environmental degradation it caused, the trajectory might have looked something like that of the curve in Figure 9. Growth would have tapered off and America’s population would never have hit 300 million. Instead, because of the rapidly rising wave of immigration unleashed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Americans and their environment are facing the grim, and utterly unsustainable, future of ever-greater demographic pressures represented by Figure 10.

What bearing do these “inconvenient truths” have on America’s Ecological Footprint? In a nutshell — everything. Current immigration levels are enlarging the already enormous U.S. Ecological Footprint and ecological deficit. With the U.S. population booming by more than 10 percent a decade, the only way to maintain — much less reduce the current, unacceptable size of our EF is to reduce our per capita consumption every decade by more than 10 percent — not just for one or five decades, but indefinitely, for as long as population growth continues. One doesn’t have to be a physicist or a political scientist to recognize that an achievement of this magnitude would be technically and politically unrealistic, if not impossible. America is already in ecological overshoot, and massive population growth driven by high immigration rates only serves to exacerbate the situation.

Figure 11 shows current trends with respect to the Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity of the United States from 1961 through 2006.³⁷ As is evident from the crossing lines in this graph, America’s EF first surpassed its biocapacity in the late 1960s, just prior to the first Earth Day. Since then the gap or ecological deficit has only continued to widen. While the addition of each new American does not necessarily increase our per capita or per person (as opposed to our aggregate) EF — only increased per capita resource consumption and CO2 generation does that, it does directly decrease our per capita biocapacity, and thus increases our ecological deficit.

Population growth does this in two ways. First, given a fixed biocapacity — that is, a land base that is demonstrably finite and constant, with fixed maximum acreages of potential cropland, grazing land, forestland, and fishing grounds — it is a simple mathematical reality that adding more people who depend on this ecologically productive land base reduces per capita biocapacity. Second, the more than three million new Americans added every year require space and area in which to live, work, play, shop, and attend school. As open space is converted into the “built-up land” category, some combination of forestland, cropland, and grazing land is inevitably developed. (In the 1950s, Orange County, California, home to Disneyland, was touted by developers as “Smog Free Orange County,” but by the 1990s, after four decades of relentless sprawl development to accommodate Southern California’s multiplying millions, it became known as “Orange Free Smog County”). In this way, our country’s biocapacity is steadily and inexorably diminished by a growing population.

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s (NRCS’s) National Resources Inventory (NRI) estimated that the United States lost 44 million acres of cropland, 12 million acres of pastureland, and 11 million acres of rangeland from 1982 to 1997, for a total loss to our agricultural land base of 67 million acres over this 15-year period.³⁸ (One explanation of the much higher acreage of lost cropland than pastureland and rangeland was that a larger fraction of the cropland acreage was not “lost” per se, but deliberately “retired” from active production into the so-called Conservation Reserve Program or CRP, a program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency. These were lands of marginal quality and high erodibility, lands on which modern, intensive agriculture is unsustainable). All 49 states inventoried lost cropland. Overall cropland losses continued in the next NRI published in 2007.³⁹

The impacts of the loss of this land extend beyond agriculture. The USDA has estimated that each person added to the U.S. population requires slightly more than one acre of land for urbanization and highways.⁴⁰ Clearly, more land is required as more people are added to our population.

A comparison of NRI acreage — 25 million acres of newly developed land over the 1982-1997 period and 67 million acres of agricultural land lost shows that development per se is not responsible for all or even half of agricultural land loss. Arable land is also subject to other natural and manmade phenomena such as soil erosion (from both water and wind), salinization, and waterlogging that can rob its fertility, degrade its productivity and eventually force its retirement or increase its dependency on ever greater quantities of costly inputs like (fossil-fuel derived) nitrogen fertilizers. Arguably, however, much of these losses are due to over-exploitation by intensive agricultural practices needed to constantly raise agricultural productivity (yield per acre) in order to provide ever more food for America’s and the world’s growing populations and meat-rich diets.

Thus, the potent combination of relentless development and land degradation from soil erosion and other factors is reducing America’s productive agricultural land base even as the demands on that same land base from a growing population are increasing. If the rates of agricultural land loss that have prevailed in recent years were to continue to 2050, the nation will have lost 53 million of its remaining 377 million acres of cropland, or 14 percent, even as the U.S. population grows by 43 percent from 308 million to 440 million.⁴¹

Continuing on to 2100, the discrepancy between booming population numbers and declining cropland acreage widens even further (Figure 12). The Census Bureau’s “middle series” projection (made in the year 2000) is 571 million, more than a doubling of U.S. population in 2000.⁴² (The “highest serious” projection was 1.2 billion, and actual growth since these projections were made has been between the middle and highest series). If the same rate of cropland loss were to continue, the United States would lose approximately 106 million acres of its remaining 377 million acres of cropland, or nearly 30 percent. Cropland per capita, that is, the acreage of land to grow grains and other crops for each resident, would decline from 1.4 acres in 1997 to 0.47 acres in 2100, a 66 percent reduction. If this occurs, biotechnology will need to work miracles to raise yields per acre in order to maintain the sort of diet Americans have come to expect.

These ominous, divergent trends — an increasing population and declining arable land, have actually led some scientists to think the unthinkable: that one day America may no longer be able to feed itself, let alone boast a food surplus for export to the world. In the 1990s, Cornell University agricultural and food scientists David and Marcia Pimentel and Mario Giampietro of the Istituto Nazionale della Nutrizione in Rome, Italy, argued that by approximately 2025, the United States would most likely cease to be a food exporter, and that food grown in this country would be needed for domestic consumption. These findings suggest that by 2050, the amount of arable land per capita may have dropped to the point that, “the diet of the average American will, of necessity, include more grains, legumes, tubers, fruits and vegetables, and significantly less animal products.”⁴³ While this might, in fact, constitute a healthier diet both for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and for many calorically and cholesterol-challenged Americans, it would also represent a significant loss of dietary choice. As nations get wealthier, they tend to “move up the food chain” in the phrase of the Earth Policy Institute’s Lester Brown, that is they consume higher trophic level, more ecologically demanding and damaging meat and dairy products, but were these predictions to hold true, Americans, for better or worse, would be moving in the opposite direction.

From 2005 to 2006, the U.S. per capita ecological deficit widened from 10.9 to 11.3 acres, continuing the long-term trend depicted in Figure 11. Assuming the Census Bureau’s official population projections for 2050 actually do happen, the U.S. population would be 43 percent larger than at present. Even if there were no further increase in the U.S. per capita EF, which is, as can be seen from the 45-year trend in Figure 11, a rather generous assumption, a 43 percent increase in the U.S. population would correspond to a further 43 percent reduction in biocapacity per capita, even without the types of continuing land and resource degradation just discussed above for cropland. The 2006 U.S. biocapacity was 10.9 global acres (ga) per capita. By 2050, if current U.S. demographic trends and projections hold, this will have been reduced to 6.2 ga per capita. If the per capita American EF of consumption were to remain at the 2006 value of 22.3 ga, the ecological deficit in 2050 would increase to 16.1 ga per capita.

In essence, if we American “Bigfeet” do not opt for a different demographic path than the one we are treading now, Ecological Footprint analysis indicates unequivocally that we will continue plodding ever deeper into the forbidden zone of Ecological Overshoot, trampling our prospects for a sustainable future. Incidentally, we would also be trampling the survival prospects for many hundreds of endangered species with which we share our country. These birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, butterflies, mussels, and other taxa are menaced with extinction by our aggressive exploitation of nearly every ecological niche, nook, and cranny.

In nature, no organism in overshoot remains there for long. Sooner or later, ecosystem and/or population collapse ensues. Are we humans, because of our unique scientific acumen, immune from the laws of nature that dictate the implacable terms of existence to all other species on the planet? Our political, economic, and cultural elites seem to think so, and en masse, we certainly act so. Yet ironically, many scientists themselves believe otherwise: that all-too-human hubris, unless checked by collective wisdom and self-restraint, will prove to be our undoing, and that civilization as we know it may unravel.⁴⁴

The Upshot

EF was never intended by its creators as the final word on ecological overshoot and environmental degradation. It does not explicitly address any number of critical issues that also have a bearing on the nation’s and the Earth’s carrying capacity and sustainability, including the over-exploitation, pollution, and worsening shortages of water resources, peak oil (and depletion of other fossil fuels and non-renewable mineral resources), or the widespread contamination of ecosystems by innumerable, persistent toxic chemicals, the human assault on biodiversity, or environmental justice. Some of its assumptions, for example that harvest of a given renewable resource is being conducted sustainably, may be overly optimistic. Yet EF analysis has evolved, matured, and improved over the nearly two decades since its initial conception on the lovely campus of the University of British Columbia, sheltered and sequestered from the rest of Vancouver by the verdant evergreen forests of the Endowment Lands and Pacific Spirit Regional Park.

EF analysis has emerged as a useful, interactive tool for exploring, illustrating, and quantifying the collective, aggregate, growing demands that human beings are placing on nature, and in turn, the diminishing ability of nature to supply apparently insatiable human needs, appetites, and whims.

For Americans concerned about the natural environment and resources in the one portion of the planet over which we have the particular obligation and ability to be good stewards, EF analysis reaches the stark conclusion that our country is already well into ecological overshoot, having long ago exceeded our biocapacity or carrying capacity. Immigration-driven population growth exacerbates an already untenable, unsustainable situation. If American environmentalists truly care about the environmental sustainability of their own country, and the world of which it is a part (and over which America exercises disproportionate influence), it behooves them to admit overpopulation and act accordingly. And what would acting accordingly consist of? Actively supporting U.S. population stabilization and reduced immigration levels to the U.S. as an urgent national imperative, on a par with ongoing and emerging efforts promoting energy and resource conservation and efficiency, green technologies, vegetarianism, recycling/reuse, preventing pollution, reducing waste, and protecting species, habitats, and ecosystems.

We need to put the “P” back into the IPAT equation (Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology) first proposed back in 1972 by biologist Paul Ehrlich and physicist (and now Obama science advisor) John Holdren.⁴⁵ It was there in the early part of the modern environmental movement, as the leaders of this movement can attest.⁴⁶ For a variety of reasons, the Environmental Establishment dropped its advocacy and retreated into uncomfortable silence and abject denial on U.S. population.⁴⁷

A popular saying among populists is that, in democracies, “if the people lead, the leaders will follow.” Yet in the case of population stabilization, in some notable instances, the leaders have led, but the people have neglected to follow. This occurred most recently with President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, developed in the heady days after the Rio “Earth Summit” in 1992. The Council’s Population and Consumption Task Force, chaired by former U.S. Senator (now head of the United Nations Foundation) Tim Wirth (D-CO), declared in 1996 that: “We believe that reducing current immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States.”⁴⁸

Ecological Footprint analysis only confirms this conviction. Now it is up to environmentalists to acknowledge it as well.

End Notes

¹ President’s Council on Sustainable Development. 1996. Population and Consumption Task Force Report. 1996.

² William Safire. 2008. “On Language.” Footprint. The New York Times Magazine. Published February 17.

³ William E. Rees. 1992. “Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: What urban economics leaves out.” Environment and Urbanization. 4 (2): 121-130. Available online at http://eau.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/121.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mathis Wackernagel and Willliam Rees. 1996. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Gabriola Island, BC, and Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, The New Catalyst Bioregional Series.

⁶ Dr. Edward O. Wilson. 2002. Personal communication with the author at the National Press Club, Washington, DC.

⁷ Mathis Wackernagel, Niels B. Schulz, Diana Deumling, Alejandro Callejas Linares, Martin Jenkins, Valerie Kapos, Chad Monfreda, Jonathan Loh, Norman Myers, Richard Norgaard, and Jergen Randers. 2002. “Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99(14): 9266-9271. July 9.

⁸ Ewing B., S. Goldfinger, A. Oursler, A. Reed, D. Moore, and M. Wackernagel. 2009. The Ecological Footprint Atlas 2009. Oakland: Global Footprint Network.

⁹ William R. Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

¹⁰ By way of example, in a 1992 effort spearheaded by the late physicist Henry Kendall, Nobel Laureate in Physics, MIT professor, and co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists, some 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists, including a majority of the Nobel laureates in the sciences (more than 100 of them), issued the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” Concerning population, the Warning stated: “The Earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the Earth’s limits …. Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future …. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth …. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.” This was written at a time when the Earth’s population was 1.5 billion less than it is now.

¹¹ In one of the best documented cases of population overshoot and collapse in the scientific literature, wildlife biologist David Klein of the Alaska Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit described how an introduced population of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) on this remote, uninhabited island in the Bering Sea skyrocketed exponentially from 29 animals in 1944 to 6,000 in 1963, before a massive die-off that claimed virtually the entire population during the harsh winter of 1963-64. The population boom of the reindeer, a function of a high birth rate and low mortality, was a natural response to the high quality and quantity of the untouched forage (lichens) blanketing St. Matthew Island and a complete absence of predators. The population collapse or crash occurred after the reindeer had eliminated the lush mats of slow-growing lichen that once carpeted the island, and thus reduced its carrying capacity for years to come.

¹² Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. Ambio. 36(8):614-621., Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Steffen is Director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. Crutzen is former Director of the Atmospheric Chemistry Division of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany and is Professor (part-time) at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California, La Jolla. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the chemical processes leading to the destruction of stratospheric ozone. John R. McNeill is Professor of History and University Professor at Georgetown University.

¹³ Paul J. Crutzen. 2002. “Geology of mankind.” Nature. 415, 23 (3 January 2002). Environmental writer Bill McKibben’s book, The End of Nature, published in 1989, posited that human-induced climate change, by altering every ecosystem on the planet, would virtually end “nature” as we know it — as a distinct, overarching entity above and beyond the ability of humans to manipulate or undermine in any fundamental way.

¹⁴ George Monbiot. 2009. “Requiem for a Crowded Planet: This is what the failure of the climate talks means.” The Guardian (UK). Accessed December 22, 2009, at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/21/requiem-for-a-crowded-planet/?utm.

¹⁵ Supra, note 7.

¹⁶ Supra, note 7.

¹⁷ Supra, note 7.

¹⁸ Kitzes, J., A. Galli, S.M. Rizk, A. Reed and M. Wackernagel. 2008. Guidebook to the National Footprint Accounts: 2008 Edition. Oakland: Global Footprint Network.

¹⁹ Supra, note 8.

²⁰ David Pimentel, C. Harvey, P. Resosudarmo, K. Sinclair, D. Kurz, M. McNair, S. Crist, L. Shpritz, L. Fitton, R. Saffouri, and R. Blair. 1995. “Environmental and Economic Costs of Soil Erosion and Conservation Benefits.” Science 24 February 1995: Vol. 267. no. 5201, pp. 1117-1123. Abstract: Soil erosion is a major environmental threat to the sustainability and productive capacity of agriculture. During the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the world’s arable land has been lost by erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year. With the addition of a quarter of a million people each day, the world population’s food demand is increasing at a time when per capita food productivity is beginning to decline. David Pimentel. 1993. World Soil Erosion and Conservation. London: Cambridge University Press.

²¹ Natural Resources Conservation Service. 2000. Excessive Erosion on Cropland 1997 [map]. Available online at: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/technical/NRI/maps/mappdfs/m5083.pdf.

²² Supra, note 8.

²³ Supra, note 7.

²⁴ Supra, note 8.

²⁵ Supra, note 8.

²⁶ Supra, note 8.

²⁷ Supra, note 7.

²⁸ Supra, note 8.

²⁹ Supra, note 8.

³⁰ Supra, note 8.

³¹ Supra, note 8.

³² Supra, note 8.

³³ U.S. Census Bureau. Population Clock. Accessed December 29, 2009, at http://www.census.gov/.

³⁴ U.S. Census Bureau. 2008. Projections of the Population and Components of Change for the United States: 2010 to 2050. Accessed December 29, 2009, at http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/summarytables.html.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Passel, J. S. and D. Cohn. 2008. U.S. Population Projections: 2005 – 2050. Pew Research Center — Social & Demographic Trends. Available online at: http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/85.pdf .

³⁷ Global Footprint Network. 2009. Accessed 12/28/09 on the World Wide Web at: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/trends/us/.

³⁸ U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. 2000. Summary Report – 1997 National Resources Inventory (revised December 2000). 84 pp. Released January 2001. See Table 1, “Surface area of nonfederal and federal land and water areas, by state and year,” p. 11.

³⁹ Natural Resources Conservation Service. 2007. National Resources Inventory — 2003 Annual NRI, State Report. February.

⁴⁰ Vesterby, M. & Krupa, S. 2001. “Major Uses of Land in the United States, 1997.” Resource Economics Division, Economic Research Service, USDA, Statistical Bulletin No. 973. October 18, 2001. www.ers.usda.gov/publications/sb973.

⁴¹ U.S. Census Bureau, Midyear Population Estimates and Average Annual Period Growth Rates: 1950 to 2050, International Data Base, October 2002 version.

⁴² Frederick W. Hollmann, Tammany J. Mulder, and Jeffrey E. Kallan. 2000. “Methodology and Assumptions for the Population Projections of the United States: 1999 to 2100″: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Working Paper No. 38. Issued January 13, 2000. Available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/natproj.html; Leon Kolankiewicz. 2000. “Immigration, Population and the New Census Bureau Projections.” Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder. Available online at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2000/back600.html.

⁴³ David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro. 1994. “Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy.” Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network; David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel. 1997. “U.S. Food Production Threatened by Rapid Population Growth.” Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network.

⁴⁴ Debora Mackenzie. 2008. “Why the demise of civilization may be inevitable.” New Scientist. Issue No. 2650. Available online at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501.500-why-the-demise-of-civilisation-may-be-inevitable.html.

⁴⁵ Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren. 1971. Impact of Population Growth. Science, 171, 1212-1217.

⁴⁶ Gaylord Nelson. 1998. Personal communication with the author. The late former U.S. Senator and Wisconsin Governor Nelson is widely credited as the “Father of Earth Day.”

⁴⁷ Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz. 2000. “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998): A First Draft of History.” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 12, No. 1. Pennsylvania State University Press. Available online at: http://www.numbersusa.com/content/resources/publications/issues/environment/environmental-movements-retreat-advocati.html. Leon Kolankiewicz and Roy Beck. 2001. Forsaking Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization. Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies. ISBN 1-881290-00-X. Available online at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/forsaking/toc.html.

⁴⁸ President’s Council on Sustainable Development. 1996. Population and Consumption Task Force Report. 1996.

by Phil Cafaro

After several decades in which American environmentalists have mostly dropped the ball on population issues, it appears that a younger generation may be more willing to face reality. A recent case in point: an article in the latest issue of The Social Contract titled “The Elephant in the Room: Population and Immigration in the United States and Their Impact on Climate Change.” It’s by Alexander Krueger-Wyman, a recent graduate of Princeton University and is based on his honors thesis completed under Dr. Stephen Macedo, who has written on the ethics of immigration. The article includes a detailed discussion of the impacts of population growth on greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of immigration on U.S. population growth. Krueger-Wyman concludes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to do our part to combat global climate change, and that this necessarily includes reducing immigration and stabilizing America’s population.

It’s an excellent article, which can be found online at:

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_20_1/tsc_10_1_krueger_wyman.shtml

For a pdf file:

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/twenty-one/tsc_20_1_krueger_wyman.pdf

by Phil Cafaro

Today the New York Times ran yet another in its endless series of editorials advocating amnesty for illegal immigrants and increased levels of immigration—American workers be damned. You’ve read it before, of course, but the “new” editorial, titled “Immigration’s New Year,” can be accessed at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06wed1.html.

In contrast to the Times’ tired rhetoric, the response to the editorial by Carole A Dunn, of Ocean Springs, Mississippi (#35 on the webpage) was honest and to the point. I quote it in full:

Massive immigration to this country was a great boon and added to the richness of our culture. That time is past however. We now have millions of Americans with no jobs and millions more with jobs holding no future. The outsourcing of jobs and the importing of more and more foreign workers has stripped the average American of supporting a family in a decent lifestyle without descending into debt. It has made a college education almost worthless for many.

Now is not the time to talk about what a boon to America millions of immigrants are. We are becoming a nation of peasants; we are becoming more and more like the countries that immigrants flee. What we need to do now is put a moratorium on all legal immigration, curb illegal immigration, stop the use of H1-B, and other work visas, and concentrate on putting Americans back to work in good jobs.

People like Mayor Bloomberg, who live up in the stratosphere, can wax poetic all they want about immigrants, but it will cut no ice with the average American who has been made to feel like an outcast in his/her own land. The upper classes have to learn that they must pay people a living wage, and stop trying to get something for nothing. The rich in this country run the government and enjoy the lowest tax rates in the world. If they want slave labor too, let them move to the third world.

Thanks to Carole Dunn! You made my day. With your help, we will force this Administration and Congress to pay attention to the interests of American workers—or pay the penalty in November.

by  Phil Cafaro

My last blog post discussed a meeting Senator Michael Bennet had with environmental leaders in northern Colorado yesterday, and the mutual incomprehension that occurred when I asked him why he pursued expansionist immigration policies that undermined his self-proclaimed environmental commitments. Incomprehension, on my side: that anyone could fail to see the connections between immigration, population growth and environmental degradation. Incomprehension on Senator Bennet’s side, that people were raising the issue of immigration at a meeting that was supposed to be devoted to environmental issues.

Of course, most of the meeting did not deal with immigration, but with regional, national and world environmental issues. There were a number of strong opponents of proposed uranium mine, thanking the Senator for writing a letter to the EPA on their behalf. There were others worried about mercury pollution from our main coal-fired electricity plant. Others reminded the Senator about efforts to block a new reservoir that has been proposed, which would drain most of the remaining water out of the Cache la Poudre, the river that runs through my hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado. And still others worried about global warming, and asked anxiously about how we could push for stronger greenhouse gas reductions in the Senate.

Senator Bennet mostly had the right answers to these questions, from the environmentalist perspective. He is for renewable energy, and against nukes. He is for keeping water in the Poudre River (we think, maybe . . .) and for the strongest possible climate change bill that can get through the Senate. The crowd of activists seemed to like him a lot, and vice versa.

Yet I couldn’t help thinking that we were all kidding ourselves a bit. It is fine to put up wind farms and better scrubbers on our electricity plants. But with more people, we will need more energy, and some of that is bound to come from fossil fuels.

It is fine to oppose uranium mines, especially on the outskirts of your town. But with endlessly greater energy needs and the growing threat of climate change, you can bet that there will be an increased role for nuclear in our future energy mix. The handwriting is on the wall.

It is fine to talk about how important our rivers are to our “quality of life.” But more people will demand more water, and you can bet that politicians will scramble to get it for them. We may fight off this reservoir project, but another one will come up. Sooner or later, people will come into conflict with the last wild denizens of our rivers. We know who will win.

It is fine—noble even—to argue that we need to do more as a nation to fight global climate change. But the reality, as we’ve seen in the recent health care bills, is that the entrenched interests will be served. We will be lucky to achieve modest per capita reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. If we allow that improvement to be swallowed up by a growing population, we will likely fall even further behind in achieving what is needed to avoid ecological catastrophe.

My friend Glen Colton, a long-time Fort Collins environmentalist, put the discussion in perspective in a follow-up message to participants:

Quite a meeting with Senator Bennett today. I find it quite interesting that many environmentalists are willing to demand a lot from everyone in the US in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, stop dams, quit building roads, and otherwise change their habits/compromise their lifestyles and consumption in order to meet environmental goals.  They want a 35% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years and an 80% reduction by 2050. They want people to dramatically reduce water consumption, they want people to stop driving, they want to stop uranium mines and nuclear power, stop coal fired plants and drilling for natural gas, they want people to live in dense developments, etc.

Of course, these are all things we probably need to do long term, anyway.  On the other hand, they seem to be rather unwilling to compromise or give anything up in return for asking others to sacrifice.

The question I have for the environmental crowd that either supports the immigration status quo or is unwilling to address the issue is the following: Are you willing to compromise any of your core beliefs in order to attain your environmental goals?  Specifically, are you willing to support reducing mass immigration to a level that will allow the population of the US to stabilize?

The obliviousness of many of the environmental folks at the meeting today to the population aspect of our environmental situation is quite disturbing.  I believe that a failure of mainstream environmental organization to address overpopulation in the US is a major contributor to our environmental problems and the fact that people aren’t aware of our population growth driven by immigration.

I believe it is unreasonable for “open borders” environmentalists to demand significant sacrifices by the American public in order to attain environmental goals and sustainability, when they won’t confront the immigration / population issue and the issue of unsustainable economic growth.  We need to get environmentalists off the dime on the immigration / population issue!

It isn’t every day a person gets to sit down and chew the fat with one of their U.S. Senators. So I jumped at the chance today to participate in an hour long Q & A session with Michael Bennet, the junior Senator from Colorado, who fielded questions from two dozen environmental activists here in northern Colorado.

Senator Bennet considers himself a strong environmentalist and in his first year in the Senate he has earned good marks from the League of Conservation Voters. He has a particular interest in promoting “the new energy economy” and promised his listeners that he would push as hard as he could for the strongest possible cuts in US greenhouse gas emissions. He has also earned praise from local enviros for supporting their efforts to prevent a new uranium mine from opening up on the outskirts of town.

However, Senator Bennet has earned the lowest possible rating from NumbersUSA for his immigration voting record. During 2009 he sponsored several major bills to increase the numbers of visas granted to foreign workers (this in the midst of the highest unemployment in the US in forty years) and provided the decisive vote to defeat an effort to put the E-Verify system in place permanently (it was subsequently reauthorized for another five years). And he has promised Denver’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that he will support an expansive amnesty bill, perhaps this year.

So when I had a chance to ask Michael Bennet a question, I took it. Senator Bennet, I said:

As you look around this room, you see people who have worked hard for years to fight sprawl, prevent river-killing dams, protect habitat for endangered species, get out cities to invest in mass transit and cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, and more. But at the base of all these problems is the problem of population growth.

More people means a greater need for water, hence for more dams and reservoirs.

More people means more greenhouse gas emissions.

More people means less room for all the other creatures that need some of this landscape to survive.

So here’s my question: How can we succeed in keeping water in our rivers, and condos from crowding out farms, ranches and wildlands on the Front Range, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, if you are working away in Washington to increase our population, through your immigration bills?

Senator Bennet was polite enough in his response, but it was easy to see he didn’t really see any connection between his immigration bills and population growth, or between population growth and environmental degradation. At one point in his response, he brought out the old standby, “look, Colorado is going to grow. The key is to make sure that we have sustainable growth, growth that improves the lives of Coloradoans and improves the environment.”

But what is this “sustainable growth”? Does it even exist? Even at very slow rates of population increase, it is easy to see that over time, human beings will crowd all the other species off the landscape, and crowd ourselves more and more. At some point, we need to stop growing, or we’ll be standing on each others’ shoulders.

The very notion of “sustainability” would seem to imply an end to the growth in human numbers, if not now, then at some point. And with the earth itself seemingly telling us, through global climate change, that we are bumping up against limits, perhaps the time to end the growth in human numbers is now.

In a follow-up question, my friend Glen Colton tried again. Look, he said: If we ended immigration now, our population would grow by a few tens of millions by 2050 as it leveled off. At current immigration levels, we are set to add perhaps another hundred million during that time. And the proposals pushed by immigration expansionists, such as yourself, will lead to even greater population increases. You say ‘growth is inevitable,’ but in fact you are helping push our growth rate higher, through your immigration and population policies.

To which the Senator laughingly responded: “I wasn’t aware I had a population policy.”

To me that gets to the heart of the matter. Senator Bennet, the US Congress and the Obama administration are setting US population policy by default. They are making population policy, they just don’t know it. Thus we blunder into the future, talking about “new energy economies” and “sustainable growth,” while we undermine the possibility of creating a sustainable society.

Today’s Sidney Morning Herald published an article, “Coalition pushes for population debate,” about the efforts of Member of Parliament Kelvin Thomson to initiate a national debate on Australian population policy:

The [governing] coalition is backing a federal Labor MP’s call for a national debate about Australia’s population growth.

Kelvin Thomson, the member for the Victorian seat of Wills, believes Australians are hungry for a debate about how big a population the nation can sustain.

Government projections indicate the population could reach 35 million by 2050, with Melbourne and Sydney each accommodating seven million people and Brisbane five million.

“We are sleepwalking into an environmental disaster,” Mr. Thomson wrote in The Australian newspaper on Wednesday.

There was a need for a debate about population growth and the impact it was likely to have on Australia’s carbon footprint, declining housing affordability, traffic congestion, and “overcrowded concrete jungles”.
“I detect there is a hunger in the electorate for a debate about this issue,” he later told Fairfax Radio Network, adding he had been deluged with emails and letters since first raising the issue.

The opposition agrees, but has stopped short of supporting Mr Thomson’s call for a population cap of 26 million.

Nor will it support the MP’s suggestion for a reduction in the skilled migrant intake to 25,000 a year.

“We’re very happy to have a population policy debate,” opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said.
“But we have to make sure that when we’re running a migration program we’re ensuring that we’re bringing people into the country who can really make a contribution.”

When asked to nominate an upper limit to Australia’s population, Mr. Morrison said: “At the moment I don’t think we know the answer to that question”.

The carrying capacity of the nation’s infrastructure and the ability of the environment to sustain a bigger population was not known, he said.

Mr. Thomson also wants overseas students to return to their country of origin for at least two years before they can apply for permanent residency in Australia.

He repeated his call for the abolition of the baby bonus and limits on family tax benefits for a third and subsequent children.

Where is the courageous United States Congressman or Congresswoman willing to initiate a wide-ranging debate on the impacts of population growth on the American environment—much less call for an upper limit on U.S. population growth? Three cheers for Kelvin Thomson, my new hero! Good on ya, mate!

The [governing] coalition is backing a federal Labor MP’s call for a national debate about Australia’s population growth.

Kelvin Thomson, the member for the Victorian seat of Wills, believes Australians are hungry for a debate about how big a population the nation can sustain.

Government projections indicate the population could reach 35 million by 2050, with Melbourne and Sydney each accommodating seven million people and Brisbane five million.

“We are sleepwalking into an environmental disaster,” Mr. Thomson wrote in The Australian newspaper on Wednesday.

There was a need for a debate about population growth and the impact it was likely to have on Australia’s carbon footprint, declining housing affordability, traffic congestion, and “overcrowded concrete jungles”.
“I detect there is a hunger in the electorate for a debate about this issue,” he later told Fairfax Radio Network, adding he had been deluged with emails and letters since first raising the issue.

The opposition agrees, but has stopped short of supporting Mr Thomson’s call for a population cap of 26 million.

Nor will it support the MP’s suggestion for a reduction in the skilled migrant intake to 25,000 a year.

“We’re very happy to have a population policy debate,” opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said.
“But we have to make sure that when we’re running a migration program we’re ensuring that we’re bringing people into the country who can really make a contribution.”

When asked to nominate an upper limit to Australia’s population, Mr. Morrison said: “At the moment I don’t think we know the answer to that question”.

The carrying capacity of the nation’s infrastructure and the ability of the environment to sustain a bigger population was not known, he said.

Mr. Thomson also wants overseas students to return to their country of origin for at least two years before they can apply for permanent residency in Australia.

He repeated his call for the abolition of the baby bonus and limits on family tax benefits for a third and subsequent children.

Where is the courageous United States Congressman or Congresswoman willing to initiate a wide-ranging debate on the impacts of population growth on the American environment—much less call for an upper limit on U.S. population growth? Three cheers for Kelvin Thomson, my new hero! Good on ya, mate!

Download a pdf copy of this Policy Brief

Policy Brief #09-2  |  December, 2009 Philip Cafaro  |  Colorado State University

A few years ago, one hot summer day, I spent a morning taking turns with a posthole digger, making holes for a new wooden fence around the house my wife Kris and I had recently bought. I was helping Steve, who does odd jobs when he isn’t working for a small home builder here in Fort Collins, Colorado. Steve is a short, powerful man, pushing 50; bald, with deep blue eyes that light up with laughter when he talks. He drives an old, multi-colored pickup truck that looks like it’s held together with baling wire, but he can fix anything on it himself.

Kris and I had hired Steve to design and build the fence because he seemed like the best choice for a job calling for both creativity and hard physical work. We also knew we could trust him to keep track of his hours honestly and buy several thousand dollars worth of materials without inflating their price.

As we worked that day, Steve talked about how hard it could be to make ends meet working construction. He mentioned a bum knee and a bad back that he was trying to treat himself; he had no health insurance and it wouldn’t take many visits to the doctor to wipe out his profits from this fence job. We talked about the going rates for construction workers. I wondered whether he had ever asked his current employer for a raise, or for health benefits.

“Well, yeah,” Steve said. “I did. He told me he could hire two illegals for what he pays me. And I know it’s true.”¹

Steve and I became friends over those postholes. I would like our economy to work for him and people like him — but it doesn’t seem to. He works more than full-time, lives modestly, and as far as I know has no expensive vices. Yet he is one serious injury or a few missed paychecks away from bankruptcy.

Steve is a good worker: honest, reliable, and intelligent. Over the years, he’s done plenty of hard, dirty, repetitive work — the kind of work, we often hear, that Americans are no longer willing to do. He’s also a real craftsman, imaginative and skilled at working with wood, stone, and plants. But he doesn’t push paper or drive a hard bargain. He’s not an “entrepreneur.” So he is poor and likely to stay poor. Why?

Recent Economic Trends

Some people buck trends; most of us ride them. Leaving aside the specifics of his personality and personal history, I’d say Steve is poor because people like him are poor. Americans with his level of education, working the kinds of jobs he works, don’t make a lot of money compared to people with similar jobs and educational levels in other wealthy countries. They have less job security and are less likely to have health insurance compared to people working similar jobs in the United States 40 years ago.

Americans don’t like to think about ourselves in class terms. But the simplest way to put it is to say that Steve is poor because his class is poor.

The trends are clear. Over the past 40 years, technological innovation and hard work have greatly increased overall economic productivity. In constant 2000 dollars, America’s gross domestic product was: $3,191 billion in 1965, $4,311 billion in 1975, $6,054 billion in 1985, $8,032 billion in 1995, and $11,049 billion in 2005. In other words, the U.S. economy generated about 350 percent more total wealth in 2005 than it did in 1965.²

However, poorer Americans have had a hard time gaining a fair share of this rapidly increasing pie. Again, the figures tell the story. Consider the table below.

While the poorest 20 percent of Americans increased their annual incomes by a measly $1,861 over this 35-year period, the wealthiest 20 percent increased their annual incomes by $70,090 — a 38-times greater increase. The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans did even better: Their incomes nearly doubled, for an increase of $140,346.

Whether we compare percentage increases or absolute increases in income, the results are striking. From 1968 to 2008, the poorest 20 percent of Americans increased their earnings $1,861 for an 18.9 percent increase; the richest 20 percent of Americans increased their earnings $70,090 for a 69.4 percent increase; and the richest 5 percent increased their earnings $140,346 for a 90.9 percent increase. In recent decades, it seems, the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor. When we consider increased work hours, decreased job security, and the swelling numbers of workers without health insurance, poor Americans appear worse off now than they were 40 years ago. All this, remember, in a country that is more than three and a half times richer than it was in 1965. (Additionally, since a big part of how well off people feel depends on comparisons with other community members, poor Americans feel poorer than they did back then, when differences in wealth were much less pronounced than they are today.)

Earlier in this article, I indicated that in recent decades poorer Americans had not succeeded in getting their fair share of America’s growing wealth. But what is a fair share? Would it be an equal share of this new wealth for everyone (or for everyone who works)? After all, Americans generally work hard, and we’re all in this immense interlocking economy together. Or do some of us — technological innovators and entrepreneurs, perhaps — deserve greater rewards for our greater economic productivity? Perhaps this second approach would best spur even more wealth creation (an important benefit, in many people’s eyes). Or a third option: might we with justice assign greater economic shares to the least affluent American workers, who arguably need these resources the most? Americans sometimes call ourselves a Christian nation. Perhaps we should follow Jesus’ example and show a preferential concern for the poor.

Here, I confess, I don’t know exactly what justice commands. As a progressive, I tend to support the third option, because if you think about it, the whole purpose of money and material goods is to help people live better lives. Increased wealth seems more likely to help poor people improve their lives than rich people. Shifting resources toward the poor allows them to meet important unmet needs; funneling more resources to the rich mostly just helps them satisfy their desires in more expensive or elaborate ways. Still, all three of these approaches have some initial plausibility and many able defenders. Perhaps the fairest approach would blend elements from all three options: Secure equal basic shares of this new wealth for all workers, but combine this with incentives for those who are more hardworking or productive, and special help for the less able or less fortunate.

I have never worked out a detailed position on the justice of economic distribution, in part because I don’t feel a burning desire to help create a perfectly fair economic order here in the United States. I don’t care much about money and material possessions and as a philosophy professor, I teach my students that they shouldn’t either. If you have enough to live a good life, I tell them, you can leave the piling up of superfluous wealth to those foolish enough to pursue that goal, and spend your time on more important and worthwhile things. Perfect economic fairness is not necessary.

The problem, though, is that many Americans do not have sufficient economic resources to live a good life. And while I don’t know what a perfectly fair distribution of the vast wealth we’ve created in recent decades might be, I feel confident that its actual distribution has been grossly unfair. Too many people who have worked hard and helped generate this increased wealth have seen their economic welfare decline, sometimes steeply. We might debate whether the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans deserve two, three, or even four times as great a reward as the poorest 20 percent, for their supposedly higher productivity. But no one can seriously argue that they are 38 times more productive and deserve 38 times the reward. No one really thinks that unless the wealthiest Americans are allowed to keep almost all the increased wealth generated by an expanding economy, productivity gains will cease. After all, such gains are largely a function of technological change and entrepreneurial innovation. They depend on the efforts of millions of engineers, scientists, and computer programmers and on entrepreneurs like Conrad Hilton and Sam Walton — not on Paris Hilton or Sam Walton’s grandchildren.

If you accept the commonsense view that the purpose of material wealth is to help people live good lives, then America’s wealth distribution over the past 40 years also appears highly inefficient. That’s because money, wonderful as it is, has what economists call “diminishing marginal utility” to help us improve our lives. Giving an extra million dollars to someone earning $10 million annually will probably not affect her happiness. But divide that million dollars into 50 $20,000 shares and add it to the annual incomes of 50 men and women currently earning the minimum wage of $15,000 per year, and you’ve just raised 50 families out of poverty.

Beyond any unfairness to particular Americans and beyond their manifest inefficiency, I believe recent economic trends are bad for our country in further ways. A winner-take-all economic philosophy is not consistent with the core American values of securing opportunities widely across society and rewarding individual hard work. If we truly believe in the dignity and worth of every individual, we cannot allow less wealthy Americans to sink into overworked, insecure poverty. If we truly believe in equality and democracy, we cannot accept ever-greater economic inequality, or the political impotence that mass poverty entails. We must reverse these trends.

Explaining Recent Trends

This startling juxtaposition — of greatly increased overall wealth with the nearly total failure of poorer Americans to benefit from it — is the great economic fact of our time. It cries out for some explanation. Most accounts focus on technological changes and the shift from manufacturing to a service economy. These trends, we are told, have devalued brute strength and manual labor and put a premium on “head work.” There seems to be some truth in this: The more formal education workers have, the better they have done economically in recent decades. But it doesn’t explain why less-educated American workers have fared so much worse than their Canadian, Japanese, and western European counterparts, whose economies have gone through the same changes during the same time.

Another common explanation points to weak American unions. From representing 30 percent of American workers in 1965, union membership has declined dramatically, to 12.5 percent today.³ Certainly fewer unions and the weak bargaining power of those remaining have limited workers’ ability to demand higher wages and benefits. But this explanation also raises as many questions as it answers. In particular, why have American unions declined so precipitously? Corruption and poor strategic decisions by union leaders (such as the failure to focus earlier on unionizing service employees) cannot be the whole story. And why have unions’ bargaining powers eroded, even where the workforce has remained unionized?

Economists tell us that another important factor in American workers’ declining fortunes has been mass immigration. Simply put, increased immigration has swamped American labor markets with less-skilled, less-educated workers. This has driven down wages for less-skilled, less-educated Americans.⁴

As most of us learned in Econ 101, in a market economy, wages are set by the mutual consent of (potential) employers and (potential) employees. Employers try to hire for as little as possible, to keep profits up. Workers bargain for the highest possible wages. What they finally agree to is largely determined by supply and demand. “Tighten” the labor market, by increasing demand for workers or lowering the supply, and wages and benefits increase. Lower demand or “flood” the market with workers, and wages and benefits decrease.

That’s the theory and empirical studies confirm that’s mostly how it works in real life. Anyone who has spent much time looking for work will not be surprised by this. It makes a difference whether employers are begging for workers, or workers are begging for work.

How does immigration fit into the picture? Starting with the Immigration and Nationality Act Revisions of 1965, the United States Congress greatly increased legal immigration levels, from around 250,000 per year to a little over one million per year today.⁵ Because the 1965 Revisions encouraged non-European immigration and “family reunification” while de-emphasizing literacy, education, and special skills requirements, most of these new immigrants were relatively unskilled and uneducated. So are the great majority of illegal immigrants in America, who currently number from 12 to 15 million people. One study found that from 1980 to 1995, immigration increased the number of college graduates in the U.S. workforce 4 percent while increasing the number of high-school dropouts in the workforce 21 percent.⁶

The upshot has been that labor markets for less skilled workers have been flooded with workers, driving down wages and allowing employers to slash benefits. Doctors, lawyers, and computer software engineers have done pretty well in recent years. Truck drivers, butchers, cleaning women, and bus boys? Not so well.

Of course the American economy is complex. It would be a mistake to dismiss all the other possible factors in working-class wage stagnation over the past four decades and just assert that mass immigration is the cause. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to discount immigration’s effects right off the bat. Consider one industry where it seems to have made a big difference.

Meatpacking

My friend Steve grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. After graduating from high school in 1973, he went to work in a packing house there, “cutting cows.” Steve remembers the work as repetitive and boring, but he stayed on for seven years. Dubuque Packers, Inc., like most of the American meatpacking industry, was unionized and paid high wages: from $16 to $20 an hour for most jobs at the plant.

“People lived real well,” Steve recalls. “They had boats and second homes” on the little lakes that dot east-central Iowa. They also had the time to enjoy them, since work hours were limited by contract. Being unionized, their jobs were also secure — or so Steve and his coworkers thought.

Working in a slaughterhouse, then as now, was hard and exhausting. But in the 1970s, it paid pretty well throughout the United States, partly as a result of union drives in previous decades. In today’s dollars, wages averaged $23.60 per hour at U.S. meatpacking plants in 1975, and health and retirement benefits were generous.⁷ The work may have been difficult, but it kept men without college degrees and their families in a comfortable, middle class existence. Workers saw these as good, permanent jobs and turnover at the plants was low.

Leaving aside the animals involved, the system worked well for all concerned. Workers got steady, well-paid work and a say in working conditions. Meatpacking companies turned a profit. And American consumers bought beef, pork, and chicken at some of the lowest prices in the world.

Today slaughterhouse jobs average $13.30 per hour — 44 percent less than they did 40 years ago — and salaries start as low as $6 per hour. Benefits have been cut industry-wide, with decent health insurance rare and good retirement plans non-existent. Workers are highly transient. What happened?

Well, apparently corporate profits weren’t as high as they could be, which meant they weren’t high enough.⁸ Starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, big companies like ConAgra and IBP demanded steep wage cuts and other concessions. Small companies, like Dubuque Packers, followed suit or were driven out of business. In plant after plant, town after town, the companies closed down plants and locked out workers, either shifting production elsewhere or bringing in outside workers to replace union members who balked. Workers staged dozens of strikes and fought tenaciously, in some cases for years. In every instance, they were forced to make large concessions, or risk losing their jobs altogether.

The meatpackers’ union-busting tactics worked, because unlike many countries, American labor laws allow companies to permanently replace striking workers and Democratic politicians have failed to defend workers’ rights by changing the law. But crucially, it also worked because the companies had a large supply of poor, unskilled immigrant workers to use as strikebreakers. Just as Italians and Slavs “fresh off the boat” had been used to thwart union building in Chicago slaughterhouses at the turn of the 20th century (as memorably chronicled in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle), packing companies used Hispanics and Southeast Asians to defeat unions in the 1970s and 1980s.

Item: In 1981, the Hygrade hog-processing plant in Storm Lake, Iowa, locked out 500 unionized workers, replacing them with Laotians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, and other immigrants. The company broke the union, but a few old union members swallowed their pride and later were hired back at half-wages. Since then the plant has relied almost exclusively on immigrant workers. Few of them know that Hygrade once provided its experienced line workers with six-week paid vacations annually.⁹

Item: In 1980, the Montfort Company of Greeley, Colorado, locked out 1,400 workers and closed their main meatpacking plant. They reopened two years later, with 40 percent wage cuts and even greater cuts in benefits. In 1987, Montfort did the same thing at their 400-person “portion foods” plant. In both cases, bringing in immigrants as replacement workers was a key part of company strategy.¹⁰ Union representative Steve Clasen recalled that throughout the 1980s, as immigrants took over more jobs at Montfort plants, “the company would use migrants to justify keeping the wage structure low.”

Item: In Austin, Minnesota, good wages allowed the Hormel Company’s workers and managers to live side-by-side in middle class neighborhoods during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. But by the 1980s, the Hormel family decided the company could no longer buck industry trends, and demanded steep wage cuts. Workers staged a bitter, year-and-a-half-long strike to preserve their standard of living, but were crushed. Over 1,000 workers lost their jobs. Minnesota had a strong tradition of labor solidarity, so it was particularly important that Hormel could count on bringing in hundreds of recent immigrants with no historic ties to the area and with few other economic options. The Hormel strike was widely viewed as the deathblow to organized labor in the meatpacking industry.¹¹

(Here a brief word may be in order about “diversity.” The 1965 Immigration Act Revisions are often praised for making America more racially and ethnically diverse. But as slaughterhouse workers became more diverse, they often found themselves speaking different languages, hampering basic communication and undermining worker solidarity. Workers who don’t speak the same language find it harder to make common cause. Workers who don’t speak English may not know their rights under U.S. law. Workers from other countries may not have a tradition of standing up to authority, while those who are in the United States illegally — a majority in some U.S. meatpacking plants — are not in any position to do so. Like most progressives, I value diversity. But no matter what diversity proponents may wish was the case, in the meatpacking industry, diversity has helped management divide and conquer workers.)

The stories at Storm Lake, Greeley, and Austin were repeated again and again across the United States. After awhile, the mere threat to bring in immigrant workers could force concessions from the unions. Workers at one plant or company who successfully resisted wage reductions, work speed-ups, or decertification of their unions were undermined when these measures succeeded elsewhere. Today the unions are mostly gone and those that remain have little bargaining power. Each individual employee must take whatever the company offers, or take a hike.

What does it mean when a job pays $10 or $12 an hour rather than $20 or $25? Dad may have to work a second job, or put in lots of overtime, to make ends meet. Mom may have to work, too, rather than being able to stay home and look after young children. Everyone is more tired. There is less leisure time and less time for being with family. Lower wages make it more difficult to save money; combined with reduced benefits, there is less economic cushion if things go wrong. So the family as a whole has less security and a lower quality of life. A job that once supported a middle class family has been replaced with one that keeps a family in poverty.

The new jobs not only pay much less, they’re also more dangerous, since workers no longer negotiate hours, breaks or working conditions, and cannot effectively challenge managers and supervisors who cut corners on safety. Injury rates have jumped since the 1970s, as companies have increased “line speeds” up to the limits of physical endurance.¹² According to OSHA, slaughterhouse work is now the most dangerous major occupation in the United States.

Today meatpacking jobs are unattractive, even to poor immigrants. Turnover is high: 60-70 percent annually industry-wide and an astounding 700 to 800 percent per year at some plants.¹³ This turnover costs the companies money, and if it were harder to find new workers, companies would have more incentive to improve wages and working conditions. But with high immigration rates, there are always newcomers to fill the jobs. Wages stay low. Company profits, however, are higher than ever.

*

The transformation I’ve just described in the meatpacking industry signifies a tremendous, ongoing transfer of wealth from workers to owners. In the middle of the greatest sustained increase in overall wealth in the nation’s history, meatpacking companies successfully drove tens of thousands of American workers, performing grueling, necessary work, from middle class prosperity into poverty. It never would have been possible without the 1965 Revisions to the Immigration and Nationality Act. The packing companies could not have replaced tens of thousands of locked-out union members without the ready availability of tens of thousands of poor immigrants desperate for work.

Similarly, low wages and dangerous working conditions could not persist in the meatpacking industry without continuing high levels of immigration. Over and over, today’s packinghouse workers describe themselves as “expendable” in the eyes of management. And they are. As things now stand, it’s easier and more profitable to use workers up and get new ones, rather than treating them as valued assets (much less as fellow human beings). This may seem like “the harsh logic of the market.” Actually, it’s the harsh logic of a flooded labor market; flooded, in this case, by the deliberate decisions of successive U.S. Congresses, which set annual immigration levels, and successive presidential administrations, which have mostly declined to enforce immigration laws.

In Steve’s case, the company lowered the boom in 1979. “They claimed they couldn’t hang on with a union,” Steve remembers, and with the bigger companies slashing labor costs and aggressively undercutting their competitors’ prices, they may have been right. Dubuque Packers locked out their workers and closed the plant for a year, then reopened with a new, non-union, poorly paid, largely immigrant workforce. Steve and his co-workers held out for a while, but every week saw fewer and fewer walking the picket line. Eventually, they all gave up. Many left their home state for good; Steve headed west to Colorado. When he first arrived in Fort Collins, in 1980, he looked for work at the nearby Montfort slaughterhouses. Ten or even five years earlier, this might have been a good bet. Now Montfort, in the process of breaking its own union, was offering even lower pay than Dubuque Packers. Steve went into construction and agricultural work, instead.

Jobs Americans Will Do

Meatpacking is an interesting example, because it’s the kind of hard, dirty, physical work that we are often told “Americans won’t do,” necessitating immigrant labor. In fact, 40 years ago this work was done almost exclusively by native-born Americans. It took extraordinary efforts by “Big Meat” to make meatpacking a job that is often done by recent immigrants and others desperate for work. Today Americans do try to avoid the industry, but that’s mostly because it pays poorly and is so dangerous. Why take a hard, risky job if it doesn’t pay much better than one that is easier and safer? And even today, most slaughterhouse workers are native-born American citizens — now working for much less than the previous generation of meatpackers.¹⁴

Not only is meatpacking a job that Americans will do. Barring a mass conversion to vegetarianism, meatpacking is also a job that someone has to do. Recent experience teaches us that the American economy can perform just fine with slaughterhouse workers making solid middle class wages or poverty-level wages; earning good benefits or few benefits; working under safe conditions or dangerous conditions. Which alternatives should we prefer?

I’m a progressive. My view is that regardless of who performs them, slaughterhouse jobs in America should be as safe as possible and carry high wages and comprehensive benefits. Well-off professionals whose work is intrinsically rewarding should be especially grateful to people like meat cutters, garbage men, and cleaning ladies who do society’s tough, dangerous, or monotonous work. We know this work needs to be done. We know that many of our less-educated fellow-citizens wind up doing it and need to do it, to earn a living and to secure their own self-respect. So we should do all we can to improve wages and working conditions in these jobs. With labor unions weak and Democratic politicians confused and timid, perhaps the best thing we can do for our fellow workers is to help tighten labor markets, so they can negotiate the best possible wages and working conditions for themselves. That means reducing immigration (and probably paying a little more for chicken wings or hamburger meat at the supermarket).

Now I realize the value of those same tough, dangerous, monotonous jobs to new immigrants from Mexico or Cambodia, even at significantly lower wages. I realize the value of their remittances to relatives back home. It’s only honest to acknowledge that if we lower immigration levels, some would-be immigrants and their families will lose out.

However, it seems to me that as Americans, our first responsibility is to create an economically just society that provides decent opportunities for all of our fellow citizens. If our economy also creates jobs that can benefit new arrivals, so much the better. But we have no right to pursue immigration policies that sacrifice the vital economic interests of poor Americans in order to help poor foreigners. There is something morally obtuse in a view that says, “let’s spread your (native working-class workers’) wealth around to poor immigrants, while I (successful, well-educated professional) reap the benefits of cheaper gardeners, nannies, and lawn-care service and restaurant meals — while enjoying a profound feeling of superiority for my enlightened views about immigration.”

America is a wealthy nation, comparatively speaking. Arguably, Americans should look for ways to share our wealth so that it benefits poor people overseas. But we shouldn’t do it on the backs of those least able to afford it here in our own country. That is unjust to our fellow citizens, who have a special claim on us to set policies that increase their welfare. And in the case of mass immigration, it is helping create a less egalitarian society, with an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. If we’re not careful, the United States may end up looking like the crummy plutocracies from which so many of our immigrants are fleeing.

Some readers may find such a possibility preposterous. America is the land of opportunity, they believe, and will always remain so. Perhaps. But during the past 40 years, the United States has become a much less egalitarian society, with greater income stratification and less economic mobility between classes. In other words, we’ve become more like Mexico and Brazil. Let me ask the optimists reading this article what, exactly, they think is going to change, to slow or reverse these trends. Are corporate executives going to undergo a mass conversion to humanitarianism and increase workers’ wages and benefits, solely out of the goodness of their hearts? Are the laws of supply and demand going to reverse themselves (like the magnetic poles are supposed to have done, occasionally, in past geological ages) so that increasing the number of workers drives wages up rather than down? I don’t think so. If we want to reverse these negative economic trends, the evidence suggests that we must tighten up labor markets for unskilled workers.

Whatever you think America owes the rest of the world and however much you may admire (as I do) immigrants’ courage, resourcefulness, and work ethic, it seems wrong to help poor foreigners in ways that harm working-class American citizens. It seems doubly wrong to say, as current policy in effect says: From now on, the 120,000 line workers in a major branch of American industry will be a permanent underclass. No matter how wealthy America becomes, they will continue to make low wages. When their bodies are damaged or wear out, we will send them packing and get new ones. In fact, they will be paid just enough and treated just well enough, so that people from the poorest nations on Earth will continue to take these jobs.

This has long been America’s de facto policy toward agricultural labor. In the past 40 years, it has infected meatpacking and many other areas of our economy. But watch out, my fellow progressives! Accept this approach and we give up all hope of creating an economically just society. Accept this approach and we cede the whole economic realm to the forces of reaction and inequity. And I see no reason to think the barbarians will stop at the slaughterhouses and the factories, and not gallop on to the offices and cubicles where so many of us work, hoping to find the prosperity and security that our blue-collar fellow citizens once enjoyed, for a few decades in the 20th century. As the rest of the world becomes more educated and learns English, we may see more and more white-collar jobs “proletarianized.” If Upton Sinclair’s “jungle” is once again a reality, can Charles Dickens’ Bob Cratchit be far behind?

As for my friend Steve, he has worked many jobs since he moved to Colorado, in construction, agriculture, landscaping, and nursing, among others. But he has never held a steady job that paid as well as his first job out of high school, with Dubuque Packers. And I don’t think he ever will.

Construction

What happened in meatpacking in recent decades has happened, or is happening, across many areas of the economy: agriculture, landscaping, restaurant work, housekeeping, and janitor services. In one sector after another where immigrants have come to dominate employment, wages have been driven down and benefits have been lost. This process is largely complete in meatpacking — although curbing immigration could, once again, make it possible for slaughterhouse workers to organize and improve their lot. (In the aftermath of recent ICE raids which caught thousands of illegal workers at six of their plants, Swift and Company increased wages on average 8 percent and offered hefty signing bonuses in order to find new workers and keep their plants running. Both native-born American workers and legal immigrants benefitted greatly from these actions.)¹⁵ We can see the same process of “de-middle-classification” halfway complete in the construction industry today, as I recently learned in dozens of interviews at construction sites across Colorado.

Consider Tom’s story. I interviewed him in Longmont, north of Denver, eating a 6:30 breakfast at a café out by the interstate.¹⁶ Fit and alert, Tom looks to be in his mid-40s. Born and raised in Denver, he’s been spraying custom finishes on drywall for 25 years, and has had his own company since 1989. “At one point we had 12 people running three trucks,” he says. Now his business is just he and his wife. “Things have changed,” he says.

Although it has since cooled off considerably, residential and commercial construction were booming when I interviewed Tom. The main “thing that’s changed” is the number of immigrants in construction. When Tom got into it 25 years ago, construction used almost all native-born workers. Today, estimates of the number of immigrant workers in northern Colorado range from 50 percent to 70 percent of the total construction workforce. Some trades, like pouring concrete and framing, use immigrant labor almost exclusively. Come in with an “all-white” crew of framers, another small contractor tells me, and people do a double take.

Tom’s an independent contractor, bidding on individual jobs. But, he says: “guys are coming in with bids that are impossible.” After his many years in the business, “no way they can be as efficient in time and materials as me.” The difference has to be in the cost of labor. “They’re not paying the taxes and insurance that I am,” he says. Insurance, workmen’s compensation, and taxes add about 40 percent to the cost of legally employed workers. When you add the lower wages that immigrants are often willing to take, there is plenty of opportunity for competing contractors to underbid Tom and still make a tidy profit. He no longer bids on the big new construction projects, and jobs in individual, custom-built houses are also becoming harder to find.

“I’ve gone in to spray a house, and there’s a guy sleeping in the bathtub, with a microwave set up in the kitchen. I’m thinking, ‘you moved into this house for two weeks to hang and paint it, you’re gonna get cash from somebody, and he’s gonna pick you up and drive you to the next one.’”

In this way, some trades in construction are turning into the equivalent of migrant labor in agriculture. Workers don’t have insurance or workmen’s compensation, so if they are hurt or worn out on the job, they are simply discarded and replaced. Meanwhile, the builders and contractors higher up the food chain keep more of the profits for themselves. “The quality of life has changed drastically,” says Tom. “I don’t want to live like that. I want to go home and live with my family.”

Do immigrants perform jobs Americans don’t want to do? I ask. “My job is undesirable,” Tom replies. “It’s dirty, it’s messy, it’s dusty. I learned right away that because of that, the opportunity is available to make money in it. That job has served me well” — at least up until recently. He now travels as far away as Wyoming and southern Colorado to find work. “We’re all fighting for scraps right now.”

Over the years, Tom has built a reputation for quality work and efficient and prompt service (as I confirmed in interviews with others in the business). Until recently, that was enough to secure a good living. Now though, like a friend of his who recently folded his small landscaping business because he “just can’t bid ‘em low enough,” Tom is thinking of leaving the business. He’s also struggling to find a way to keep up the mortgage payments on his house.

*

Jeff, another one of my contacts in construction, has also seen immigration’s impacts on the industry up close.¹⁷ He’s been hanging drywall in new houses for 30 years, the last 21 running his own business. “We pride ourselves on quality and reliability,” Jeff tells me; he still works for some of the same builders as when he started out. He’s always had plenty of work, although he’s “never gotten real big.” Currently he has five men working for him full time. He warms up quickly to the topic of illegal workers in construction.

“I’ve got no qualms about people coming here,” Jeff says, “It’s the American dream.” But when there are millions of people here illegally, “that’s just wrong. They’re breaking the law. Period.” He says other small contractors and native workers agree with him, something my own interviews confirm. The bigger companies, though, are “a totally different story. That’s all they’re hiring” — and not because of their strong commitment to ethnic diversity.

Hanging drywall is typically piecework. Jeff pays his workers $8-$10 per sheet hung, with his total costs running $14-$15 a sheet. Some other contractors pay their illegal workers $3-$4 a sheet, in cash. “I’m fully insured, liability, unemployment insurance,” Jeff says. “I guarantee ya, half of [the big contractors’] labor force is not insured.” So it’s pretty easy for less scrupulous contractors to outbid Jeff and still make a profit. He says he doesn’t even show up anymore to bid for the big jobs with mega-home builders. His work is now mostly on expensive custom houses, where quality work can still earn a premium.

“I think it comes down to nothing but greed,” Jeff says, a statement I will hear more than once as I talk to construction workers, landscapers, and cleaning women who have been priced out of their former jobs. “They see a lot of dollar signs in front of their faces.” “You’re in business to make money, I know that,” he says. But that shouldn’t be everything. “I’m making a living, but I’m also doing the right thing,” by hiring legal workers and paying them a living wage.

Loyalty to his workers, who average eight years working for him, is important to Jeff. In comparison, the big companies go through workers “like water,” he says. Loyalty to his country is also important. He worries that Americans are “selling our souls, just to get a few things cheaper.” “I’d be willing to spend more” to help American families earn decent wages, he asserts — another comment I’ve often heard from people discussing low wages, in industries from meatpacking to housecleaning.

Do immigrants perform jobs that Americans don’t want to do? I ask. Answer: “That’s a flat-out false statement. In the construction industry, they’re taking over our jobs.”

Question: Does immigration push down wages? Answer: according to Jeff, “there’s a lot of complaining out there” about reduced wages. He mentions a former employee, a great worker, now working for South Valley Drywall, one of the big outfits in Denver, that only pays $3 a sheet. “[The large companies] know they can get the labor cheaper,” Jeff says. That drives down wages. It’s that simple.

Jeff is starting to think about retirement. He mentions that when he discussed the issue recently with one of his longtime employees, Paul, he “got a worried look on his face. Paul knows that if he has to get a new job, his pay will be less.”

“Who wants to go to work for less than fair wages?” Jeff asks.

Or for less than you made 20 years ago? I add.

“Exactly. You think you’re climbing the ladder in life ….”

Before I leave, Jeff tours me through the nearly finished home he’s working on. The drywall work is very well done.

*

Men like Jeff and Tom want to preserve a decent middle class life for themselves, their families, and their fellow workers. They make it clear that they aren’t asking for handouts, or special treatment. But they see opportunities drying up or shifting away from people like themselves in construction — and they don’t see politicians doing anything about it. When I mention that I find it odd that many unions and Democratic politicians support increased immigration, given their historic roles in defending the interests of American workers, Tom and Jeff have little to say. They simply don’t expect any economic help from unions or the Democratic Party. (Much less from progressive academics. Let’s face it. Today, academics’ fondness for “otherness” embraces lesbian Haitian poets a lot more easily than native-born white construction workers.)

All this is not just a matter of lost wages and earnings. It also involves losing relationships with long-time clients, when they make “the jump” to using cheaper contractors who use immigrant labor. It’s about declining quality, as cheaper but less-skilled drywallers take over more of the work, and anyone competing with them is forced to cut corners. Personal relationships and craftsmanship, too, are being eroded by “market forces,” as the economists say, or “greed,” to use more old-fashioned moral language. “The country’s selling itself for money,” says Jeff.

Tom and Jeff blame greedy contractors, out-of-touch politicians, and Americans generally for letting immigration get out of hand. One group they don’t blame, interestingly enough, is immigrants themselves, even those here illegally.

Jeff, who’s taken several hunting trips to northern Mexico, describes seeing people in Sonora living in “less than a hut. They’re so used to being so poor, that anything they can make here, they’re happy to make,” he says. “A trailer is a big step up.”

Tom recalls his son, then in his early 20s and working for him, talking one day about the “damn Mexicans” who were pricing them out of jobs. “Don’t generalize,” Tom told his son. “If you were born in Mexico, and had to fight for every piece of food, you would do the same thing. You would come here [too].”

Limits to Idealism

In the words of Harvard economist George Borjas, a leading authority on the economic impacts of immigration, any immigration policy will have winners and losers.¹⁸ People with more job opportunities and people with fewer; folks with more money in their pockets and folks with less. This is because individuals affected by immigration have different, often conflicting, interests. Borjas notes that large employers generally support high levels of immigration precisely because they drive down workers’ wages.¹⁹ If higher immigration levels did not decrease wages, the benefits to employers would disappear and they would have no reason to push for more immigration.

Any immigration policy will have winners and losers. And in deciding what immigration policy to set as a society, it’s important to realize the limits to personal generosity in all of this. A big part of Jeff’s sense of his own success is that over the years, his business has helped his workers — who are also his friends — earn good wages and support their families. But there are limits to what Jeff can pay his workers before he prices himself out of a job. He is generous, but it is necessarily a circumscribed and comparative generosity. Wages in a capitalist system are (mostly) set by the market.

This holds true for even the smallest, most personal transactions. My wife Kris and I tried to pay Steve generously for building our fence. But our sense of what was generous was based largely on what other people were paying for similar work. Even if we had wanted to give Steve more than we did for building our fence, he wasn’t looking for charity; in fact, he prides himself on setting “a fair price” for his work. And that price isn’t set by us sitting down and reading economic theory or political philosophy together, or figuring out a formula for what is fair, but by the market.

Progressives should want markets working for workers, not against them. George Borjas’ research indicates that during recent decades, on average, each 10 percent increase in the number of workers in a particular field has decreased wages in that field by 3.5 percent.²⁰ So Americans need to think long and hard about immigration levels. We can help some poor foreigners by letting them come here and work. But such help necessarily comes at the expense of American workers like Steve and Tom.

Today the average wage for workers across all the construction trades in Colorado is $12.30 an hour.²¹ In Mexico, the average wage for construction workers in 2001 was 105 pesos a day — $7.68.²² If we allow these two labor markets to merge, both economic theory and recent experience suggest that wages in America’s construction industry will decline sharply. Would that be good for our country?

Interestingly, and perhaps hopefully, many of the people I’ve talked to about immigration resist the idea that markets have a determining influence over their lives. Tom and Steve take pride in their work — it’s not just a paycheck — and they seem to find their relationships with their fellow workers and clients as meaningful as the money they make. Jeff pays his workers generously at higher than the “going rate.” Yet we are all caught up in the market. If we can transcend it in various ways, it also constrains us.

Tom was able to build strong relationships with contractors and a thriving business due to his own abilities and hard work. But one by one, those relationships are fraying, as contractors choose to “go cheap.” In a swamped labor market, he probably won’t be able to keep his business going. That’s a reality that Tom has to face; he doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring it if he wants to avoid personal bankruptcy. Progressive policymakers and theorists thinking about immigration policy are less constrained by reality and often imagine that all the negative impacts of swamped labor markets can be mitigated through government actions. (Example: “we’ll have special panels, which will make sure that immigrant workers are hired at prevailing wages.” Never mind that the only way to actually raise wages is for tight labor markets to drive “prevailing wages” up.) They would probably take a more realistic approach to mass immigration’s impacts if their own wages and livelihoods were at stake.

Winners

Any immigration policy will have winners and losers. If we keep this crucial insight in mind, we can avoid a lot of the confusion that impedes attempts to get to the bottom of this issue. So let’s ask a simple question. Who wins and who loses, economically, from our current mass immigration regime in the United States?

Three groups are big economic winners. First, immigrants themselves, who enjoy greater wealth and economic opportunities than if they had stayed home. Here is a list of America’s ten largest immigration “source” countries, in order of importance:²³

1. Mexico
2. China
3. The Philippines
4. India
5. Cuba
6. El Salvador
7. Vietnam
8. South Korea
9. Canada
10. The Dominican Republic

These ten countries provide well over half of all immigrants into the United States; Mexico alone accounts for almost 30 percent. With the exceptions of Canada and South Korea, they are all much poorer than the United States. Many of them have gross systemic corruption and poor public education systems. Most are overpopulated, with large cohorts of unemployed and underemployed young people. All this makes it hard for the average man or woman to thrive economically in Mexico or El Salvador, China or the Philippines, Vietnam or India. Even where progress is being made, opportunities are much greater in America for average people without connections.

A second group benefitting from mass immigration is employers and business owners.²⁴ For example, all the landscapers I’ve interviewed in northern Colorado are enthusiastic proponents of mass immigration, and so are their national professional organizations, which lobby vigorously for immigration increases in Washington. Immigration allows landscapers to lower their labor costs and pocket more profit per job. Lower labor costs may also allow them to lower costs to customers, increasing the number of customers who can afford their services and allowing their businesses to grow — also increasing profits. A similar logic prevails among employers across many sectors of the U.S. economy, from restaurants and hotels to software and Internet companies (Bill Gates is an enthusiastic proponent of increasing visas for high-tech computer workers).

The bigger the business, the greater an employer’s potential winnings from mass immigration. A small Colorado landscaper might be a few thousand dollars richer this year because of mass immigration. The Montfort family, which owns large blocks of shares in Colorado’s largest meatpacking operations, is doubtless many millions of dollars richer.

A third group benefitting from mass immigration, overlapping with the previous group, is large stockholders.²⁵ The more stock an individual owns in publicly traded companies (which benefit from mass immigration), the larger his or her potential winnings from a growing economy. With tens of millions of Americans invested in the stock market through their retirement accounts, there are tens of millions of potential beneficiaries here, but the biggest benefits are reserved for the wealthy. If you are a teacher or construction worker, a nurse or a policeman, what you gain in the stock market through immigration is probably swallowed up by what you give back through having your wages driven down by increased labor competition. But if you are truly wealthy and don’t depend on a wage for most of your income, it’s a very different story!

Interestingly, then, the greatest beneficiaries of mass immigration include the very poor (from other countries) and the very rich (who are mostly homegrown).

Losers

Who are the big losers from high levels of immigration? Once again, three groups stand out.

First, working-class Americans, whose modest wages are driven down in economic sectors with lots of immigrant workers. Meatpackers, supermarket checkout clerks, and janitors. Construction workers, secretaries, and nurses aides. Backhoe operators, waiters, and garbage men. Mechanics, roofers, and day laborers. These folks may see some relief through lower prices for consumer goods. But generally this does not make up for smaller paychecks and less job security.²⁶

Recent studies suggest that some professionals have also taken a wage hit from immigration; the laws of supply and demand hold for computer programmers and engineers, as well as janitors and cleaning women.²⁷ But higher salaries and lower numbers of immigrants have insulated professionals from the harsher effects of immigrant competition. After all, between 1990 and 2000, immigration increased the number of high school dropouts in the United States 21 percent while increasing the number of all other workers by 5 percent.²⁸

Immigration has had very different effects on wages among different classes of Americans. According to one study, during the 1980s and 90s, immigration reduced the wages of high school dropouts 7.4 percent; high school graduates 2.1 percent; workers with some college experience 2.3 percent; and college graduates 3.6 percent.²⁹ Strikingly, the least-educated workers suffered more than double the loss of the most-educated workers, as a percentage of their salaries. And since the salaries of high school dropouts average less than half the salaries for college graduates, these percentage losses translate into even greater losses in quality of life. The college graduates’ 3.6 percent decrease might mean the difference between buying a BMW or a Chevy, or whether or not to take a European vacation. The high school dropout’s 7.4 percent pay cut might mean she can’t afford to rent an apartment in a safer part of town or fix her teeth. (By the way, if you think that it’s inevitable that the poorest workers shoulder the largest burdens of mass immigration, you’re wrong. Canada and Australia also have high immigration levels, allowing in even more immigrants than the United States, as a percentage of their populations. But since they focus on bringing in skilled workers, wage competition has fallen primarily on wealthier Canadians and Australians (doctors and engineers, rather than construction workers) and immigration has not played the same role in increasing inequality as in America.)

African-Americans comprise a second important group harmed by mass immigration. This is not surprising, given that they are generally less educated, less skilled, and poorer than their white counterparts. African-Americans are therefore more likely than whites to compete directly in immigrant-rich sectors of the economy. The most detailed study to date of immigration’s impacts on African-Americans found “a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates.”³⁰ Its authors conclude: “Our analysis suggests that a 10-percent immigrant-induced increase in the supply of a particular skill group reduced the black wage by 4.0 percent, lowered the employment rate of black men by 3.5 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate of blacks by almost a full percentage point.”³¹

Vernon Briggs, Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, points out that African-Americans are more likely to suffer unemployment than the average citizen, partly because unemployment tends to be higher among the poor. In February 2008, he notes, “the national unemployment rate was 4.8 percent, but the unemployment rate for adults without a high school diploma was 7.3 percent” and the unemployment rate for blacks without a diploma topped 12 percent.³² Because most immigrants seek less-skilled work, where the black labor force is disproportionately concentrated, “there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market.” “Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low-skilled black workers,” writes Briggs, “it is obvious that the major losers in this competition are low-skilled black workers.”³³

Younger, urban African-American residents also lose out because mass immigration alleviates the need to train them for more skilled work. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” pleaded Booker T. Washington to the nation’s industrialists, nearly a century and a quarter ago. Like Frederick Douglass before him and W.E.B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph afterwards, Washington urged American employers to hire African-Americans, rather than import workers from abroad.³⁴ Today corporate leaders in high tech industries speak of the urgent need for a more educated workforce. But rather than mounting a serious effort to train minority children for these “jobs of the future,” they prefer to import workers from other countries. It’s cheaper and quicker. It seems likely, however, that if “the economy” needed more educated workers and could only find them among America’s own young people, we would never tolerate failing inner city schools. Immigration permits us the “luxury” of allowing this resource to run to waste.

A third group harmed by mass immigration is previous immigrants. Because they are less educated and less skilled than the average American worker, immigrants disproportionately incur the economic costs of continuing immigration. Of course, without earlier immigration, they wouldn’t be here in the first place. But once established, immigrants have a strong interest in limiting further immigration and the wage depression that goes along with it.

This explains a surprising fact: When polled, immigrants support reducing immigration at almost as high a rate as native citizens. So do Hispanics, whose ranks of course include a high proportion of immigrants. If you want to increase your wages at the carpet factory or the meatpacking plant, you know that a tight labor market is your friend.

I recall a recent interview with Paul, the foreman of a large planned subdivision in Fort Collins, Colorado.³⁵ We talked right after a local crackdown on illegal workers in the construction industry. His current framing crew, immigrants based out of Albuquerque, all had papers, he said, and they “were all asking for more money.” “My foundation guy [the subcontractor in charge of pouring concrete foundations] says his guys who are legal went to work somewhere else, where they paid them $4 an hour more.” Paul and his subcontractors were scrambling to increase wages, in order to hold on to good workers and keep their project on schedule. With two-thirds of his workers immigrants, most of the benefits of the crackdown on illegal workers were going to other, legal immigrants.

Basic Fairness

Mass immigration’s biggest winners, then, at least among U.S. citizens, are the wealthy, while its biggest losers are found disproportionately among the nation’s poor. Under our current immigration system, the less our fellow citizens can afford it, the larger the burden we ask them to shoulder in paying the inevitable costs of mass immigration. On the face of it, this seems unjust.

Of course, citizens are not the only group with an important stake in U.S. immigration policy. There are immigrants themselves and would-be immigrants around the world: people who may greatly improve their lives by moving to the United States. Progressives, with our preferential concern for the poor, naturally want to help these people. We often support mass immigration for that very reason.

But if the preceding analysis holds true, mass immigration is a bad way to help poor foreigners, precisely because it unfairly burdens America’s poor, rather than asking more from wealthy Americans, who can better afford to help.

Think of it this way. Let’s say you are a political progressive, who believes the United States — a wealthy nation, after all — can and should do more to help the world’s poor. However many billions of dollars President Obama’s administration devoted to foreign aid and global anti-poverty measures this year, you believe the United States should devote two, four, or even ten times as much money to such measures. Well, whatever the figure, if you are a progressive, you do not want that money coming solely out of the pockets of poor and middle class Americans, with a disproportionate amount coming from the poor. You would never support a special tax to help poor people overseas that broke down as follows: 5 percent tax on income for Americans making less than $30,000 a year, 2 percent for people making $30,000-$60,000 per year and 0 percent on those making more than $60,000 a year. But that, effectively, is the kind of regressive “tax” on wages and benefits that high levels of immigration impose on poorer Americans today. So progressives shouldn’t support it.

Neither, really, should people elsewhere on the political spectrum. However we define our responsibilities toward the world’s poor and however much we as a nation are willing to spend to help them, Americans should all be able to agree that we should not meet our responsibilities on the backs of our own poor citizens. That would be unjust — and it is why current U.S. immigration policy is unjust.

Increasing Inequality

Another argument for reducing immigration into the United States is that current policies are widening income inequality within our society. This is not the same point as the previous one, that current immigration policies are unjust because they benefit wealthy Americans and concentrate harms among poor Americans. My argument now is that in addition to this injustice toward the poor, increased economic inequality is bad for our society as a whole. It is bad most simply because Americans believe in a fundamental moral equality between people and are committed to a democratic political process. When economic inequalities become too great, the differing opportunities available to rich and poor make a mockery of fundamental moral equality. When economic inequalities become too great and are allowed free rein within the political process, the resulting power differential between rich and poor makes a mockery of democracy.

I am not advocating for complete economic equality. Even if it were possible, there is no conceivable need to try to ensure that everyone makes the same salary, has the same income, or owns the same kind, number, or quality of possessions. No, all I want to say is that when individuals are driven into insecure poverty, their opportunities for personal development, political action, and full and equal participation in society are diminished. This is happening widely today in our society. When certain individuals are allowed to concentrate and deploy large amounts of wealth, they will tend to dominate their fellow citizens. For these reasons, economic inequality must be limited in a society like ours with a commitment to equality of opportunity and political participation.

Mass immigration widens economic inequality in the United States in three main ways. First, as we have seen, mass immigration makes rich Americans richer and poor Americans poorer. The wages of many American workers have stagnated for the past 40 years and wages for the poorest Americans have actually declined in real terms. During this same time, the income of the wealthiest Americans has skyrocketed. Not all of this income disparity can be laid at the door of mass immigration — but some of it can.

Second, mass immigration, at least as practiced in the United States, provides a continual influx of poor people. By increasing the numbers of poor people much faster than the numbers of middle class or rich people, large-scale immigration directly increases income inequality.

This is one of those obvious points rarely mentioned in popular or scholarly analyses of persistent poverty in America. Once a year or so, my hometown newspaper, the Fort Collins Coloradoan, reliably runs a series of articles on the growth of poverty in our region, complete with earnest editorials about how residents should remain committed to “fighting” poverty. It never mentions that many of the people swelling the ranks of the poor in Colorado are recent arrivals. They are poor, not through any failure of our society, but because they came here poor. Furthermore, no matter how many of these poor people are Spanish-speaking immigrants, these articles will be sure to focus on poor native-born Americans with names like Smith or Jones. Poverty affects everyone, right? We wouldn’t want to give the impression that it only affects Hispanics or recent immigrants.

This is all very sweet, but more than a little misleading. Under the best scenarios, poor immigrants swell the ranks of the poor until they can work themselves out of poverty. Yet because poor immigrants are generally less educated and less skilled, they often remain in poverty. Statistics show that while they may do much better than they would have in their native countries, poor immigrants tend to remain poor by American standards.³⁶ Their children and grandchildren partially close the income gap between themselves and native-born Americans, but remain somewhat poorer than the children and grandchildren of natives. All this contributes to inequality here in America. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. By importing poor people and setting them in competition with other poor people, we ensure this very result.

A third way mass immigration widens inequality is by increasing the percentage of poor Americans who aren’t citizens. It is a lot easier for politicians to ignore poor people’s interests when they don’t have to worry about attracting their votes. In many American cities, a quarter or more of the population may not be citizens, and a majority of the poor may not be.³⁷ We should not be surprised that during recent decades, as the numbers of U.S.-resident noncitizens doubled and doubled again and doubled yet again,³⁸ government policy has shifted away from helping the poor, or that discussions of “urban policy” have become rare and big cities have lost a lot of political clout.

These problems are compounded, of course, when large numbers of workers are here illegally. Illegal workers cannot challenge dishonest and abusive employers, much less fight effectively in the political realm for a fair share of government services. But even legal immigrant workers cannot band together effectively without the prerogatives and the mindsets of citizens, including the background belief (foreign to so many immigrants’ experience) that government should be working for them. That is why expanding “guest worker” programs from agriculture into landscaping, construction, or other areas is such a bad idea. It would create more sectors of the economy where we accept the permanent impoverishment of lower-level workers, as Americans now accept the permanent impoverishment of agricultural laborers.

To sum up: Over the past 40 years, America has generated tremendous increases in wealth. But that wealth has mostly been captured by wealthier Americans and economic inequality has increased greatly. If we continue to allow mass immigration into the United States, this inequality will likely worsen. This is particularly true since Democrats no longer show a strong willingness to fight for policies that redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Democratic timidity makes it even more important to ensure that labor markets do not work against poor and middle class Americans.

A Master / Servant Economy

We can see increasing economic inequality in the figures for wages and income over the past 40 years, but also in signs of a burgeoning “servant” economy in the United States.³⁹ More people are hiring lawn care services to cut their grass and trim their hedges. We eat out a lot more than we used to. More people are hiring nannies to take care of their children. All these services rely heavily on immigrant labor.

A mainstream economist might find little to criticize in these trends and much to praise. Contracting out grass cutting relieves some people of a tedious chore and creates jobs for others who need them. Eating out at restaurants is a harmless enjoyment that again creates jobs. Hiring a nanny allows educated women professionals to make the best (read: “most lucrative”) use of their time. All this activity registers positively on the GDP tally sheet. It is “good for the economy” and therefore good, period.

But is it? I hardly see busboys and nannies as sinister figures, but I’m wary of these trends. In the 19th century, servants were a lot more common in America than they are today. During the 20th century, the rise of the middle class and the related high cost of labor mostly did away with them. Now servants are making a comeback. I think this is a bad thing.

Where there are servants, there will be masters. There will be some measure of deference on one side and some feeling of entitlement on the other. This contradicts the egalitarian spirit at the heart of progressivism.

Where there are servants, the masters will run the show politically. The servants will hardly have the time, inclination, or organization to engage in politics. They also may not have the required citizenship. This contradicts our democratic political system.

Where there are servants, the masters’ children are apt to get soft and lazy. The servants do the hard, physical work, as a matter of course. With Americans facing an obesity epidemic, this might not be the right time to cut back on chores like cutting grass and trimming trees that help keep us physically active.

But my main concern is not with our bodies but with our souls; or rather, with the souls of our communities. Americans who are doing fairly well — professionals, intellectuals, the kind of people who might be reading this policy brief — need to ask themselves what sort of society we want to live in. Do we want to live among neighbors, people with the same general status as ourselves — or deferential peons, who take care of all our “dirty work?” Do we want fellow citizens, with the interest and the time to get involved in community matters and local politics — or “guest workers” who shut up and do what they’re told? (And please: Let’s not kid ourselves that such programs will provide such wonderful safeguards that these “guests” will be able to stand up for their rights, successfully unionize, or even have the time and energy to live fully human lives. The goal of such programs is to provide workers — not neighbors, not citizens. Employers have these workers over a barrel. That’s the point.)

Mass immigration moves us in the latter direction, in part through the economic forces we’ve been discussing, in part by creating linguistic and cultural barriers between professionals and the manual workers who empty their wastebaskets and take care of their children. It is easier to accept the subservient status of people who look and talk differently from ourselves. Besides, we think, they’re doing a lot better than they would have in Guatemala, or the Philippines, or Haiti.

When we combine the attitudes and expectations of a servant economy with declining wages for manual workers and less-educated workers, we find ourselves falling into a less egalitarian society. Now meatpackers and garbage men, waitresses and busboys, bus drivers and janitors, roofers and construction workers, begin to stand out against doctors, engineers, and other professionals, as a separate class. They are no longer our equals in terms of wealth, security, education, influence, leisure time, or power. We are the ones with influential professional associations; their unions are weak or gone. We are the ones with stock portfolios. We are the ones with health insurance. We are the ones who can change our jobs or have our teeth fixed when necessary. A hierarchical America is growing before your eyes, if you will only open them and see it.

I don’t like this new, hierarchical America — even if I can find Thai food and sushi in places where a dinner out once meant steak and potatoes at the local diner. If progressivism in America means anything, it means fighting to turn this situation around and get a fairer deal for American workers. And let’s be honest. The answer cannot be for everyone in America to go back to school, get advanced degrees, and enter the professions.

We are constantly told that the answer to stagnating incomes is education and acquiring new, marketable skills. That is good advice for many individuals. But there will always be people who do poorly in school, or who get less education for one reason or another. And for the foreseeable future, our society will have plenty of hard, physical labor and repetitive grunt work that needs to be done. Are we saying that the people who wind up doing this work should be poor? Why? Perhaps they deserve to be punished for not being as smart as they should have been. Perhaps their poverty makes us, the successful professionals, feel that much more satisfied with our own lives.

Sound a little ugly? Then join me in saying the opposite. People who are willing to work hard and do the dirty work of this world should be well paid. They should have the same economic security, the same opportunities for leisure, the same basic middle class comforts as any doctor, lawyer, or businessman. If you say they shouldn’t, then you are just a snob. (If you say they should, but can’t imagine how to go about doing it, then you are probably a modern-day Democrat.)

I’ve found that it offends many people’s sense of decency to imagine having garbage men paid as much as lawyers or professors, so I won’t insist on that. Let the professionals make two or three times as much as manual laborers (although I don’t see why they should; the stimulation of their professions should be reward enough for them). Let the successful businessmen and businesswomen pile up as much wealth as they can, if they are in love with that particular pursuit. But then let the garbage man and the janitor, the secretary and the security guard, make a decent middle class living as well. Let my friend Steve have health insurance, so he can get treatment for his aching back after a hard day’s work.

Conclusion

I think this is the main political choice facing America today. Do we want to meet our fellow citizens as friends and equals as we go about our economic lives? Or should we magnify economic distinctions so that some of us — the smart, the lucky, the ruthless — can lord it over peons?

We like to think of the towns and cities we live in as “communities,” the United States itself as a union of citizens pledged to protect one another’s welfare. On our patriotic holidays, we remember the words “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” In our churches, we hear how all people are precious in God’s sight. I think being a progressive means working to create an economy that upholds these noble ideals.

But it does little good to pursue piecemeal reforms if we are not willing to look economic realities squarely in the face. Mass immigration of unskilled workers is a powerful force pushing us toward greater inequality. Cutting back on immigration is one of the most obvious and important actions Americans can take to begin to rebuild an egalitarian society.

Comment on this post:

(Comments are moderated)

End Notes

¹ Personal interview, Steve, September, 2007.

² Table 1.1.5, “National Economic Accounts,” Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce. Accessed May 2008, at http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/.

³ Figures obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor.

⁴ For a good overview of the economic effects of immigration on workers’ wages, see George Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1999). See also, the essays in Steven Shulman (ed.), The Impact of Immigration on African Americans (Transaction, 2004).

⁵ Annual immigration rates taken from table HS-8, “Immigration—Number and Rate: 1900 to 2001,” U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003, p.15.

⁶ George Borjas, Heaven’s Door, p.11.

⁷ “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National) SIC,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Data extracted December 2007; figures adjusted for inflation. “Today” refers to wages in 2003, the last year for which BLS figures are available.

⁸ A good account of the rise and decline of unionized meatpacking can be found in the essays in Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman (eds.), Unionizing the Jungles: Labor and Community in the Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry (University of Iowa Press, 1997).

⁹ Roy Beck, The Case Against Immigration: The Moral, Economic, Social, and Environmental Reasons for Reducing U.S. immigration Back to Traditional Levels (Norton, 1996), chapter 6.

¹⁰ Carol Andreas, Meatpackers and Beef Barons: Company Town in a Global Economy (University Press of Colorado, 1994).

¹¹ Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (South End Press, 1992).

¹² Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Harper Perennial, 2001), chapter 8. See also Andreas, Meatpackers and Beef Barons, chapter 5.

¹³ Steven Kay, “The Nature of Turnover: Packers Attempt to Reverse a Financial Drain,” Meat & Poultry 43 (1997): 30-34; A.V. Krebs, Heading Toward the Last Roundup: The Big Three’s Prime Cut (Washington, DC: Corporate Agribusiness Project, 1990), p. 51.

¹⁴ Jerry Kammer, “The 2006 Swift Raids: Assessing the Impact of Immigration Enforcement Actions at Six Facilities” (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2009), note 19.

¹⁵ Kammer, “The 2006 Swift Raids.” See also “Immigration Raids May Affect Meat Prices,” The Washington Post, December 12, 2006; “An immigration raid aids blacks for a time,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 17, 2007.

¹⁶ Personal interview, Tom, October, 2007.

¹⁷ Personal interview, Jeff, October, 2007.

¹⁸ Borjas, Heaven’s Door, p.13.

¹⁹ Borjas, Heaven’s Door, p. 90.

²⁰ George Borjas, “The Economic Benefits from Immigration,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1995): 7.

²¹ Colorado Department of Labor and Employees, cited in “Immigration Wage Debate Rages: Pay Stagnates in Sectors Full of Foreign-Born Workers,” Rocky Mountain News, August 26, 2006.

²² International Labor Organization, “Statistics: By Country,” “Mexico,” Table 5A “Wages, by Economic Activity.” Accessed October 2009 at http://laborstra.ilo.org/.

²³ Steven Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States – 2002: a Snapshot of America’s Foreign-Born Population” (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2002).

²⁴ Borjas, Heaven’s Door, p. 91.

²⁵ Id.

²⁶ Steven Camarota, “Immigration’s Impact on American Workers.” Testimony before House Judiciary Committee, May 9, 2007 (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies); George Borjas, “Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration: Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers” (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2004).

²⁷ George Borjas, “The Labor Market Impact of High-Skill Immigration” (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005). Working paper 11217.

²⁸ Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States – 2002,” figure 2.

²⁹ George Borjas, “Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration: Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers,” (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2004).

³⁰ George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson, “Immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment, and Incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks,” Working Paper, September 2006.

³¹ Id.

³² Vernon Briggs, “Illegal Immigration: The Impact on Wages and Employment of Black Workers ” (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies). Testimony before U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 4, 2008.

³³ Id.

³⁴ Robert Malloy, “Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are: Black Americans on Immigration” (Washington, DC, Center for Immigration Studies, 1996); Daryl Scott, “Immigrant Indigestion: A. Philip Randolph, Radical and Restrictionist” (Washington, DC, Center for Immigration Studies, 1999).

³⁵ Personal interview, Paul, October, 2007.

³⁶ Borjas, Heaven’s Door, chapter 7.

³⁷ Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States—2002,” tables 18 and 19.

³⁸ Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States—2002,” figure 1.

³⁹ Barbara Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order: The Politics of Other Women’s Work,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1, 2000; “The New West’s servant economy,” High Country News, April 17, 1995.