By Herschel Elliott and Richard D. Lamm

Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2002.

What if global warming is a reality, and expanding human activity is causing irreparable harm to the ecosystem? What if the demands of a growing human population and an expanding global economy are causing our oceans to warm up, our ice caps to melt, our supply of edible fish to decrease, our rain forests to disappear, our coral reefs to die, our soils to be eroded, our air and water to be polluted, and our weather to include a growing number of floods and droughts? What if it is sheer hubris to believe that our species can grow without limits? What if the finite nature of the earth's resources imposes limits on what human beings can morally do? What if our present moral code is ecologically unsustainable?

A widely cited article from the journal Science gives us one answer. Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) demonstrated that when natural resources are held in common -- freely available to everyone for the taking -- the incentives that normally direct human activity lead people to steadily increase their exploitation of the resources until they are inadequate to meet human needs. The exploiters generally do not intend to cause any harm; they are merely taking care of their own needs, or those of others in want. Nevertheless, the entire system moves inexorably to disaster. Everyone in the world shares in the resulting tragedy of the commons.

Today, our standard of living, our economic system, and the political stability of our planet all require the increasing use of energy and natural resources. In addition, much of our political, economic, and social thinking assumes a continuous expansion of economic activity, with little or no restraint on our use of resources. We all feel entitled to grow richer every year. Social justice requires an expanding pie to share with those who are less fortunate. Progress is growth; the economies of developed nations require steady increases in consumption.

What if such a scenario is unsustainable? What if we need an ethics for a finite world, an ethics of the commons?

It is not important that you agree with the premise. What is important is that you help debate the alternatives. An ethics of the commons would require a change in the criteria by which moral claims are justified.

You may believe that current rates of population growth and economic expansion can go on forever -- but debate with us what alternative ethical theories would arise if they cannot. Our thesis is that any ethical system is mistaken and immoral if its practice would cause an environmental collapse.

Many people assume that moral laws and principles are absolutely certain, that we can know the final moral truth. If moral knowledge is certain, then factual evidence is irrelevant, for it cannot limit or refute what is morally certain.

Our ethics and concepts of human rights have been formulated for a world of a priori reasoning and unchanging conclusions. Kant spoke for that absolutist ethical tradition when he argued that only knowledge that is absolutely certain can justify the slavish obedience that moral law demands. He thought he had found rational grounds to justify the universal and unchanging character of moral law. Moral knowledge, he concluded, is a priori and certain. It tells us, for example, that murder, lying, and stealing are wrong. The fact that those acts may sometimes seem to benefit someone cannot diminish the absolute certainty that they are wrong. Thus, for example, it is a contradiction to state that murder can sometimes be right, for, by its very nature, murder is wrong.

Many human rights are positive rights that involve the exploitation of resources. (Negative rights restrain governments and don't require resources. For example, governments shouldn't restrict our freedom of speech or tell us how to pray.) Wherever in the world a child is born, that child has all the inherent human rights -- including the right to have food, housing, and medical care, which others must provide. When positive rights are accorded equally to everyone, they first allow and then support constant growth, of both population and the exploitation of natural resources.

That leads to a pragmatic refutation of the belief that moral knowledge is certain and infallible. If a growing population faces a scarcity of resources, then an ethics of universal human rights with equality and justice for all will fail. Those who survive will inevitably live by a different ethics.

Once the resources necessary to satisfy all human needs become insufficient, our options will be bracketed by two extremes. One is to ration resources so that everyone may share the inadequate supplies equally and justly.

The other is to have people act like players in a game of musical chairs. In conditions of scarcity, there will be more people than chairs, so some people will be left standing when the music stops. Some -- the self-sacrificing altruists -- will refuse to take the food that others need, and so will perish. Others, however, will not play by the rules. Rejecting the ethics of a universal and unconditional moral law, they will fight to get the resources they and their children need to live.

Under neither extreme, nor all the options in between, does it make sense to analyze the problem through the lens of human rights. The flaw in an ethical system of universal human rights, unqualified moral obligations, and equal justice for all can be stated in its logically simplest form: If to try to live by those principles under conditions of scarcity causes it to be impossible to live at all, then the practice of that ethics will cease. Scarcity renders such formulations useless and ultimately causes such an ethics to become extinct.

We have described not a world that we want to see, but one that we fear might come to be. Humans cannot have a moral duty to deliver the impossible, or to supply something if the act of supplying it harms the ecosystem to the point where life on earth becomes unsustainable. Moral codes, no matter how logical and well reasoned, and human rights, no matter how compassionate, must make sense within the limitations of the ecosystem; we cannot disregard the factual consequences of our ethics. If acting morally compromises the ecosystem, then moral behavior must be rethought. Ethics cannot demand a level of resource use that the ecosystem cannot tolerate.

The consequences of human behavior change as the population grows. Most human activities have a point of moral reversal, before which they may cause great benefit and little harm, but after which they may cause so much harm as to overwhelm their benefits. Here are a few representative examples, the first of which is often cited when considering Garrett Hardin's writings:

• In a nearly empty lifeboat, rescuing a drowning shipwreck victim causes benefit: It saves the life of the victim, and it adds another person to help manage the boat. But in a lifeboat loaded to the gunwales, rescuing another victim makes the boat sink and causes only harm: Everyone drowns.
• When the number of cars on a road is small, traveling by private car is a great convenience to all. But as the cars multiply, a point of reversal occurs: The road now contains so many cars that such travel is inconvenient. The number of private cars may increase to the point where everyone comes to a halt. Thus, in some conditions, car travel benefits all. In other conditions, car travel makes it impossible for anyone to move. It can also pump so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that it alters the world's climate.
• Economic growth can be beneficial when land, fuel, water, and other needed resources are abundant. But it becomes harmful when those resources become scarce, or when exploitation causes ecological collapse. Every finite environment has a turning point, at which further economic growth would produce so much trash and pollution that it would change from producing benefit to causing harm. After that point is reached, additional growth only increases scarcity and decreases overall productivity. In conditions of scarcity, economic growth has a negative impact.
• Every environment is finite. Technology can extend but not eliminate limits. An acre of land can support only a few mature sugar maples; only so many radishes can grow in a five-foot row of dirt. Similar constraints operate in human affairs. When the population in any environment is small and natural resources plentiful, every additional person increases the welfare of all. As more and more people are added, they need increasingly to exploit the finite resources of the environment. At a certain point, the members of an increasing population become so crowded that they stop benefiting each other; by damaging the environment that supports everyone, by limiting the space available to each person, and by increasing the amount of waste and pollution, their activity begins to cause harm. That is, population growth changes from good to bad. And if the population continues to expand, its material demands may so severely damage the environment as to cause a tragedy of the commons -- the collapse of both environment and society.

Those cases illustrate the fact that many activities are right -- morally justified -- when only a limited number of people do them. The same activities become wrong -- immoral -- when populations increase, and more and more resources are exploited.

Few people seem to understand the nature of steady growth. Any rate of growth has a doubling time: the period of time it takes for a given quantity to double. It is a logical inevitability -- not a matter subject to debate -- that it takes only a relatively few doublings for even a small number to equal or exceed any finite quantity, even a large one.

One way to look at the impact of growth is to think of a resource that would last 100 years if people consumed it at a constant rate. If the rate of consumption increased 5 percent each year, the resource would last only 36 years. A supply adequate for 1,000 years at a constant rate would last 79 years at a 5-percent rate of growth; a 10,000-year supply would last only 125 years at the same rate. Just as no trees grow to the sky, no growth rate is ultimately sustainable.

Because the natural resources available for human use are finite, exponential growth will use them up in a relatively small number of doublings. The only possible questions are those of timing: When will the resources be too depleted to support the population? When will human society, which is now built on perpetual growth, fail?

The mathematics makes it clear: Any human activity that uses matter or energy must reach a steady state (or a periodic cycle of boom and bust, which over the long run is the same thing). If not, it inevitably will cease to exist. The moral of the story is obvious: Any system of economics or ethics that requires or even allows steady growth in the exploitation of resources is designed to collapse. It is a recipe for disaster.

It is self-deception for anyone to believe that historical evidence contradicts mathematical necessity. The fact that the food supply since the time of Malthus has increased faster than the human population does not refute Malthus's general thesis: that an increasing population must, at some time, need more food, water, and other vital resources than the finite earth or creative technology can supply in perpetuity. In other words, the finitude of the earth makes it inevitable that any behavior causing growth in population or in the use of resources -- including human moral, political, and economic behavior -- will sooner or later be constrained by scarcity.

Unlike current ethics, the ethics of the commons builds on the assumption of impending scarcity. Scarcity requires double-entry bookkeeping: Whenever someone gains goods or services that use matter or energy, someone else must lose matter or energy. If the starving people of a distant nation get food aid from the United States, then the United States loses that amount of food; it also loses the fertility of the soil that produced the food. To a point, that arrangement is appropriate and workable. Soon, however, helping one group of starving people may well mean that we cannot help others. Everything that a government does prevents it from doing something else. When you have to balance a budget, you can say yes to some important services only by saying no to others. Similarly, the ethics of the commons must rely on trade-offs, not rights. It must specify who or what gains, and who or what loses.

Indeed, in a finite world full of mutually dependent beings, you never can do just one thing. Every human activity that uses matter or energy pulls with it a tangled skein of unexpected consequences. Conditions of crowding and scarcity can cause moral acts to change from beneficial to harmful, or even disastrous; acts that once were moral can become immoral. We must constantly assess the complex of consequences, intended or not, to see if the overall benefit of seemingly moral acts outweighs their overall harm.

As Hardin suggested, the collapse of any common resource can be avoided only by limiting its use. The ethics of the commons builds on his idea that the best and most humane way of avoiding the tragedy of the commons is mutual constraint, mutually agreed on and mutually enforced.

Most important, the ethics of the commons must prevent a downward spiral to scarcity. One of its first principles is that the human population must reach and maintain a stable state -- a state in which population growth does not slowly but inexorably diminish the quality of, and even the prospect for, human life. Another principle is that human exploitation of natural resources must remain safely below the maximum levels that a healthy and resilient ecosystem can sustain. A third is the provision of a margin of safety that prevents natural disasters like storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions from causing unsupportable scarcity.

Not to limit human behavior in accordance with those principles would be not only myopic, but also ultimately a moral failure. To let excess human fertility or excess demand for material goods and services cause a shortage of natural resources is as immoral as theft and murder, and for the same reasons: They deprive others of their property, the fruits of their labors, their quality of life, or even their lives.

The ethics of the commons is a pragmatic ethics. It denies the illusion that human moral behavior occurs in a never-never land, where human rights and duties remain unchanging, and scarcity can never cancel moral duties. It does not allow a priori moral arguments to dictate behavior that must inevitably become extinct. It accepts the necessity of constraints on both production and reproduction. As we learn how best to protect the current and future health of the earth's ecosystems, the ethics of the commons can steadily make human life more worth living.

As populations increase and environments deteriorate, the moral laws that humans have relied on for so long can no longer solve the most pressing problems of the modern world. Human rights are an inadequate and inappropriate basis on which to distribute scarce resources, and we must propose and debate new ethical principles.

Herschel Elliott is an emeritus associate professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. Richard D. Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, is a university professor at the University of Denver and executive director of its Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues.

Reprinted with permission of the authors.

"Finding the Trimtab" is a talk by Jonette Christian, presented at the the third annual environmental conference on Global Environmental and Social Issues in Aspen, CO, hosted by the Sopris Foundation and the Worldwatch Institute during July 12-14, 2002.

This is a wonderful and insightful talk explaining the dysfunctionality of our society that refuses to examine the multiple and significant impacts of mass immigration. It is very worthwhile reading:

Our situation is serious. Global emissions of CO2 have quadrupled since 1950 and the climate of our planet is rapidly changing in perilous ways. Although a well designed effort to educate world elites is gradually producing results this movement is much much too slow. The solution to our problem is more complex than simply educating leaders. In short, the behavior, the expectations, and the thinking patterns of 6 billion people must change, and they must change rapidly in billions of unforeseeable ways. It is commonly said that we need leadership that is capable of thinking outside the box but ideas that come from outside of the box are jarring and uncomfortable and that is why they are outside of the box - and we only consider them unless we are absolutely forced to do so.

Twenty years ago I was introduced to a metaphor from Buckminster Fuller, called the "trimtab factor". Imagine you are on the deck of an ocean liner with l000 people. Rocks are looming ahead and you must find a way to steer the boat to safety. One person stands in the bow, pointing out the rocks, and the passengers try to steer the ship with their weight, running from side to side in response to the guide's gestures. It's a clumsy method with a doubtful outcome. However, in the steering mechanism of a real ocean liner is a piece of metal 6 inches square called a trimtab. One person moving the trimtab can steer an ocean liner more effectively than even 10,000 people running back and forth on the deck. As individuals, the problems confronting us are enormous and tremendously complex. Therefore, it is vital that we look for the trimtab - that place to take action which will maximize our leverage on the course of human history.

Many changes are essential in building a sustainable future, but our job right now is to find the action that is most powerful for this particular moment. We need to find a trimtab.

Twenty years ago I believed that the trimtab for a sustainable economy lay in a global commitment to ending world hunger a commitment which might shape all of our decisions in light of this one great unifying purpose. This goal would require long term planning, it would demand a whole new relationship with the environment, to natural resources and to each other. We would be forced to think differently, to look for new solutions and most important, it would unify humanity in achieving our most important purpose to feed our children. So I joined multiple hunger organizations, taught a mini course on the problems in developing countries, recruited friends and family to become monthly contributors to hunger organizations, and wrote many letters. I believed that we needed to live this goal seven days a week. And every year on the birthday of my children I fasted and gave more money to remind myself of this commitment.

I was a little short on the details of how the plan would work, but I made up for it with passion. And in any case, shooting from my good liberal hip, I was pretty certain I had the big picture right. It is a common failing of idealists that we sometimes become infatuated with the moral beauty of our vision for the world, and the moral beauty of ourselves working for that vision. It was hard for this global idealist to humble herself - to think small and to think locally but eventually I made the transition. And I consider it no small achievement to have successfully resisted that beguiling temptation to believe that I was chosen to save the world.

Today I see things very differently. I am still committed to a world with a sustainable future, but I am no longer a global idealist and I no longer believe that simply calling for the end of world hunger will lead mankind in some new and glorious direction. Today, I'm an older woman and more experienced with people. Today I believe that the trimtab meaning the place to put my weight to maximize my leverage lies right here in my native land, the land I feel most closely connected to, the land where I speak the language, pay the taxes and vote. I am working to stabilize the population of the United States because continuous population growth is simply not sustainable. We need to shrink our consumption and our footprint upon the world, to reduce our growth by moderating the predominant factor driving that growth immigration - to teach our people the importance of sustainable planning for our own descendants, to become responsible stewards of the land we inherited, and to bring the attention of this nation back inward to the needs of our own people. In short, I have downsized. In the media and among academics and globalist elites, people like me are dismissed as "nativist" or "xenophobic". But among the people I work with, we see our work as community activism directed toward preserving the local economy; livable wages for local people, and the local culture.

I started Mainers for Immigration Reform while working with Maine loggers who were being replaced by Canadian and Mexican workers. The lumber companies didn't have to pay health insurance for the Canadians, and both Canadians and Mexicans were willing to work for less because their dollar denominated wages bought more when sent home. The lumber companies were happy; the international workers were happy. Too bad for Maine loggers and their communities, who for generations had earned modest but livable wages performing this dangerous work. . Nearly all Maine loggers have now migrated out of state to find jobs to support their families they were told that in the service of a global economy, they must find better jobs by learning computer skills and leave their old jobs to foreign workers willing to work for much less. This chaos is called "efficiency" in a global labor market.

I wish I could report that Mainers organized on behalf of their loggers, many of whose families have lived in our state for generations, but in fact, the only group of Maine people who got involved was the local progressive community. Applying their tired old agenda rather than analyzing the current situation, they framed the conflict as workers against bosses and tried to organize a coalition of immigrant workers and loggers. Not surprisingly, the loggers were insulted; the effort failed, and it didn't build good feelings.

What happened to Maine loggers has happened all over this country in one industry after another: poultry processing, garment making, food processing, construction and agriculture. In l979 Iowa slaughterhouse workers made solid middle class incomes, and no company had trouble remaining profitable while treating its workers well. These jobs sustained whole communities and were jealously handed down through generations. Expressed in present dollars, these workers were making $18.32 an hour. By 2000, average wages had fallen to $10.32 an hour, and entry level wages were as low as $6 an hour.

Congress rewrote our immigration laws in l965, which led to spiraling family chain migration and introduced massive refugee resettlement operations swelling the pool of low wage workers. In the early l980's the meat packing industry was completely reorganized in response to the availability of cheap foreign workers.

Newly formed nonunion companies, like IOWA Beef Processors, took advantage of abundant foreign labor by slashing pay, speeding up the processing lines, and allowing safety conditions to deteriorate to an appalling level.

The old companies that had paid good wages, like Armour, Hormel, Swift and Wilson could not compete. They slashed wages or declared bankruptcy and Iowa Beef Processors acquired one third of the national red meat slaughter market.

Americans were not accustomed to such low wages and shameful working conditions. But immigrants, legal and illegal, were willing to take these jobs. And so the story was told that we needed immigrants to do the "jobs that Americans wont do". Just as Mainers used to cut their own trees, so Americans always slaughtered their own meat and earned a living wage doing it until Congress decided to rig the system for nonunion companies by swamping the labor market with millions of new workers. Dr. George Borjas, Harvard economist and this nation's most acknowledged expert on the labor impact of immigration, estimates that native born American workers are losing $160 billion a year due to competition from immigrant labor. The savings to business from cheap labor travels upwards to the employers and stockholders, contributing to the glaring income disparities we have today.

I am certain that if we were importing a million and half lawyers every year, shrinking their hourly billing rates, Congress would be passing legislation to reduce immigration before the day was over. But the fact is, immigration predominately impacts the working poor who do not have the political clout to determine policy.

In a recent New York Times story, Allan Greenspan made the following candid remarks regarding his support for immigration: "Unless immigration is uncapped . . . wage increases must rise above even impressive gains in productivity. This would intensify inflationary pressures or squeeze profit margins." In other words, a continual supply of cheap foreign labor is necessary to keep wages low and profit margins high. This economy is not designed to meet the needs of our people. We have created a behemoth that is requiring people to service it. Our government is rapidly pursing policies to dissolve our borders, and turn all workers into migrating economic units, each searching for a job with a livable wage. There is nothing kind or compassionate or even rational about this policy it is a vicious and shameful weapon against the working poor, forcing common laborers, minorities, and recent immigrants to compete against each other in a race to the bottom and those who mistakenly believe that we are "sharing America's wealth with the poor" are not the ones who do the sharing. Post l970 immigrants and their descendants have added more than 55 million people to our country; this is the equivalent of absorbing all of Central America in thirty years. To quote Voltaire: "The rich will always require an abundant supply of the poor".

And where will this breath taking population growth lead a nation of high consuming people and how will it impact the world? According to the Census Bureau, if we continue to grow at the current rate, we will DOUBLE our population in the lifetime of our children, and at least 70% of this growth will be due to just one government policy: our immigration policy. What legacy do we leave to the future when we have deliberately doubled the population of every American city, doubled the need for highways and petroleum, houses, shopping malls, schools, hospitals, prisons? Even if we manage to cut consumption in half we have achieved nothing if we allow this growth to happen. It is irrational to think that any consumption based plan, such as the Kyoto Treaty, could possibly succeed in the absence of a simultaneous reduction in population growth.

One of the consequences of our infatuation with global idealism is that America is no longer comfortable discussing our own welfare. We have been shamed and intimidated by past errors of Western civilization; the harm we have caused in other parts of the world; the greed of our corporations, and we feel enormous guilt for this wrong doing. And increasingly it seems that our success has become an illusion. Our children have grown obese and highly medicated for depression and hyper activity. We pay strangers to cook our meals, clean our homes, mow our lawns and perform the most intimate care of our loved ones. Our families are disconnected. We are stressed out, over worked, and lonely. We continually berate ourselves for materialism even as we slavishly enable the very policies which continue it. We teach our youth to sneer at the "dead white men" who founded their country and to idealize foreign people and foreign cultures, gushing and cooing about all kinds of diversity, and how foreign people will improve us, enrich us, and revitalize our communities- and we think nothing of how insulting and hostile that message really is.

Recently I read a story about a New York City school with many immigrant children. And the administrators reported that immigrant children were much better behaved, more respectful and hardworking. Studies are now indicating that as immigrant children assimilate they acquire the same level of teenage pregnancy, school drop out, obesity and drug addiction as their America peers. The point is, we have a problem which must be solved from within.

The guilt that we bear for America's history will not be absolved by pursuing a policy of mass immigration today. Our grandchildren do not deserve to be punished for the errors of their grandparents, and no global mission, no matter how altruistic, absolves us of responsibility to our own people

The world grew by 78 million last year, most of it coming from impoverished nations. The United States admitted about 1 million legal immigrants and 700,000 illegal immigrants. In terms of saving people from poverty, it was a trifle a little something to alleviate our western guilt which accomplished nothing for most of the world. The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a cruel hoax to promote the fantasy that we will take in the world's huddled masses, because we cant..

As a family therapist, I work with families who are trapped in dysfunctional patterns: domestic violence, alcoholism, abusive parenting, and poverty. These are not bad people. They were brought to their misery by a long series of disastrous choices with unintended consequences, and they do not see how to free themselves from the results they produce. What I bring to this conference on sustainability is my experience working with dysfunctional families which may have bearing upon the larger problem of dysfunction that concerns us today.

I will list a few basic observations which I believe are pertinent to our discussion.

First, there is a difference between saving people and building a relationship in which people see for themselves what they need to do to change. Much of our foreign policy in the third world has vacillated between using other people and generating grand plans to save them. Ultimately, neither response is helpful. They will see more clearly what they need to do, when we see what we need to do. We need to put our own house in order and build sustainability into national planning for this country.

Second, How people treat each other within a group will largely determine what result that group will produce. This is true for families, and it is true in nations. Poverty, overpopulation, authoritarian government, political corruption and high infant mortality rates are the product of cultures in which neither women nor children are truly valued or have a voice in group decisions. Having more children than you can care for is the product of a dysfunctional set of beliefs, and having many children is not the same thing as valuing children.

A third observation. Dysfunctional groups are dominated by what they don't talk about. Since l990 we have added 38 million people to America's population, and if we continue to grow at this rate, we will double ourselves in less than 70 years. And we are not talking about it! A recent study of media coverage of environmental problems, such as water shortages and loss of wildlife, found that fewer than l1% of these stories mentioned population growth as a cause and none of them suggested none-that stabilizing population could be part of the solution. This is lunacy. We are responding like deer with headlights in our eyes paralyzed or else indifferent and we would rather talk about almost anything else: urban sprawl, pollution, traffic, falling water tables, declining fish stocks, women's empowerment, housing shortages, economic justice anything to avoid blunt speech about population numbers and the painfully obvious connection between these numbers and nearly every problem we are trying to solve. How can we be so dense? Speaking as a therapist, this is the speech pattern of dysfunctional groups - avoiding or minimizing the "pink elephant" in the living room at all costs, and exhausting themselves in a flurry of chatter around peripheral matters. We have agitated and deluded ourselves with the illusion that we are being overwhelmed by many many problems, when in fact, we have primarily only one.

Fourth point. Dysfunctional families commonly take in outsiders in what appears to be a breathtaking gesture of generosity. A closer examination of this behavior often reveals that this generosity is not driven by kindness; it is not nice, it is not what it seems to be, it is a ploy to dominate and control other members within a family; and these relationships rarely last. America's current immigration policies have this nation engaged in a breathtaking gesture of self sacrifice and generosity to outsiders. But look carefully, this policy is destroying the living standard and the political power of working class Americans. Dysfunction commonly masquerades as something it is not, and that is why it is so difficult to see what it really is. But you will know it by the result it produces. Number five. In dysfunctional families everyone is responsible for every one else's business, and no one is responsible for any business of his own. We call it a boundary problem, and it always produces chaos and paralysis. Environmentalists often describe population as a "global" problem with a "global solution" meaning no one in particular is responsible for any piece of it because we're all responsible for it -- therefore no one ends up being responsible for any of it. This is dysfunction masquerading as a high moral plane.

Some comments about race and my sixth point. Race is the problem that never seems to go away, and it is always shaping and affecting our thoughts in subtle ways. In l970 when Earth Day gave birth to the environmental movement and America's population growth was primarily driven by the fertility rate of anglo-european Americans, we had no trouble speaking openly about the need to reduce our numbers . According to Senator Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, stabilizing the population of the United States was one of our top environmental priorities in 1970. Within a few years our fertility rates had declined, and we were on the road to stabilization. But when immigration became the primary source of population growth in this country, the environmental movement grew timid about the need to reduce our own numbers. Today, there are more than 60 environmental organizations in Washington, and almost none of them is working to stabilize the population of this country. 90% of our immigrants are coming from non-European countries. If immigration were driven by Europeans, we would be having a straight forward national debate about numbers and their impact on our society, just as we did in l970. And why cant we do that now? Stabilizing our population benefits everyone who lives here regardless of their race or national origin.

The eerie silence of the environmental movement over the past fifteen years concerning population growth has been disastrous. Just as we ask today, what did Germans know, when did they know it, and what were they talking about when that holocaust was looming on their horizon, so our descendants will ask, what did we know about population growth over the past three decades and what were we talking about. This silence has been especially cruel for the continent of Africa. Despite dumping billions of dollars of aid into Africa by Western nations over the past three decades, the population doubling rate today is about 30 years and the per capita protein consumption is less than it was in l970. The population juggernaut in Africa has been carefully documented and widely known for decades we cannot plead ignorance. We deliberately chose to minimize the subject.

If you see someone you care about barreling toward a cliff at 100 miles an hours, wouldn't you want to wave every red flag you could find, wouldn't you be jumping up and down pointing to that cliff, and would you give a damm because some people told you to mind your own business? Western people were told that the fertility rate of Africans was none of our business. And we went mute. Had we been motivated purely by compassion, we might have protested and responded with conviction: No way. Stabilizing population is about child survival, and it has nothing to do with race . People may not want to hear it. But that is no reason to stop talking about it. People don't want to talk about women's rights in Pakistan, and that is not a reason to be quiet or to minimize the subject. As long as we are intimidated by the word "racist" or "elitist" and we are still trying to prove that we aren't, we are not really free to speak the truth, or to act from pure compassion. And the accusation of racism will not go away until we face it down.

Number 7. About ending poverty. Experience has shown us that the most successful anti-poverty programs are those directed at educating women, supporting local community organization, and micro-enterprise at the grass roots level. We call it community empowerment. In other words, the dead opposite of the current bi-national plan to end poverty in Mexico which is focused on building gambling casinos, luxurious tourist resorts, maquiladoras and promoting the migration of poor people into a rich country causing unrealistic expectations, chaos and disconnection for communities in both countries. This is a plan concocted by oligarchs on both sides of the border to their mutual advantage. We need to take back our country, and they need to take back theirs.

And finally. The difference between an internationalist and a globalist boils down to this: an internationalist feels deeply connected and responsible to a particular group of people and a particular piece of land. He is respectful and generous to others; he is not an isolationist. A globalist feels no particular connection to any piece of land or any group of people, and he mistakenly believes that he has arrived at a higher moral understanding.

A few final thoughts:

This country was founded by English colonists whose feet were firmly planted in the Age of Enlightenment. They did not set out to save the world. They simply wanted to design the game plan for a nation that would be stable and wisely self governed, based on the ideal that all men are created equal before the law. These English colonists were mindful of the choices before them and how those choices would affect future generations. George Washington used the word "posterity" nine times in one of his speeches, and after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his beloved wife Abigail, "I do not know what will be the outcome of this. We may pay a very high price. But it is certain that posterity will profit from our sacrifice." With our welfare in mind, these men wrote the most brilliant Constitution for self-government the world has ever known. And today, passages from this document are found in the constitutions of democratic governments all over the world. We have been the very fortunate beneficiaries of their wisdom and humility, and the world has been inspired and changed forever by their brilliance. And now the torch has passed to us. Our descendants will live with the choices we are making for them today. And without a doubt, the single most important and timely choice before us is how populous this nation will become. We must decide are we a family of people with an obligation to ourselves and our descendants to plan for the long term well being of our nation or are we simply a rapidly expanding global mass? A mass is not a family.

Sustainability will be achieved in pieces, and America is our piece. And this alone will be a breathtaking challenge. Like territorial animals in nature, order is established by marking the borders and dividing national responsibilities. We cannot handle our piece, if we have open borders, multiple agendas, and global missions. We disempower ourselves when we assume more than we can possibly handle.

Human beings will solve the problem of sustainability within groups. The solutions will vary - there will be no all-purpose Walmart solution. The history and the culture of each group, including our own, must be respected. We will not build sustainability by turning ourselves into a multilingual regional mass. In a mass we are too numerous and too diverse to have meaningful conversation. We have tough choices before us, and these choices will not be reduced to neat little slogans for mass consumption. Sustainability will require exceptionally thoughtful discussion and most important: group cohesion. If we destroy group cohesion, we destroy our ability to act intelligently.

The world will save itself, and it will happen much quicker when America is clearly focused on saving herself. We must build a sustainable future in this country, and set the example for others. Just as we gave the world the game plan for democracy by building it for ourselves, we have inspired the world with a civil rights movement, a woman's movement, an environmental movement, a human rights movement, a men's movement,- where else would you find that one? -a labor movement, and even the movement to end world hunger was created and funded by middle class people in Western countries, and not the educated elites from poor countries who currently flock to this nation for high paying jobs. Whenever Americans have changed themselves and acted on their own behalf, the world has taken note.

Polls show that large majorities of Americans already support greatly reduced levels of immigration, and this support increases as we go down the economic ladder. Over the past five years there have been multiple bills in Congress calling for reductions in immigration we have one in Congress right now all we need to do is pass it or we can continue to move toward open borders, spiraling population growth, spiraling consumption, turning ourselves into a vast "economic region" of migrating multi-lingual economic units, as globalists are promoting, and thereby completely destroying our cohesion as a group and the capacity to determine our future.

If mankind is like the frogs in the boiling water who slowly boil to death because they don't recognize what is happening to themselves, and if nature is not going to give us a wake up call in the form of some electrifying event, then we must supply that event ourselves. A substantial reduction in immigration is the wisest decision for ourselves, and it will have an electrifying effect on the rest of the world. It won't be popular with many. But it will remind the world that we are only one country among many, that running from the problems in your native land is no longer a solution, that the world, and even America, has limits. We do not have a plan for saving the world, and it is time we told people the truth. That illusion must end. The behavior, the thinking patterns, and the expectations of 6 billion people must radically change, and they must change very very soon. The trimtab is here.

Jonette Christian is a practicing family therapist, founder of Mainers for Immigration Reform, Maine, and has been an advisor to CAIRCO.

Copyright 2002 Jonette Christian. Reprinted with permission.

Population, immigration, and global ethics

A talk by Jonette Christian

This is the text of a speech given by Jonette Christian on October 9, 1999 at the Aspen Institute, Aspen Colorado, at the Myth of Sustainable Growth conference.

The United States was founded by a group of English colonists who thought long and deeply about the choices before them in the l8th century and how those choices would impact the lives of their descendants. George Washington used the word "posterity" nine times in one speech. Two centuries later, we are the very fortunate beneficiaries of their exceptional wisdom. Like our forefathers, we are gathered together today for posterity. The work we do... is mostly for future generations. In the midst of our enormous wealth many of us are troubled about the future and we have doubts about whether the direction we are headed will leave a nation to our descendants as beautiful as the one which was left to us.

We are sensitive to the disparity in wealth between ourselves and others, and we are afraid that the racism which has plagued our history might be masquerading as immigration reform.

Nations are like families. We need to have conversations about our affairs which are not altogether comfortable. For a "nation of immigrants" - and everyone of us is either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant - immigration policy has become a very touchy subject. We want everyone in the world to have the opportunity to live as well as we do. We are sensitive to the disparity in wealth between ourselves and others, and we are afraid that the racism which has plagued our history might be masquerading as immigration reform. And for all these reasons and others we avoid this discussion.

800 million people in our world do not have enough food to eat.

800 million people in our world do not have enough food to eat. Hundreds of millions would move here if they could but we are not an open house. The vast majority who deserve a better life will never be able to come here. The immigration debate, which we are not having, is about what level of immigration best serves the long term interests of this nation and the rest of the world. But even before we commence this conversation, we must decide - are we a family of people with an obligation to ourselves and our descendants to plan for the long term well being of our nation - thereby setting an example for the rest of the world, or are we simply a rapidly expanding international mass? A mass is not a family. Where are we going? And how will the way we think about ourselves impact our descendants and the rest of the world?

Human beings have been migrating for l0,000 years and every nation in the world was formed by migrants. We are a nation of immigrants and so is everyone else.

Last year, in a speech on immigration, President Clinton stated, "No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude over so short a time" . . . he went on to say, "Mark my words: Unless we handle this well, immigration of this sweep and scope can threaten the bonds of our union." - threaten the bonds of our union - a remarkable statement from our president, greeted by the press with virtual silence.

Post 1970 immigrants and their descendants have added between 35 and 45 million people to America's population. This is the equivalent of absorbing all of Central America in less than 30 years.

Post l970 immigrants and their descendants have added between 35 and 45 million people to America's population. (1) This is the equivalent of absorbing all of Central America in less than 30 years. If current immigration levels are not changed, then we will double our population in less than 70 years - and 90% of this growth will be due to recent immigrants and their descendants. These are the numbers from the US Census Bureau which account for Clinton' s sobering words. Can any of us imagine living in America when every city has double its present population, and is still growing? Double the traffic, double the number of houses, schools, prisons, etc? Is this the future we want to leave to our children? The America people were never asked if we wanted to bring this enormous growth upon ourselves and our families. We were never consulted.

Immigration levels are determined solely by Congress, and Congress is free at any moment to alter the number of immigrants. For example, the current level of immigration is about four times greater than we averaged through out most of this century. Immigration laws have usually been written in response to the demands of special interests who profit in some way from this policy. Their profit is extremely expensive for the rest of us. Many immigrants and recently naturalized citizens are using: Medicaid, SSI, Social Security, subsidized housing, fuel assistance, food stamps, TANF, bilingual education, subsidized legal aid, and earned income tax credits. The disparity between what immigrants pay into these programs and what they use in services runs into billions of dollars every year.

Adjusted for inflation, real average weekly earnings of working class Americans have dropped 20% since l973, as a function of the law of supply and demand in the labor market.

As a family therapist I work with that class of Americans who clean their own houses, who mow their own lawns, and who wash their own clothes - I see an overworked, overstressed sector of our society - in which two people must work long hours in order to provide a modest living for only two children. Adjusted for inflation, real average weekly earnings of working class Americans have dropped 20% since l973, as a function of the law of supply and demand in the labor market. The enormous costs of mass immigration is falling upon their shoulders. We should not be surprised if they become irritable and unsympathetic to the cause of bringing in millions and millions of outsiders. Advocates for illegal immigrants and mass immigration often use stirring words like "social justice" and "resisting oppression" and "building community" to justify their views. But building community begins with respect for your fellow citizens. They deserve to be consulted. Enthusiasm for embracing outsiders has made advocates for immigrants oblivious to the burdens they place upon their fellow countrymen - and this is no way to build community.

Discussion about where immigration policy is leading us is often dismissed with the remark, "Oh, but we're a nation of immigrants" - Human beings have been migrating for l0,000 years and every nation in the world was formed by migrants. We are a nation of immigrants and so is everyone else. But lets take a brief look at our history of immigration and the unadorned truth about what happened during this period.

In l870 American wages were 136% the wages of Europeans, and from this position of strength labor unions began to organize. (2) In response to the labor union movement, capitalists and factory owners decided to import European workers in order to expand the labor pool and flatten American wages. They began by advertising American jobs in Europe and paying steerage for those workers to come to America. What began as a trickle rapidly became a deluge when the disparity of wages was fully appreciated in Europe.

From about l925 to l965...we averaged no more than l78,000 immigrants a year.

By the early l900's after decades of massive numbers of new workers, American wages had lost half the pay advantage relative to European wages. This period was known as The Great Wave, and many of us have ancestors who came during this period. Our cities were crowded with slum tenements; the middle class was shrinking; we had glaring disparities of poverty and wealth, and anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments were heard from many sectors of our population., including Black leadership. Blacks could see that immigration was destroying their chance at the good entry level jobs. Legislation to limit immigration was introduced yearly - and three times during this period, legislation controlling immigration was passed but vetoed by presidents whose sympathies lay with the wealthy who profited from cheap abundant labor. With the arrival of World War I, the flood was naturally stemmed and by this time the public demand to shut the door had reached such intensity that a series of laws were passed to restrict immigration. It was during this period from about l925 to l965 when we averaged no more than l78,000 immigrants a year that our newest citizens, who had arrived during the Great Wave, finally got their chance to enter the main stream. The labor shortage which resulted in higher wages for everyone, allowed unions to grow, and promoted a solid middle class. By l960 our feelings toward immigrants had completely changed - we elected the grandson of an Irish immigrant to the White House and for the first time, we began to describe ourselves as a "nation of immigrants". It was during this period of low immigration that American blacks got their first chance at middle class wages. Northern factory owners were now forced to recruit black workers from the South. In l940 22% of blacks had middle class incomes and by l970, 71% of blacks had incomes in the middle class. (3) These tremendous gains were mostly accomplished before the Civil Rights movement or affirmative action, and in the face of Jim Crow laws, and institutional racism.

Since l970 due to changes in our immigration laws we have received millions of new workers, and that number 71% has just slightly improved; 30% of Hispanics live below the poverty line, and on some Indian reservations, the unemployment rate is above 70%. These are stunning numbers when you consider the enormous wealth this country has created since l970 and the determined efforts we have made to rid ourselves of racism. Even so, nearly one third of our black population continues to struggle to get into the middle class, forced to compete with a flood of foreign workers. The unemployment rate for blacks and other minorities continues to be much higher than it is for whites today, and the absolute number of people living in poverty continues to grow.

Our current immigration policy results in a $160 billion dollar yearly transfer of wealth from unskilled workers into the hands of their employers

According to Dr. George Borjas, Cuban immigrant and Harvard economist, our nation's leading scholar on the labor impact of immigration, (one of the authors of the National Academy of Sciences study on the economic impact of immigration) our current immigration policy results in a $160 billion dollar yearly transfer of wealth from unskilled workers into the hands of their employers due to the availability of immigrant labor. (4) In other words, our current immigration policy is making it increasing difficult for our most vulnerable populations - blacks, minorities, recent immigrants, and the poor to earn a living wage. Immigration on our current scale has been hugely profitable to certain sectors of our population, but never have we seen such disparity between rich and poor as we see in America today.

Congress remains indifferent...and our government continues to force us to accept millions and millions of new citizens. Our media colludes with this policy by minimizing impartial debate and withholding an enormous amount of information about what is happening to this nation due to our immigration laws.

The benefits which massive immigration brings to immigrants and to their employers has been the exclusive focus of our media. We are presented with numerous human interest stories about the success of individual immigrant families who left dreadful circumstances, and we are often told, in glowing terms, about the booming prosperity and growth of diversity in our communities. We are told that more and more diversity is always good for us, and it has been virtually impossible to discuss any negative impacts. For instance, our media rarely mentions the enormous fiscal costs which immigration on this scale places upon receiving communities and the middle class who must fund the social services of rapidly growing immigrant colonies, predominately poor and with many children who require special education and bi lingual classes, nor the long term environmental impact of such massive population growth, nor the negative impact on jobs and wages for the working poor, nor the ethnic conflict which such rapid demographic change causes. We have characterized thoughtful discussion about the negative impacts of massive immigration as racist or xenophobic.

Many Americans feel that bringing in millions of mostly impoverished people from third world nations is a generous and ethical thing to do, a way to share the wealth. But this generosity is having unintended consequences which are very destructive to this country and to the rest of the world, and it does nothing to empower third world people to solve the problems in their native land. Saving people is not the same thing as empowering people to save themselves.

If we are motivated by true compassion for mankind, then it is time to step up to the plate - forego the empty humanitarian gesture of "saving" a handful of outsiders - and commit ourselves to a world in which all people are empowered to provide for their families. This is the future we want - so where do we begin to focus our attention?

Denying, obfuscating, and minimizing population growth... is a hate crime against future generations - and it must end.

Today there are 6 billion people on the planet and we are adding a billion more every 12 years. According to UN projections, world population will grow at least another 3 billion in the next century. We will leave to our descendants the awesome task of feeding, housing, educating, and employing at least 9 billion people and with far less farm land and less ground water than we have today. As this future descends upon our children, public silence about these numbers is deafening. We are responding like deer with headlights in our eyes-paralyzed, or else indifferent - and we would rather talk about almost anything else: urban sprawl, pollution, global warming, declining fish stocks, falling water tables, increasing energy consumption, over crowded schools, and ethnic cleansing, - anything to avoid blunt speech about population numbers. Speaking as a family therapist, this is the behavior of dysfunctional groups - they avoid conversation about the pink elephant in their living room at all costs, and they exhaust themselves in a flurry of helpful activity around peripheral matters. We have agitated, confused and deluded ourselves with the illusion that we are being overwhelmed by many, many problems - when in fact, we have primarily only one. But it is the one that terrifies us the most - and we handle that terror by chattering endlessly about everything else. Denying, obfuscating, and minimizing population growth in l999 is a hate crime against future generations - and it must end.

Polls show that Americans were better informed and more worried about population in l970 during Earth Day, than we are today. For 30 years the impact of population has been minimized and all but ignored.

Population is glibly dismissed today as a "global problem" requiring a "global solution.". It makes a good sound bite, but it is simply not true. According to the Population Institute, better than 95% of the world's growth comes from just 20 third world nations. (5) Population growth is driven by specific groups; it is not global. Regarding those mythical "global" solutions, they do not exist. Human beings live in groups. We define ourselves by our group, and we solve our problems in groups. We do not solve our problems in a mass. In a mass, we are too many and too diverse to have meaningful conversation with each other - and the problems are more complex than simply "respecting diversity" or "learning to share". Each country must put its own house in order. The kind of public debate that people need to have to stabilize their growth in a country like Pakistan will not be the same as the conversation in a country like Guatemala or the United States. But we cannot stabilize world population when cultures with astronomical growth are permitted. to send their citizens into countries with stable fertility rates.

We often hear that population is just a "symptom" and that the real problems are poverty and economic injustice. This is the reasoning that caused us to minimize the importance of population growth over the past 30 years and to focus our efforts instead on correcting the disparity between haves and have-nots. But our results are not encouraging. For example, western nations have poured massive aid into Africa over the previous 3 decades, and today the per capita protein consumption is less than it was in l970 and the population doubling rate is 28 years. By contrast, China, during the same period and with virtually no Western aid at all, dramatically ended hunger, lowered infant mortality rates, increased life expectancy and delivered basic education and health care to 1.2 billion people. China - in contrast to most third world countries - isolated herself from the West, confronted her situation, and forged solutions which were acceptable within her culture.

Western involvement in other people's problems has not been notoriously successful, even when we meant to be generous. Many experts are now conceding that we gravely misunderstood the fundamental cause of third world poverty.

Poverty, overpopulation, slavery and high infant mortality rates pervade societies in which women and children have few rights. These societies are patriarchal, rigid, organized around tribal and ethnic loyalties, and lacking democratic values. How you treat women and children is not a minor consideration - it affects every aspect of a society . According to the Christian Science Monitor, l00 million children have been sold into slavery or prostitution mostly by their own relatives and many have been maimed in order to make them more pitiful when they beg. We are often told that people have large families in order to solve the problem of poverty in their old age simply because they are poor. There is another possibility. When selling your children or maiming them is never an acceptable option to begin with, then you are forced to arrive at other solutions long before you come to the point of desperation - you must think differently and every choice that society makes all along the way for generations will be affected by this fundamental value. Not all poor people choose to solve their poverty by having many children. Overpopulation is a sorry excuse for the collective failure to plan for the well being of ones descendants - having children is not the same thing as valuing children.

In Japan we see the difference between a society which confronts poverty by seeking to improve conditions for their children, as opposed to a society that uses their children to solve their poverty. The difference is in the value placed on children - and that is the difference that makes all the difference in the world.

In l945 Japan was a basket case - a third world economy by any definition of poverty - bankrupt, humiliated, suffering a famine. Yet this tiny densely populated island, with few natural resources and no oil, stunned the world in just 25 years with an economic miracle which left us breathless and which seemed to defy reason. Today Japan is the second largest economy in the world. What many people do no realize is that this miracle began in part with a mutual decision by the Japanese people to have smaller families. In the late 40's the Japanese realized that in order to compete with the West they would need to produce a generation of Japanese with superior health and a superior education. In order to maximize their limited post war resources, they would need to have a much smaller number of children. The media openly discussed this matter and Japanese fertility rates took a dramatic decline. Today, Japanese children are the healthiest and best educated children in the world, and the Japanese population is expected to shrink dramatically in the next century, which is a great gift to the world from a nation of high consuming people.

In Japan we see the difference between a society which confronts poverty by seeking to improve conditions for their children, as opposed to a society that uses their children to solve their poverty. The difference is in the value placed on children - and that is the difference that makes all the difference in the world.

When I was growing up back in the l960's, a paper mill near our town was polluting our air. A group of concerned women in our community organized themselves and began to demand that the company put scrubbers on those smoke stacks. Some people were annoyed by these uppity women who went house to house stirring up public debate. But they kept at it, and the scrubbers were eventually installed. We know that if you let things slide, the problems just accumulate - and there's no one to save us, but ourselves. And we raise our children with this conviction. In nations with predominately western cultures this is a common story. Our country was founded by people who took action to solve their problems, who questioned the prevailing beliefs, - as we are today in this conference - activism runs in our blood and in our history, and even in our marriages, men and women are having conversations with each other which would not be tolerated in other cultures. We have endless petition drives, referendums, concerned citizen groups, talk shows, and neighborhood coalitions. We don't expect government - even when freely elected - to solve our problems without our continual involvement. And we know that all of us are responsible for the common welfare. Largely due to this work , these traditions and these attitudes which distinguish our unique cultural heritage, we have the prosperity, the social justice, and the democracy which accounts for our amazing success.

I never really appreciated this remarkable quality about us until I experienced a Latin culture. For three generations, my family have been friends with a middle class family of well educated Mexicans - and we have exchanged children over the summers. On a recent visit I noticed that the river which used to run through their city with many bridges over it had completely disappeared. No one seemed to know or to care what had happened to their river. They simply weren't interested. I was astonished. Can you imagine that any American community would allow a whole river to simply disappear - with so little interest from the people? Are we surprised that Mexicans are now sending their people to find employment throughout America? A culture which allows a river to disappear might just as easily find itself without jobs for their children. The wealthy and the educated who might have been organizing an environmental movement in Mexico , who might have been organizing a war on poverty or political corruption, or a conference like this one which challenges the prevailing doctrines on growth have instead decided to promote the migration of their many poor and uneducated citizens into American communities. And are we truly a good neighbor by collaborating with this solution? In l940 Mexico had a population of only 19 million. Today her population is l00 million, not including the millions which have already immigrated to America. The population doubling rate is just 32 years. The poverty, environmental degradation, and human suffering which this astronomical growth produces was not caused by American racism, social injustice, capitalism, or even corporate greed - but far more common human failings: procrastination, denial, and the failure of an entire culture to examine itself and make changes.

Culture is fundamental in understanding poverty and high growth. Authoritarian cultures, not surprisingly produce authoritarian governments, and these nations are especially vulnerable to economic domination from outsiders. For instance, multinational corporations can obtain unfair advantages in a country like Guatemala, which would never be tolerated in a country like Denmark. The ruling elites of Latin America have had little interest in protecting the welfare of their own people. But the problem lies within the culture. In Latin societies there is no code of conduct that calls for social responsibility or citizen activism outside of the family. Consequently, very few political leaders in Latin America leave office without amassing tremendous wealth for themselves and their relatives. Latin presidents do not turn to their people and say, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Patriotism of this order is sadly missing. Political corruption, nepotism and petty thievery pervade these nations, and there is barely a whisper of protest from the people. The awesome price for generations and generations of citizen passivity and neglect for the common welfare is painful indeed.

It is not an accident that America has given the world the game plan for modern democracy and the example of a culture which continually works to improve itself: a labor movement, a woman's movement, a civil rights movement, an environmental movement, a war on poverty, an anti - war movement, a human rights movement, and a men's movement - where else would you find Promise Keepers and a Million Man March - even the clean clothes campaign and the movement to end world hunger did not begin with the educated elites in poor nations, who currently flock to America for high paying jobs, but with middle class western people who were moved by the plight of desperate suffering in third world nations and who funded the many organizations working on these causes. We are a culture that is continually examining ourselves and making changes, setting new standards for human rights for the whole world, and inviting everyone to participate in this work.

In my state of Maine we have teenagers who go house to house with the Maine People's Alliance, lobbying for health care, environmental protection, and campaign finance reform. My daughter worked for the Alliance when she was l8 years old, canvassing the state of Maine with a group of youth all of whom were under the age of 25. The result is that Maine has one of the best campaign finance laws in the country. She discussed these issues with the heads of the households, many of whom were men 2 and 3 times her age. Can you imagine that an 18 year old girl in El Salvador or Pakistan would be given the right to do this work? And what difference does it make to a nation when the intelligence of a young woman is treated with respect? These differences in the way we treat each other - the way we treat women and children, have enormous bearing on the outcome of a society.

From that remarkable group of English colonists who founded this nation, we inherited a tradition of citizen activism and social responsibility that has formed one of the most creative and tolerant societies in the world - and it is not surprising that we have also produced phenomenal wealth. Immigrants from many cultures have come here and been able to create wealth which they could not create in their native land. Our culture has produced one of the most successful systems in the world for generating economic and social opportunity. But our capacity to create wealth is not our most significant gift to the world, and it is not the most important statement about who we are as a people. Without discounting the greed of multinational companies and the past errors of our foreign policy, third world poverty is not caused by Western success. Rather it is culture - the way people treat each other in a group that determines stability and well being above all other factors.

The current population doubling rate in El Salvador is 30 years, the Philippines is 31 years, India is 37 years., and Pakistan is 25 years.

Despite falling birth rates, the current population doubling rate in El Salvador is 30 years, the Philippines is 31 years, India is 37 years., and Pakistan is 25 years. (6) For 4 decades America has been lecturing other countries about stabilizing their population, but we have never been willing to do so ourselves. We are long overdue. We consume more natural resources and produce more pollution on a per capita basis than any nation in the world, and the failure to stabilize our population is unethical and hugely destructive to this planet. In order to stabilize our population we must lower immigration because immigration is the predominant cause of our growth today. Talking about restricting immigration in America is about as controversial as talking about women's rights in Pakistan. But America and Pakistan need to have these uncomfortable political debates if either country is ever going to stabilize its growth.

What are the ethical implications of forcing a nation to tolerate immigration on a scale that is not wanted by the overwhelming majority?

Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans across all class and ethnic lines want immigration drastically reduced. 73% of blacks want it brought below 300,000 a year , according to the latest Roper Poll and according to the Hispanic USA Research Survey Group - 89% of Hispanic Americans strongly support an immediate moratorium on immigration. But Congress remains indifferent to these sentiments - and our government continues to force us to accept millions and millions of new citizens. Our media colludes with this policy by minimizing impartial debate and withholding an enormous amount of information about what is happening to this nation due to our immigration laws. Let us ask some questions about the ethics of what we do.

What are the ethical implications of forcing a nation to tolerate immigration on a scale that is not wanted by the overwhelming majority? Will this policy promote civic cohesion or tolerance for our ethnic differences? Are we confident that we can overcome negative feelings by simply introducing more programs which "teach tolerance" or more conversations about racism? And how long do we plan for this massive immigration to continue?

America exports $40 billion dollars in grain to countries who cannot feed themselves. If our growth continues at the current rate, then we will require every bit of grain produced in this country for our own people within 20 years. (7) What are the ethical implications of allowing our population to grow beyond the point that we can share food with others?

America is 4.7% of the worlds population, but we consume 23% of the natural resources and produce 23% of the pollution that is destroying the biosphere.

America is 4.7% of the worlds population, but we consume 23% of the natural resources and produce 23% of the pollution that is destroying the biosphere. (8) In l950 our entire economy might have run on domestic supplies of oil. By allowing our population to expand, we are now required to import 60% of our petroleum and we must invest billions in defense - largely to protect our access to foreign resources. As we grow more populous - we grow more aggressive and more vulnerable - and we consume a much bigger share of the world's wealth.

Even at our present population , we are using our ground water for irrigating our crop lands faster than the rate of repletion in 21 % of our aquifers. (8) What are the ethical implications of pursuing growth policies now which leave our grandchildren with insufficient ground water?

What are the implications of allowing countries with authoritarian governments, dominated by wealthy elites, like the Philippines and Mexico, to send their poor into American labor markets? Would Americans tolerate the idea of sending our welfare recipients into Canada as a way of unburdening ourselves of responsibility for our poorest citizens?

Increasing numbers of well educated immigrants are forsaking the problems in their native land in order to earn American wages. What are the ethical implications when we rob poor countries of their most talented citizens? These are the people most capable of solving the problems in their native land. Where would South Africa be if Nelson Mandela had decided to cut and run ?

For the first time in this century we are seeing increasing disparity between rich and poor, and massive immigration is largely responsible. Do we have an obligation to protect the living standard of unskilled workers in this country, or are we going to require them to compete with third world wages? And if we decide not to protect our workers, then who are we as a nation and what are the values we stand for?.

The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a very dangerous piece of folly. Ultimately the world must save itself, and it is a cruel hoax to promote the fantasy that we will take in the world's huddled masses, because we won't and we can't.

The world grew by 78 million people last year, most of it coming from impoverished and overpopulated countries. We took in l.4 million immigrants - legal and illegal. In terms of saving people, it was a trifle - a little something to alleviate our western guilt which accomplished nothing for most of the world. The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a very dangerous piece of folly. Ultimately the world must save itself, and it is a cruel hoax to promote the fantasy that we will take in the world's huddled masses, because we won't and we can't.

Saving people is not the same thing as empowering people to save themselves. If we fail to see this distinction, then we may cause enormous chaos.

We all long for a world in which every child born has the chance to flourish. What are the choices we need to make which will move the world in that direction? We must consider those choices very carefully. Saving people is not the same thing as empowering people to save themselves. If we fail to see this distinction, then we may cause enormous chaos. There is nothing more powerful than putting our own house in order, stabilizing our population, lowering our consumption, planning for the welfare of our descendants, and setting an example of enlightened self government for the world.

References

(1) Beck, Roy; The Case Against Immigration
(2) Beck, Roy; page 44 - Hatton, Timothy Migration and the International Labor Market (3) 1850-1939.
(3) Beck, Roy; page 157.
(4) Borjas, Georg; Heaven's Door; l999.
(5) The Population Institute.
(6) "World Population Data Sheet", published by the Population Reference Bureau.
(7) Pimentel David; Cornell University, Food, Energy, and Society,
How Many Americans Can the Earth Support?,
Impact of Population Growth on Food Supplies and the Environment,
U.S. Food Production Threatened by Rapid Population Growth by David and Marcia Pimentel, 1997, Cornell University.
(8) Imperiled Waters, Impoverished Future: The Decline of Freshwater Ecosystems, Abramovitz, Janet; World Watch papers; March, l996.

Jonette Christian is a practicing family therapist, founder of Mainers for Immigration Reform, Maine, and has been an advisor to CAIRCO.

Copyright 1999 Jonette Christian. Reprinted with permission.