My environmental path to sustainable immigration reform - and it isn't racist
There are those who say that concern about mass immigration, human numbers, as even the cultural impacts of immigration, are racist, nationalist, and xenophobic. I've read attacks saying CAIRCO's Fred Elbel is a racist and xenophobe for wanting to limit mass immigration to sustainable numbers. How funny! That is not the case in the least.
Here are some excerpts from my article My Non-Racist Environmental Path to Sustainable Immigration Reform by Fred Elbel.
I am concerned about environmental sustainability, which means the ability to continue the rate of depletion of environmental resources, as well as the rate at which the environment is burdened with absorbing the wastes of human technological civilization, for an indefinite number of future generations. The anthropomorphic view of sustainability is primarily concerned about the environmental impact on future human generations. If we expand the scope to encompass future generations of all species, both human and non-human, then the perspective changes to what is termed a deep ecological approach to sustainability. I lean toward the deep ecology perspective.
Humanity is not immune to the laws of ecology. We have used technology to leverage our ability to extract resources from the environment in order to vastly increase our numbers past what would be sustainable in the absence of technology. We think that because right now we're doing fine that things will continue like this in the future - even with rapidly growing population.
Immigration, it turned out, was the key to never-ending U.S. population growth.
In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Nationality Act, followed by seven Congressional amnesties for illegal aliens, beginning in 1986. Republicans loved mass immigration because it provided cheap labor for their corporate constituents, and Democrats embraced the potential of all the new Democratic voters. And we all know that President Obama has been the incontrovertible immigration non-enforcer in Chief.
If one is an environmentalist who is concerned about more than feel-good environmental efforts (such as recycling), then one must be concerned about intergenerational sustainability. This mandates concern about human numbers and their impact on our sustaining ecosystems. It's a concern I've shared for many decades.