Thread: The people problem series on US population

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The people problem: Will anyone take up Gaylord Nelson's fight against overpopulation?
First of a two-part series
By Rob Zaleski
August 22, 2005

"I don't think most people understand where we're headed." - Gaylord Nelson in 1994, on the perils of overpopulation

That he was a man of exceptional wisdom and courage seems beyond dispute.

But while dozens of pundits and politicians paid tribute to Gaylord Nelson following his death on July 3 at age 89 and lauded him for his sterling environmental record, most made passing or no reference to the issue to which the father of Earth Day devoted the last decade of his life: overpopulation.

It is, Nelson had maintained, not only a critical issue for the future of mankind, but the most compelling issue of them all.

Bill Christofferson, his biographer, says that whenever Nelson gave talks on the issue - particularly if he happened to be in fast-growing Dane County - he'd always try to get people to understand what the local impacts would be if the U.S. population were to double by 2060.

"He'd say, 'Imagine what that will be like. We're not just talking about twice as many people, we're talking about twice as many everything. Twice as many highways and twice as many schools. Twice as many parking lots and twice as many hospitals.

"And then he'd ask, 'If that happens, what will the quality of life be like for the people living here?' "

Yes, it's a complex and explosive subject, the former Wisconsin governor and three-term U.S. senator acknowledged. At the very least, however, we need to have the debate - not only to provide a "road map for the future," he argued, but because the consequences of ignoring it are too grim to even imagine.

But while the world's population has grown by 11.2 million in the eight weeks since Nelson's death, there have been no calls to take up that debate, no signs that anyone in the media or Congress or the White House is interested in accepting Nelson's challenge.

"It's cowardice. What else can you call it?" says Elizabeth Bardwell, a longtime friend of Nelson's and a staunch anti-growth advocate in Madison.

"And you have to ask yourself, what is this sinister plot that keeps us from having the debate? What's going on?"

Christofferson says the answer is simple. People avoid the debate because to talk about overpopulation means confronting such hot-button issues as birth control and family planning - which conservatives and most religious groups adamantly oppose.

And if you talk about controlling the mushrooming U.S. population, he says, it means you must address the issue of immigration, which now accounts for about one-third of the 3.2 million people our country adds every year. Then you will be labeled a racist.

Nelson got away with it, of course, because he was Gaylord Nelson - a bona fide progressive and a man of impeccable credentials, Christofferson says. This was a guy, after all, who commanded an all-black company in the segregated Army in World War II and took immediate action to integrate the Wisconsin National Guard when he became governor.

But even Nelson endured some flak, Christofferson says, especially after he came out in favor of tightening immigration quotas, "which set off all kinds of alarms among a lot of his liberal and progressive friends."

But to Nelson, the issue had nothing to do with racism or "nativism," Christofferson notes. As Nelson himself explained in his 2002 book, "Beyond Earth Day," the "real issue" is numbers of people and the implications for freedom of choice and sustainability as our numbers continue to grow.

"Population will be a major determinant of our future, how we live and in what condition; talk of it should not be muzzled by McCarthyism or any other demagogic contrivance," he wrote. "Rather, the issue must be brought forth and explored in public hearings and discussions, precisely because it is a subject of great consequence."

Moreover, Nelson said was deeply troubled that "rhetoric of this sort has succeeded in silencing the environmental and academic communities and has tainted any discussion of population-immigration issues as 'politically incorrect.' "

But as frustrating as it was to see the president and members of Congress "running for cover on such a monumental issue," Nelson wrote, "it is nothing short of astonishing to see the great American free press, with its raft of syndicated columnists, frightened into silence by political correctness."

Nobody is more troubled by that silence than David Durham, chairman of the board of Carrying Capacity Network, a Washington D.C.-based population stabilization group, who maintains that any objective observer would find the world population statistics downright chilling. (Nelson was an adviser to the group.)

In 1960, for example, the global population was 3 billion. In 1999 - just 33 years later - it had doubled to 6 billion.

Although the rate has slowed in recent years - largely because Canada, Australia, Japan and Western Europe have stabilized their growth - world population is still expected to hit 9 billion by 2054, with 90 percent of the growth occurring in Africa, Asia and Latin America, he says.

That growth will cause enormous strains on our natural resources, particularly the world's fast-dwindling supply of fresh water. As it is, an estimated 800 million humans - more than double the U.S. population - are starving or seriously malnourished, says Durham, noting that Niger is the most recent African country facing massive starvation problems, after years of drought.

In addition, an estimated 700 species of plants and animals are endangered from destruction of habitat caused by population growth.

But while it's mainly a Third World problem now, that doesn't mean the United States can ignore its own burgeoning population, Durham says.

Yes, the birth rate in the United States is at replacement level, or about 2.1 children per woman on average, he says. But we're still the fastest growing developed country in the world. And if we don't act now to stabilize our population - currently about 292 million - we could reach 500 million by 2050 and 1 billion by 2100, he says.

And if that doesn't alarm you, Durham and other population experts say, consider this: If current trends continue, by the year 2020 - or just 15 years from now - the U.S. will add enough new people to create another New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Indianapolis, San Jose, Memphis, Washington, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, Boston, Columbus, New Orleans, Cleveland, Denver, Seattle and El Paso.

Which is why, Durham says, CCN and some 50 other slow-growth organizations are pushing Congress to enact a five-year moratorium that would cap legal immigration - now at 1.2 million a year - at 100,000 annually and reduce illegal immigration to about 50,000 annually.

(In the last two sessions, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., has introduced a bill that would cap legal immigration at 300,000 annually. Durham says it's received lukewarm support.)

John Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times who was, like Bardwell, a friend of Nelson's, says he talked to the former Wisconsin senator on several occasions about overpopulation and could sense his exasperation that so few people seemed to grasp how serious the situation's become.

Nichols says that while he doesn't excuse it, he can understand why politicians are terrified of the subject. "Because this issue, above almost all others, touches the trip wires- or the third rails - of our politics."

But the media's refusal to address it is a little more complicated - and disturbing, Nichols says.

"I think the American media 25 years ago would have been quite comfortable digging into this issue," he says. "But increasingly we have media that tend toward celebrity coverage and noncontroversial, simplistic approaches to issues.

"Most of our newsrooms today are guided not by traditional journalistic values but by marketing values. And so the desire was to make Gaylord Nelson into an easily digested iconic figure - the Earth Day founder and environmentalist who never did anything too controversial."

When, in fact, Nelson was "never a pretty little politician" but a militant foe of the Vietnam war who took strong, bold positions on all sorts of politically dangerous issues throughout his career, Nichols says.

(Nichols acknowledges that, although it's taken strong stances on international family planning and other "tough choice" issues, The Capital Times hasn't exactly been out front on overpopulation. "And maybe Gaylord's passing does call us to address the issue more aggressively and open up the debate even more," he says.)

George Archibald, co-founder of the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, says anyone who's done a lot of traveling worldwide knows there are numerous examples of how uncontrolled population growth "has destroyed the whole base of life for people and other creatures."

And he suggests there's no better example than Haiti, "where the forests have been removed, the soil has washed away, people are starving and the quality of life is terrible.

"Of course, there are political complications in Haiti, too," adds Archibald, a board member of World Population Balance. "But when people are basically unhappy because they don't have a good way of life, they don't have a job, it's often related to too many people and too few opportunities."

Fortunately, there are a few signs of hope as well, Archibald says - notably Bhutan, a small country sandwiched between China and Nepal on the southern slope of the Himalayas.

"Here's a very stable country under a traditional political system - a monarchy merging into a democracy, with an elected assembly - that has a low population (2.2 million) and tremendous conservation of culture and biodiversity," he says.

In fact, its national motto is "Gross National Happiness" - meaning that its chief economic objective is to boost the health and overall satisfaction of its citizens rather than the growth of its Gross National Product.

"Bhutan - having looked at its neighbor, Nepal, which is overpopulated, has ruined its environment and is very unstable politically - knows what it wants: not to become another Nepal," Archibald says.

To that end, it has not only adopted strict land use and immigration policies, he says, but even limits the number of tourists who visit each year.

"So Bhutan would stand out as a model, and Haiti is at the other end," Archibald says. "And everybody else sort of falls in the middle somewhere."

Dr. Dennis Maki, the esteemed head of infectious diseases at the UW-Madison Medical School, feels so strongly about the threat that he said in an interview with The Capital Times in 2002 that if he could do just one thing to make the world a better place, he'd devise a form of birth control that would make people sterile for about 10 years.

And he said he'd distribute it worldwide - literally drop it from airplanes - so that no children were born in the world for an entire decade.

Have his views changed?

Not one bit, says Maki, adding that he wishes every U.S. citizen could spend a week in rural India or parts of Brazil or sub-Saharan Africa and witness firsthand the suffering that's a daily fact of life for tens of millions of people.

"Then they'd suddenly realize what the impact of overpopulation is," he says. "I mean, there's not enough food, there aren't the educational resources. And so overpopulation is absolutely the most regressive tax there is on the people who can least afford it: the developing world.

"To me, it's a great, great tragedy."

And what's even harder to bear is that the situation isn't about to change anytime soon, Maki says - in part, because the Bush administration "doesn't have any interest in population control for a variety of reasons I think are obvious to most of us."

Neither, he says, does the Catholic Church, which still has enormous influence in many Third World countries, especially in Latin America.

"I like to think of myself as open-minded and pretty tolerant of things," Maki says. "But I've been profoundly disappointed by the position of the leadership of the Catholic Church on population control, because it creates so much unnecessary misery in the developing world."

But, like Nelson, Maki believes it's foolish to think this is just a Third World problem, pointing out that the educational and health care systems in California are already reeling from the massive influx of immigrants over the last two decades.

So does the United States need to curb immigration?

Absolutely, Maki says.

"Anybody who's had a reasonable education understands this isn't a racist issue," he says. "I mean, any Hispanic immigrant realizes that mass immigration will affect the quality of life that their kids and their grandchildren are going to have. They see that, and it's in their own self-interest to get on the bandwagon for population control."

Nichols says restricting immigration "isn't the core answer," but agrees that it's an important question and certainly one worth debating.

Are many of those who favor restricting immigration racists? No question, he says. But he says it's wrong to suggest that anyone who opposes uncontrolled immigration is a racist and notes that there are also racists on the other side of the issue; namely, the many U.S. companies that exploit immigrants - especially illegal immigrants - as cheap labor.

A big reason he opposes tightening immigration quotas, Nichols says, is the North American Free Trade Agreement - or, more specifically, the impacts of NAFTA.

"What we did with NAFTA is force 1 million smaller farmers in Mexico off their land," he says. "We displaced them, and a great number of them did become immigrants to the United States because NAFTA didn't work in Mexico. There weren't jobs.

"So our policies put people in a situation where they faced the threat of starvation, radical dislocation, all sorts of other crises. To then impose an immigration quota and absolutely bar those people from coming into this country either legally or illegally is irresponsible."


What's the solution?

"We have to, as a country, stop causing the crises that create massive immigration," he says. "We just caused another crisis two weeks ago. We voted for the Central American Free Trade Agreement. That will do more to cause illegal immigration and legal immigration to the United States than anything else done this year. Guaranteed."

So it doesn't make sense, Nichols says, "to just say, 'Oh, we're going to have tighter immigration quotas.' I don't think it's going to do a thing.

"But I do think that ultimately if we address trade, if we address foreign aid, if we address international family planning and other issues in a responsible way, we can dramatically decrease immigration."

There is one other issue here that the slow-growth advocates rarely address, and that's the positive economic benefits of our current immigration trend, says Alberto Palloni of the Center for Demography and Ecology at UW-Madison.

"Think, for example, who is going to finance your Social Security check when you retire?" he says. "Or who allows that your burrito at Qdoba is only $6 - not $15?"

Christofferson says he once asked Nelson why, if overpopulation was a global problem, he thought controlling immigration in the United States was so crucial.

Nelson then related an argument put forth by famed environmentalist Garrett Hardin, which he called the "global pothole problem," Christofferson says.

"He said, 'That's like saying if you can't fix every pothole in the world, there's no sense in trying to fill the one right in front of your house.' "

His point, Christofferson says, "was that you have to start somewhere and with something you can actually do something about" - as opposed to, say, the birth rate in India.

"He told me that if we try to solve every other country's problems by just saying, 'Send your extra people here,' that means they'll never have to face their own problems. And it doesn't do anything to encourage them to find a solution of their own."

Nelson didn't expect everyone to agree with him, Christofferson says. But he couldn't believe that Americans would simply turn their backs on what he felt was the most critical challenge of our time.

As he put it in his book, "It is the biggest default in our history."

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.p ... 23&ntpid=0

The people problem here
In Dane County, how bad is the population situation? Second of two parts
By Rob Zaleski
August 23, 2005

In 1996, Money Magazine announced that the most desirable place to live in the entire United States wasn't San Francisco or Seattle or such touristy hot spots as Santa Fe or Key West, but our own Madison, Wis.

Of course, Madison officials almost without exception greeted this announcement with unrestrained glee. The conventional wisdom was that the ranking almost certainly would spur others to move here. And that, in effect, would stimulate the local economy.

They were right.

In the nine years since, Madison's population has jumped to 221,000 (from 200,000), and Dane County - now at 458,000 - has become the fastest-growing county in the state. And, as the Chamber of Commerce loves to point out, our economy is one of the strongest and most stable in the Midwest.

But Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, for one, has come to realize that rapid growth is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, she welcomes the growth and thinks it's "fabulous" that the Madison area continues to make all sorts of "best places to live" lists. (The latest example being Middleton, which last month was ranked seventh on a list of "Great American Towns" compiled by Money Magazine and CNN.)

On the other hand, she worries that unless we come up with a detailed and cohesive land-use plan to accommodate the 120,000 people we'll be adding in the next 20 years, we'll lose the very things that made us so desirable in the first place.

Such as the ability to step out our front doors and within 10 minutes find a bike trail, a park, a body of water or a gorgeous cornfield.

"And not only will you not be able to see cornfields but we'll have even worse water quality in our lakes and streams," Falk says. "And people's property taxes - from all the new roads and schools and sewers that will be necessary to support the growth - will increase significantly."

As it is, she adds, "we're losing about 3,000 acres of farmland a year - half at the edges of our cities and villages, and half in rural development."

Who are these newcomers?

A lot of them are our own kids, many of whom - after checking out other cities - realize this is a pretty cool place to settle down and raise a family of their own, she says.

Some probably saw the Money Magazine article or heard about our first-rate schools and abundance of recreational amenities and our "relatively affordable" housing - although she admits being dismayed that the average cost of a new home in Dane County has shot up 72 percent, to $276,000, in a decade.

And yes, a lot of them are Hispanic immigrants, says Falk, noting that the local Latino population has tripled in a short amount of time.

Not that Madison is unique in that regard.

Hundreds of communities throughout America are experiencing a boom in their Latino populations - largely due to the 1.1 million legal immigrants and an additional 300,000 to 600,000 illegal immigrants who enter the United States each year. And that has led some - most notably the late Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, who died last month at age 89 - to warn that if the United States doesn't take immediate steps to restrict immigration, our population, now at 292 million, could actually double by 2060.

At the very least, we need to have the debate, argued Nelson, who understood that it's a volatile issue but was outraged that politicians, the media and even some environmental groups refuse to confront it for fear of being labeled racists. (The issue's been so divisive within the Sierra Club that the organization has remained essentially neutral on it since 1998. "Our membership has explored this issue in great depth ... and has chosen to focus on the root causes of migration - poverty and environmental degradation," says Brett Hulsey, senior Midwest representative for the group.)

Falk, a staunch environmentalist and liberal Democrat who's mulling whether to run for Wisconsin attorney general next year, declines to say where she stands on the overpopulation issue. But she makes it clear she's firmly opposed to tightening immigration quotas.

"I'm an Irish and German immigrant daughter. I welcome others, just like my grandparents and great-grandparents were welcomed here," she says, adding that there's no question in her mind that the expanding Latino population has enriched the social and cultural fabric of Dane County.

"One of the things we see is how hard-working these people are. I mean, the Latino community has generated its own chamber of commerce. They've led on helping establish better child care policy. They've just stepped up and become really thoughtful problem solvers and leaders."

As part of her Attain Dane! initiative, Falk and her staff have spent much of the last 18 months analyzing the Smart Growth plans of the 62 municipalities in Dane County and trying to get a realistic idea of what the county will look in 2025. (Verona and Fitchburg have yet to finish their plans.)

What she's seen so far makes her nervous.

For instance, the village of Cottage Grove (pop. 4,900) will triple in size and add about 3,100 new residents. The city of Sun Prairie (pop. 23,000) will double in size and add 11,000 more people.

Madison will see massive development on its far east side. Verona, Mount Horeb, DeForest and Waunakee are all expected to grow significantly. More worrisome yet, some communities want to develop the same parcels of land.

But while it's a complicated and still incomplete picture, the only conclusion, Falk says, is that we need a regional plan "to take some of the fuel out of the sprawl engine." Otherwise we'll be in serious trouble.

And this isn't just Kathleen Falk talking, she says. Indeed, if there was one message she heard again and again at the listening sessions she and her staff conducted over the last year, it's that "people here want the politicians and elected officials to do something collectively to change the status quo, so we can preserve our county."

Their chief concerns? The continuing degradation of our lakes. And, of course, the ever-worsening congestion on the Beltline.

Fortunately, Falk says, most people understand "that it took hundreds of years to get to this point of deterioration in our lakes, and so nobody thinks there's a quick fix. I've yet to meet anybody who thinks that."

However, after 10 years of research and debate, she's convinced we'll have a commuter rail system in the not-too-distant future - a system from Middleton to East Towne Mall that can be lengthened as our population grows and will alleviate at least some congestion on the Beltline.

One of the big problems in this whole planning process, Falk acknowledges, is that there are no national models to draw on.

"Certainly there are places all over the country that are struggling with growth issues," she says. "But is there any one place that we think or anybody has said this is the panacea, this is the way to do it? No."

So, lacking a model, "we've been trying to generate our own homegrown ideas - looking at what they've done in Portland and Traverse City, Mich., and Montgomery County, Md., and all the other places that have tried to do something useful."

Portland, she notes, is often cited as the nation's No. 1 anti-sprawl success story.

"But one of the lessons learned from Portland, looking back now, is that there was a backlash" to its efforts to restrict growth, Falk says. Just last year, Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved a pro-property rights bill called Measure 37, which some believe will hamper future Smart Growth planning in that state.

"So one of the goals we've had from the beginning is to take this road that's sustainable over the long haul politically," she says. "Otherwise a backlash undoes the good work that's been done. And that does not serve our citizens."

To be sure, Falk isn't the only one concerned about what Dane County will look like 20 years from now.

Hugh Iltis, the feisty and highly respected professor emeritus of botany at UW-Madison and a Madison resident since 1955, has been railing about Madison's burgeoning population for more than a decade and says he cringes whenever elected officials say they welcome more growth.

"That is absolute, sheer nonsense," he says. "Kathleen Falk is very nice and I like her dearly, but to encourage even more people to move here is a recipe for disaster."

Yes, planning for growth is important, Iltis says. But, as Gaylord Nelson liked to point out, all the planning in the world isn't going to prevent the many headaches associated with having too many people.

Indeed, when Iltis tries to envision what Dane County will look like with 120,000 more people by 2025, here's what he sees:


• Our lakes so choked with weeds and algae from urban runoff that beach closings are commonplace.


• Daily rush-hour gridlock not only on the Beltline but throughout the downtown - to the point where people will be discouraged from using motor vehicles.

• Ozone so bad during the summer that even fitness buffs won't want to exercise outside.


• A huge jump in crime - "not because of the immigrants, but just because of the sheer numbers of people," he says. "You're going to have a city that eventually looks like downtown Chicago."

Peter Munoz, executive director of Centro Hispano in Madison, won't go that far. But he says anyone who's witnessed the frenzied, helter-skelter development on Madison's fringes over the last decade has to wonder what the city - and the county - will look like two decades from now.

As it turns out, Munoz happens to agree with Nelson that overpopulation is the greatest threat facing mankind - a position, he notes, that probably puts him at odds with most other Latinos. In fact, he even wrote a paper on the subject while attending UW-Sheboygan in the late 1980s and says, "It's amazing to me that more people haven't thought about it."

But Munoz, who was born and raised in Cuba, says he believes it's mainly a Third World problem and not something the United States needs to worry about right now.

And, like Falk, he believes there's still plenty of room in Dane County for additional growth, providing - and this is the key, he says - that we create a detailed blueprint for that growth.

"I think we still have the capacity for bringing more folks in - particularly diverse folks," says Munoz, who contends that restricting immigration would cause more problems than it would solve.

"To me, the hard-working immigrants who are carrying the economy on their backs are making a great contribution to this country. Perhaps we need even more of these folks to counter the baby boomer effect" on our health care system and Social Security.

Having said that, Munoz says that while it's obvious many of those who favor curbing immigration are racists, he doesn't believe it's a racist issue per se. And he says Gaylord Nelson was right - that it would be a healthy thing for the country to debate the issue "because that will bring clarity, that will bring reason to the subject."

In fact, that debate's already occurring in the southwestern U.S., where the bulk of the immigrants are settling, says David Durham, board chairman of the Carrying Capacity Network, a population stabilization group with close ties to Nelson. And the battle lines aren't quite as clear as one might expect, he says, pointing out that a surprising 47 percent of Arizona's Latinos voted in favor of Proposition 200, which denies welfare benefits to illegal immigrants and passed last November by a 56-44 percent margin.

Still, before taking a position on immigration, Americans should try to put the issue in perspective, suggests John Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times and a friend of Nelson's. In other words, they should try to understand the circumstances - especially in recent years - that are causing tens of thousands of Mexicans to seek a new life here.

"Let me ask this question," Nichols says. "Do you think the average person who lives on a beautiful plain in Mexico - with year-round 80-degree weather and their family's been there 1,000 years or longer - says, 'You know, I think I'd like to move to Madison, Wisconsin, where it can sometimes be 20 below zero and where I'm going to have to share an apartment with two dozen other people and really struggle just to get by.'?

"Do you think that person wakes up one day and makes that decision on their own? I don't think so. I think what happens is, we passed NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), then we saw the industrialization of Mexican agriculture, the flooding of its markets with U.S. beans, and other processes that forced that person off the land. And when that happens and they can't find a job in Mexico, they cross the border looking for work here.

"And they come to places like Madison to make our food, to clean our hotel rooms, to do the work that a lot of Americans don't want to do."

But while he believes curbing immigration would be a mistake, Nichols says we desperately need to have the debate - just as world leaders need to confront the devastating impacts that overpopulation is having on millions of people in the Third World.

"And our failure to address it - which is really what Gaylord was talking about - will haunt us. It's already haunting us in a whole bunch of ways."

But with Nelson gone, is there anyone who's capable of stepping into the void and sounding the alarm about where we're headed?

"Actually, I don't think there's anybody who can," Nichols says. "Nelson was an iconic figure. And remember, even Gaylord was almost entirely unsuccessful in getting this issue out."

Durham is equally as pessimistic.

"I cannot think of anyone with equivalent stature who stands astride the three key issues - environmental protection, population stabilization and immigration reduction," he says.

"There are people who have respect in one or two of those communities. But in all three? With the stature of Gaylord Nelson? I certainly can't think of anyone.

"That's the magnitude of the loss."

http://www.madison.com/tct/news//index. ... 39&ntpid=0

Officials don't challenge population, immigration

By Rob Zaleski
August 23, 2005

The Capital Times asked U.S. Sens. Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, and Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz if they shared the late Gaylord Nelson's concerns about overpopulation and whether they felt the United States should tighten its immigration quotas.

Both Feingold and Baldwin declined to respond, saying through aides that they didn't have time.

"This is a topic that Tammy would not want to give a one- or two-sentence answer to. It's much too complex for that," said Jerilyn Goodman, Baldwin's press secretary.

Here's what Kohl and Cieslewicz had to say in e-mails on the subject:

Kohl: "One of the many contributions of Sen. Nelson was his work to bring attention to the important issue of our increasing population.

"The projected populations for both our country and our planet will present us with many challenges. How will we utilize our natural resources? Can we continue to grow and preserve our way of life?

"We must continue to devote resources toward developing new technology that will help with the needs of an increasing population - food, clean water, self-sufficient economies and a clean environment.

"This country was built by immigrants into the greatest in the world. We recognize that our immigration system needs comprehensive reform, but putting further restrictions on our visa quotas would likely drive more people into the country illegally.

"We need a well-regulated immigration system to enforce laws against illegal immigration, devote more resources to border security and determine how many people should be allowed to enter the country legally each year."

Cieslewicz: "While I disagreed with Gaylord Nelson's take on immigration to the United States, his underlying point was valid. Gaylord wanted to further limit immigration because the average U.S. citizen consumes a lot more of the world's resources than the average citizen of the world.

"For example, we have 5 percent of the world's population, but we consume about 25 percent of the world's oil. You can apply that same kind of analysis to where people live within the United States. Because cities are relatively compact, the average urban resident will consume less land and drive less than the average resident of a sprawling subdivision. That means less contribution to dependence on foreign oil and less contribution to air pollution and the gases that cause global warming.

"I ran for mayor in the first place because I believe that living in cities is an environmental act, and public policies that make cities more attractive places to live are some of the best things we can do for the environment in the long run.

"I thought that the environmental movement needed to consider the 'demand side' to the sprawl equation. That is, instead of just focusing on the 'supply side' and trying to shut down land to development through purchase and regulation - though I think those strategies are valid, too - we need to ask ourselves why some people want to live outside of cities.

"Then we need to fashion policies that make cities attractive places to compete against sprawl."

Great article.

Overpopulation is a main factor for my stand against illegal immigration and yes, I think legal immigration should be below 200,000.