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Submission: Demonizing opposition does not solve issue of excessive immigration

By Benjamin Zuckerman

Sept. 4, 2017 11:15 p.m.

In the Aug. 28 issue of the Daily Bruin, there is a submission titled “Bruins must stand against hate groups in face of professor involvement.” One of the online responses to this piece states that the author of the piece, Hector Prado, tries to “smear a professor.”

That professor is me.

Prado’s comments are full of factual errors and inconsistent information. Here are a few examples:

Firstly, I have been president of Californians for Population Stabilization for seven months, not 17 years, as Prado wrongly claimed before the Daily Bruin issued a correction for his piece.

Secondly, the two individuals Prado considers to be white supremacists were hired before I became president. I did not hire them, and they are no longer affiliated with Californians for Population Stabilization. With regard to these items, the Daily Bruin later issued a correction to fix these statements in Prado’s initial piece.

For many years the United States has admitted a million legal immigrants a year. This, combined with illegal immigration, has had a significant impact on low-income American workers, who are disproportionately persons of color. The abundant pool of cheap labor contributes to the transfer of wealth from lower to upper strata of society, thus increasing income inequality. This is one reason why Californians for Population Stabilization supports reduced levels of immigration, and not because of “racism” or “xenophobia.”

Our mission statement is simple: “Californians for Population Stabilization works to formulate and advance policies and programs designed to stabilize the population of California, the U.S. and the world at levels which will preserve the environment and a good quality of life for all.”

With regard to the environment and quality of life, U.S. Census Bureau data demonstrate that, for many years, virtually all of California’s rapid population growth has been due to immigration and the U.S.-born offspring of immigrants. With population growth as is, California will, by about 2060, have almost as many people per square mile as China has. This is the same China that, in desperation, instituted its infamous one-child-per-family policy to stop its population growth.

The importance of a prompt stabilization of the U.S. population is not a newfound concept. In fact, it was highlighted as one of the two most important steps the U.S. must take toward sustainability, according to the 1996 Population and Consumption Task Force Report of former President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Twenty-one years later, however, the U.S. population is almost 56 million larger and continuing to explode.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center made projections of the U.S. population for the next 50 years, and a key finding was that future immigrants and their descendants would continue to be a very large source of population growth if the current immigration trends continue. The study states, “Between 2015 and 2065, they are projected to account for 88 percent of the U.S. population increase, or 103 million people, as the nation grows to 441 million.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center that Prado parrots has been designated a hate group by individuals and organizations that span the political spectrum from left to right. SPLC is an open-borders political organization that routinely employs tactics former U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy used in the 1950s: Silence your opposition by use of name-calling and guilt by association. The SPLC’s ploy is to attack messengers rather than to discuss issues – in this case, endless U.S. population growth.

Demonization of one’s opponents engenders hate and negates any chance for reasoned discussions. And this nation can no longer afford to delay reasoned discussion about explosive population growth.

Zuckerman is a research professor and professor emeritus at UCLA’s department of Physics and Astronomy.

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