For Environmentalists, a Growing Split Over Immigration

[Guest guest]

For environmentalists, a growing split over

immigration

 

By Brad Knickerbocker

 

Source >

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0512/p01s04-ussc.html

 

Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

 

5/12/2006

 

To environmentalists worried about population growth,

people are people.

Even if they do their best to live lightly on the

land, their rising numbers are a growing burden on

Earth's resources. And whether they sing the " The

Star-Spangled Banner " in English or in Spanish really

doesn't matter.

 

As politicians and the public heatedly debate

immigration, so, too, are environmental activists.

 

The flow of people into the United States is troubling

some environmentalists for two reasons. First, more

Americans means more people living in one of the

world's most resource-consuming cultures. Second,

there's new evidence that Hispanic women who move to

the US have more children than if they stayed put.

 

" We've got to talk about these issues - population,

birth rates, immigration, " says Paul Watson, founder

of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which

confronts whalers, seal hunters, and those who poach

wildlife in the Galapagos Islands. " Immigration is one

of the leading contributors to population growth. All

we're saying is, those numbers should be reduced to

achieve population stabilization. "

 

Mr. Watson also was a Sierra Club board member.Last

month, he resigned in protest just before his

three-year term ended because he thinks the

organization ignores immigration as a major factor in

population growth.

 

Beneath the dispute is a political subtext.

Environmentalists generally see themselves as

political progressives; they don't want to be

bedfellows with anti-immigrant activists sometimes

labeled as xenophobic or racist. Very few greens raise

a supportive fist when they see " Stop the Invasion "

billboards sprouting from California to Florida. For

the most part, they skirt the issue.

 

" The leadership and the membership have said we want

to be neutral on this, " says Eric Antebi, national

press secretary for the Sierra Club in San Francisco,

one of the largest and oldest grassroots environmental

groups in the country. It's a global issue, says Mr.

Antebi, caused by environmental degradation and

poverty that need to be solved so people won't have to

look elsewhere for a better life. Other large

environmental groups take the same position.

 

Yet the US population is far from stabilized, and

immigrants (legal and illegal) are one of the main

reasons. There are about 11 million illegal immigrants

in the US today, 57 percent from Mexico, and another

24 percent from other Latin American countries,

according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Of the US

foreign-born population, nearly 30 percent is illegal,

according to Pew.

 

The US Census Bureau this week reported that Hispanics

- the largest minority at 42.7 million - are the

nation's fastest-growing group. They are 14.3 percent

of the overall population, but between July 2004 and

July 2005, they accounted for 49 percent of US

population growth. Of the increase of 1.3 million

Hispanics, the Census Bureau reported, 800,000 was

because of natural increase (births minus deaths), and

500,000 was due to immigration.

 

" The Hispanic population in 2005 was much younger,

with a median age of 27.2 years compared to the

population as a whole at 36.2 years. About a third of

the Hispanic population was under 18, compared with

one-fourth of the total population, " according to the

Census Bureau report. That means such younger people

are just entering (or will remain longer in) the years

in which they have children of their own.

 

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center

for Immigration Studies in Washington, finds that once

women emigrate to the US, most tend to have more

children than they would have in their home countries.

" Among Mexican immigrants in the United States

fertility averages 3.5 children per woman compared to

2.4 children per woman in Mexico, " he wrote in a study

last October. And the same is true among Chinese

immigrants. Fertility is 2.3 in the US compared with

1.7 in China. However, typically these high fertility

rates decline in the successive generations as

immigrants assimilate into America.

 

" New immigrants (legal and illegal) plus births to

immigrants add some 2.3 million people to the United

States each year, " Camarota writes, " accounting for

most of the nation's population increase. "

 

Over the past 60 to 70 years, US population doubled to

nearly 300 million. If current birth and immigration

rates were to remain unchanged for another 60 to 70

years, US population again would double to some 600

million people - the equivalent of adding another

state the size of California every decade.

 

" You just can't deal with that issue without dealing

with immigration, " says Bill Elder of Issaquah, Wash.,

a former Sierra Club activist now organizing prominent

conservation leaders to focus on population.

 

Though China and India have much larger populations,

the US has the highest population growth rate of all

developed countries. Also, experts say, Americans on

average have greater environmental impact. The

equation for this is I = PAT (Impact = Population x

Affluence x Technology), with such impact being the

main thing determining whether an area's " carrying

capacity " has been exceeded.

 

Harvard University ecologist Edward Wilson figures

that the " ecological footprint " - which he defined in

a Scientific American article in 2002 as " the average

amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated

by each person in bits and pieces from around the

world for food, water, housing, energy,

transportation, commerce, and waste absorption " - is

about 5 acres per person worldwide. In the US, each

individual's ecological footprint is about 24 acres,

according to Dr. Wilson.

 

" Our responsibility for pollution and resource use is

all out of proportion to our numbers, " says Alan

Kuper, a retired physicist in Cleveland and founder of

Comprehensive US Sustainable Population. The group

publishes a " Congressional Environmental Scorecard " on

lawmakers' votes about conservation, consumption, and

population, including immigration. " It's not a matter

of where or how people come, it's the growth that we

have to be concerned with, " says Dr. Kuper. " If you're

going to be an environmentalist, you have to be

concerned about the numbers as well as the usual

issues - public lands, energy, pollution, and so forth

- because the numbers will just wipe you out. "