Limiting immigration key to saving environment

Monday, April 13, 1998

Limiting immigration key to saving environment

POLLUTION: Reducing per capita consumption preferable, not
realistic

Last June, the president of the U.N. General Assembly opened
Earth Summit II saying: "We as a species – as a planet – are
teetering on the edge, living unsustainably and perpetrating
inequity, and may soon pass the point of no return." The April 9
Daily Bruin chillingly illustrated this warning. There was an
ecological horror story on brush fires in Borneo, set by humans,
pushing our close relatives the orangutans ever closer to
extinction. Another article reported on the many plants on
endangered species lists worldwide. According to the Nature
Conservancy, one-third of U.S. plant and animal species already are
at risk of extinction.

Yet another story focused on low U.S. gas prices: "with gasoline
cheap, consumer confidence high and the economy showing no sign of
weakening, motorists are expected to hit the highway in record
numbers" this summer. Many, one might add, in their new
gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. And why not when U.S. gas
prices, corrected for inflation, "are now the lowest in recorded
history"?

Against this dismal backdrop, we must make hard choices to break
the endless downward spiral of humanity’s assault on the biosphere.
Because of our high per-capita consumption, we 270 million
Americans inflict as much environmental damage as billions of
people in the developing world.

Two of these hard choices, discussed below, are the termination
of U.S. population growth and reductions in per-capita consumption.
Our population is now growing faster than that of any
industrialized country, quadrupling during the 20th century. If
these trends continue, a U.S. population of .5 billion in the
middle of the 21st century and then a billion in the 22nd century
is inevitable.

A century ago California was, for all practical purposes, empty;
now it contains more people per square mile than the continent of
Europe. We should not be surprised that our freeways seem a bit
crowded. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, California will hit
the 50 million people mark in about 2030, when most current UCLA
students will probably still be living here. At that time, the
population density in California (people per square mile) will
equal that of China now – the same China that has a
one-child-per-family policy. California’s population growth is due
almost entirely to immigration from abroad.

Were it simply a matter of environmental protection and of
quality of life, no doubt all environmentalists and indeed most
Americans (excepting land speculators, developers and others who
make financial windfalls off population growth), would opt for
stabilization or even reduction of the U.S. population. Enter a
hard choice. Since most U.S. population increase is due to
immigration, to terminate endless growth we must lower immigration
levels. But many people who want to come to the U.S. are poor.
Therefore, conflict arises between protecting the U.S. and global
environment, and compassion for poor people who wish to improve
their lot in life. Were these the only factors, then, depending on
one’s value system, one could opt either for the environment (low
immigration levels comparable to those during most of the 20th
century) or for poor people from elsewhere (current high
immigration) but at the expense of the environment.

However, the equation has a third component never considered by
those who argue for high immigration levels – the negative impact
of massive immigration on the lives of poor people already here.
Studies by the Rand Corporation, the National Academy of Sciences,
and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) all highlight the same
conclusion: the immigration-driven reduction in wages of the
average native in low-skilled occupations. The CIS’s "The Wages of
Immigration" (1998), sums up the situation: "At present, our
immigration policy reflects the preferences of a number of
different interest groups – unfortunately, the interests of the
working poor are not among them."

In addition to diminished wages, mass immigration causes
dislocation of residents from traditional neighborhoods, degraded
environmental conditions, burdens on schools from masses of
non-English speaking children, and competition for other government
supplied services. No wonder that clear majorities of the three
largest ethnic groups (African American, Latino and white),
especially the poorest among us, strongly support substantially
reduced levels of immigration according to poll after poll.

If you are reading these words and you are a student, staff or
faculty member of the UCLA community, then you are not a person who
will pay the price of our overly generous immigration laws. That
burden will fall on those less fortunate.

Although many peoples here can claim victimhood at one time or
another, the sufferings of American Indians and of African
Americans are qualitatively different from all the rest. In my
opinion, charity begins at home. In conflicts between disadvantaged
peoples, Americans should put the interests of disadvantaged
Americans first.

I grew up during the heyday of the civil rights movement in the
late 1950s and 1960s. I walked in the second-ever civil rights
march in Washington (1959) and rode with revulsion in segregated
buses in the South. During the 1960s, my sister was a "Freedom
Rider" who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to
Montgomery, Ala. Some Freedom Riders lost their lives during these
times.

Because UCLA students are not old enough to have experienced
defining moments in recent American history – the civil rights
movement and the war in Vietnam – most have no sense of scale in
American history and exaggerate the importance of current events,
for example, often playing the race card at the drop of a hat.
African American civil rights activist Julian Bond, who now teaches
history at the University of Virginia, observes: "My students are
modern young men and women, filled with the cynicism and despair of
their age. For them these are the worst of times, and my
documentation of a harsher and more oppressive past does not always
convince them that these days are better than those older days they
study with me."

Some would say that the real problem is high U.S. consumption.
And truly, although U.S. per capita consumption is now roughly
stabilized, still we should try hard to lower it. Unfortunately,
because high individual consumption is an integral part of our
culture, diminishing it significantly will be very difficult and
will take a long time. In the meantime, for a net improvement at
the end when all is said and done, we must not let our population
size explode.

Concerning consumption, those few environmentally positive
actions we take, such as recycling, are much more than offset by
our dreams of a big energy-inefficient home in the suburbs.
Fulfillment of this dream accelerates destruction of farmland and
increases automobile usage, not to mention all of the materials
involved. In 1998 gas prices have tumbled to record lows as more
people drive more miles in gas-guzzling vehicles, hardly the way to
cut consumption. Most of the 75 percent of Americans who profess to
be concerned about the environment are, more or less heavily,
invested in the soaring stock market. But these companies (our
companies) are often the very ones that most despoil the
environment. Many of them are multinational in nature and their
tentacles (our tentacles) extend to sensitive lands abroad; half of
the world’s industrial output is generated by multinational
corporations. Similar considerations apply to banks that utilize
our savings deposits.

Even with the best of intentions, because of inertia built into
the infrastructure of our country, meaningful change in overall
consumption will take a long time. Last year David Freeman, a man
with demonstrated concern for the environment, became head of the
L.A. Department of Water and Power. His vision is to power Los
Angeles with renewable energy, specifically solar power. His first
step is to equip 100,000 houses. But when asked, thinking
optimistically, how long this might take, his response was, "about
25 years". So, even when we have a government official with special
sympathies for the environment, it still will take, optimistically,
25 years to switch a tiny fraction of the homes in Los Angeles to
solar power. And most government and private leadership is not so
motivated.

If the United States continues to accept current levels of legal
and illegal immigrants, then the U.S. population is likely to
double in 80 years. Because of considerations outlined above, the
time required to halve our per capita consumption is unlikely to be
less than 80 years. Thus in the absence of stricter immigration
laws, we can be pretty sure that the total U.S. ecological
footprint will not be smaller in the year 2100 than it is in 2000
and it might be much bigger.

The 500,000-plus members of the Sierra Club are now voting on
whether the club should address the environmental consequences of
U.S. immigration policies. The vast preponderance of the premiere
U.S. environmentalists believe that immigration levels should be
reduced.

Names of prominent endorsers of this view and other details can
be found at www.ecofuture.org/ecofuture/susps/Ben Zuckerman