Thread: Immigration - The Ultimate Environmental Issue

Immigration - The Ultimate Environmental Issue
By Richard D. Lamm
Published in The Social Contract
Volume 18, Number 1 (Fall 2007)
Issue theme: "The future of an unsustainable planet"
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman ... lamm.shtml

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Every generation has its challenges, almost inevitability challenges different from those of their parents. The great challenge of public policy is to correctly identify the new challenges and the new realities that society is faced with. Public policy is a kaleidoscope, and time changes the patterns we are faced with and we have to be wise enough to react to the new challenges as these new patterns evolve.

One new pattern/challenge must be to look at the issue of the environment with new eyes. Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our ecosystem. The environment issue is hydra-headed and complicated, but it is of immense importance that we have all aspects of the issue on the table.

One issue in the current environmental debate, however, is strangely absent: immigration. Immigration is the ultimate environmental issue, but the U.S. environmental leaders are AWOL on this issue. The United States with low immigration will stabilize its population at about 350 million shortly after the middle of this century. With current levels of immigration the United States will double in size and then double again. The census projections call for an America of 420 million people by 2050 and a billion by the end of this century.1 Can you imagine the ecosystem, already under great strain, with 1 billion consuming Americans? Our current immigration policy is leaving our grandchildren an unsustainable America of a billion people, which I suggest is public policy malpractice.

The environmental community wouldn’t tell you this (though most know). A combination of political correctness and the recent tendency of the environmental leadership to play Democratic politics has silenced the almost universal recognition of the early environmental community that population was an indispensable part of environmentalism.

Environmental leaders in the 1960s had a formula, I=PAT, which postulated that environmental impact was the sum of Population, Affluence, and Technology. To Gaylord Nelson, who conceived Earth Day, and the early environmental leaders, leaving out population would be like having a bicycle with only one wheel.2 Today’s environmentalists will discuss U.S. air pollution policy, U.S. wilderness policy, U.S. water quality policy, U.S. billboard policy, but never a hint of U.S. population policy.

Here’s my simple experiment I use on my environmental friends who have tragically lost their voice on population. Assume that I had a magic wand and could wave it and accomplish all the goals of today’s environmental leadership, but did nothing about the current immigration rate. Is there a scenario where a billion Americans at the end of this century would live in an environmental sound America? Have you been to China? India? We could do everything on the current environmental agenda yet still have an unlivable nation. The self-imposed tragedy of the environmental movement in the U.S. is that the current environmental agenda will not get us to an environmentally sound America. On the contrary, it locks in a myriad of environmental traumas as the United States careens toward a billion Americans.

There is a concerted effort in the environmental community to keep immigration out of the dialogue. But the subject is so central to the environment that it keeps popping out. The President’s Council on Sustainable Development concluded in 1996 “We believe that reducing current immigration levels is a necessity part of working toward sustainability in the United States.â€

Save gas and some pollution, send the illegals back home!

There, done, next problem...