The Environmental Left Joins the Right In Growing Anti-Immigration Movement

Today was Eric Cantor's last day in Congress. I don't know if he's still trying to figure out what went wrong, but most of the professional political class in Washington, D.C. picks any reason except the two most obvious: immigration and crony capitalism.

I have predicted the U.S. would follow in the wake of the UK and immigration would suddenly turn into a major issue. Now it appears it could become the number one issue. The right is halfway there, with voters having tossed out the majority leader in the House of Representatives in the intraparty primary and brewing anger at the border situation. Now the left is waking up to the issue and it is from the left that the idea of restricting legal immigration is being put on the table. If this continues, immigration restriction will be a major issue by the time of the 2016 election. Should the economy weaken before now and then, the debate will push further into restrictionist policy.

80% of U.S. population growth is from immigrants, resources being sucked dry

A group dedicated to saving the planet by cutting runaway population increases is raising a new and shocking issue in Washington’s bitter fight over immigration reform: Most of the nation’s population growth is from immigrants, and they are consuming resources dangerously fast.

According to Negative Population Growth Inc., 80 percent of the growth in U.S. population comes from immigration, legal, illegal and among American-born children of immigrants.

“With increased population, we see a direct increase in the problems our nation faces on a daily basis: pollution, over-consumption, traffic gridlock, crowded schools and hospitals, overburdened social services, unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, urban sprawl, over-development, threatened or extinct animal and plant species, and dwindling natural resources,” said said Tracy Canada, the group’s deputy director.

She added, “Immigrants to the U.S. are also found to greatly increase their consumption — and their resulting footprints — upon settling here, which furthers our nation’s environmental impact.”

The California drought is a case in point; the large growth in California's population is due to immigration alone——natives have been fleeing the state.

Socionomics predicts anti-immigration sentiment during periods of negative social mood. Of all the policy issues, this was the most extremely out of sync with voters. Many American politicians are still pushing a policy that is extreme for peak social mood, while the public has shifted far, far away as social mood headed lower. Environmental groups in the United States used to oppose immigration because they recognized that increased population is one of the greatest threats to the environment, since more people consume more resources, need more land, etc. They changed their tune in the 1990s as political correctness climbed to a peak along with social mood.

Immigration vs. Environmentalism

The Sierra Club, logically declared in 1989 that its goal of zero population growth required that "Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S." Native-born Americans have indeed done their part in achieving the Sierra Club's goal, reducing their birth rate to the replacement level. But continued massive immigration has lead the Census Bureau to forecast that the U.S. population will more than double from 275 million in 2000 to 571 million in 2100, even though the global population is now widely expected to drop in the second half of the 21st century.

......Despite the mathematical inevitability of high immigration increasing America's population, in 1996 the Sierra Club leadership, hoping to outreach to minorities, discarded its immigration reform plank and decided to "take no position on immigration levels". While neutral-sounding, this policy has functioned as a gag order. For example, the Sierra Club recently shut down two of its email lists that discuss population issues on the Orwellian grounds that immigration reformers were using it for "dissension" rather than the "open communication ... for which they were created." Apparently, some communications are more open than others.

Dissident Sierra Club members forced a referendum in 1998, and garnered endorsements of immigration reform from superstar environmentalists like retired Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day; World Watch co-founder Lester Brown; novelist Farley Mowatt, author of Never Cry Wolf; photographer Galen Rowell, whose magnificent pictures have sold millions of Sierra Club calendars; and famed sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, the brains behind the "biodiversity" movement.

Although the immigration realists merely wanted to go back to the 1989 Sierra Club policy that "The Sierra Club will lend its voice to the congressional debate on legal immigration issues when appropriate, and then only on the issue of the number of immigrants - not where they come from or their category," they were of course demonized as racists by the organization's management.

Shades of UKIP in the UK, being called racist in the recent election. This charge lost its impact in the UK and its likely to fail in the U.S. soon as well, certainly as it relates to issues such as immigration.