What did you do on Earth Day? Four Ways Mass Immigration Affects Our Environment
What did you do this Earth Day? I took a pledge to have no more children. After all, our nation is already overpopulated. Yet in taking the pledge, I could not help but harbor bitter resentment towards our President and Congress for failing to enforce existing immigration laws. They insist on using mass immigration to double US population within the lifetimes of children born today.
Forgotten on Earth Day: Four Ways Mass Immigration Affects Our Environment, FAIR, April, 2014
Today, people across the world will commemorate Earth Day, taking a moment out of their busy lives to consider what we can do to maintain and improve the health of our environment.
One consideration often lost on U.S. policy makers and even environmental activists is the effect of mass immigration on our natural resources and quality of life. Massive immigration, in excess of 1 million legal permanent residents and tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers every year, has led to an explosion in U.S. population and detrimental effects on our environment.
- Urban Sprawl – 80% of U.S. population growth can be attributed to immigration. This population boom has necessitated housing to be built further away from economic centers and increased land costs. The result: longer commutes, higher costs of living, and encroachment on farmland and wildlife habitats.
- Traffic Congestion – Feel like you’re spending more time in the car these days? There are not only more people on the road, but families are also relocating further away from jobs to find affordable housing. As competition for housing and the number of cars on the road increase due to population growth, Americans are driving more – adding more pollution and frustration to our daily lives.
- Freshwater Consumption – Americans are constantly encouraged to conserve water, however population growth has cancelled out all the gains in conservation and is resulting in an overall rate of use that continues to put a severe strain on the nation’s water supply.
- Erosion of Natural Resources – Mass immigration and population growth leads to increased consumption of natural resources. In addition to the depletion of the water supply, energy resources and food are not infinite in the U.S. Continually admitting over 1 million immigrants a year threatens access to these resources for everyone, particularly low wage workers whose jobs are already at risk because of the inflow of cheaper workers from abroad.
Billions of dollars are at stake for the profiteers of mass immigration. From saving money by employing cheap foreign labor to building new homes, corporations are eager to put the interests of their business before Americans and the environment. And, their money talks in Washington.
There is some good news. We have the tools to control the effect mass illegal and legal immigration has on our environment and our daily lives. By efficiently eliminating illegal immigration and limiting legal immigration to a more sustainable level, the U.S. would be able to ensure Americans have access to jobs, natural resources, and a healthy life. That’s the American dream.
35 Years of Population Growth, FAIR, April, 2014
We are surely in a new era in our national discourse. When FAIR was founded 35 years ago, it was axiomatic that policies designed to rapidly increase the size of the U.S. population were undesirable. By common consent, confirmed by presidential commissions, it was assumed that no national objective could be advanced by encouraging a population size greater than 250 million.
The year FAIR was founded, the U.S. population was 225 million. As this Earth Day approaches, the U.S. population exceeds 315 million. It is not inconceivable that within a few short years, nearly 100 million people will have been added to the United States (225 million to 325 million) in the years since the dawn of the modern “true immigration reform” movement. Nearly all of this increase comes about as a result of post-1970 immigration. Most of it was not planned or projected. And how has this helped? Is traffic easier, land cheaper, water tables higher, education better, jobs more plentiful, is the economy stronger, the nation healthier? Is the middle class more stable? Welfare dependency and food stamp use on the decline? What about the gap between rich and poor? In what way has this rapid population growth improved the national ecology and environment?
The truth is that mass immigration has made our most important domestic policy objectives even harder to reach. And yet, increasingly, the mainstream environmental lobby has not only abandoned any commitment to U.S. population stabilization, many groups now actively encourage overcrowding through aggressive immigration increases. Recently, the Sierra Club endorsed the Senate immigration reform after earlier insisting the [Sierra] Club would simply take no position on immigration.1
Anyone traveling through major cities and towns in America can easily see firsthand what happens when immigration and resultant population growth exceeds projections: the overcrowded schools, insufficient housing stock and congested roads all point to a mismatch between the demographic trends and the financed infrastructure. Good government can only happen when the population using services matches our ability to finance those services.
Our declining national fortunes can be traced back to the first Earth Day, when warning after warning went unheeded. Instead we continue to leave the borders uncontrolled decades after prudence, wisdom and courage could have brought mass migration under proper management. Let’s learn from past 35 years of experience and make this Earth Day 2014 an historic awakening to the reality we all must face for a better tomorrow. Only by husbanding our resources a preserving our ecology can the U.S. ensure a brighter tomorrow for ourselves and assist other nations realize a better and sustainable future.
CAIRCO Notes
1. SUSPS has revealed that the Sierra Club received $100 million at the time they reversed their policy on immigration-driven population growth.
Kenneth Weiss, author of the LA Times article that broke the story, quoted what David Gelbaum, a super rich donor, said to Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope: