Immigration Restrictionists Make Bad Environmentalists

by Dave Bennion

categories: Economy, Immigration Reform, Nativism

Published July 08, 2009 @ 10:44PM PT

I hear a lot from organizations in the John Tanton network about how the best way to protect the environment is to restrict immigration to the U.S.

The argument isn’t intuitive, but it goes like this: Immigration leads to population growth, which harms the environment by transferring people from low-polluting nations to the high-polluting U.S.  Poor people who stay outside the U.S. maintain a relatively low carbon footprint.  But once they come to the U.S., they adopt the high-polluting lifestyle that Americans enjoy.  Therefore, immigration causes global warming.

Walter Ewing at Immigration Impact doesn’t think much of this reasoning:

[A]ccording to the World Resources Institute, the United States is home to 23% fewer people than the European nations of the EU-15, yet produced 70% more greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, as of 2000. The production of greenhouse gases in the United States is a function not of population size, but of the degree to which we as a society rely upon fossil fuels, power plants, industrial processes, and automobiles that actually produce greenhouse gases.

I have also discussed the reasons I think it's wrong to focus on minimizing U.S. population growth instead of implementing smart, eco-friendly energy policies.

But there are other reasons to doubt the Tanton network’s commitment to the environment.  One of these is the fact that the members of Congress that NumbersUSA, a Tanton outfit, rates most highly on immigration policy voted against the recent Waxman-Markey climate change bill by a margin of more than 5 to 1.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the cap-and-trade bill or Waxman-Markey, is a landmark bill that represents the first national effort in the U.S. to seriously combat global warming.  It is one of Barack Obama’s principal domestic priorities.  The NRDC believes that ACES "has the major ingredients to generate millions of jobs, break our dependence on oil and reduce the pollution that causes global warming."

When I heard about the recent vote in the House on ACES, I wondered how the Representatives who tend to support immigration restrictions voted on the bill.  As it turns out, the members of the House who get NumbersUSA’s highest ratings (a “B” or higher) voted against ACES 168-31, with one member not voting.

NumbersUSA grades members of Congress based on their support for “lower immigration and lower U.S. population growth.”  Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most Democratic politicians score poorly on NumbersUSA’s report cards, or that most Republicans opposed the President’s cap-and-trade legislation.  But the results (available in full here) were interesting nonetheless:

Total Representatives graded “B” or higher by NumbersUSA: 200

Democrats: 47
Republicans: 153

Votes on ACES:

Total Yes: 31
Total No: 168
Not voting: 1

Democrats voting Yes: 25
Democrats voting No: 22

Republicans voting Yes: 6
Republicans voting No: 146

Number of Representatives with “A” or “A+” ratings voting Yes: 4/108

So of the 108 Representatives who NumbersUSA believes do the best job of protecting the environment by keeping out immigrants, only four voted for landmark legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

Again, I’m not surprised, but these findings blow a hole in the claims of NumbersUSA and other Tanton affiliates that they are motivated by environmental concerns.

The interesting thing about all this is that, according to the SPLC, Tanton "started out as a passionate environmentalist. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was a leader in the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and other mainstream environmental groups."  But then something went badly wrong.  David L. Ostendorf writes:

The anti-immigrant movement is deeply rooted in the population control movement of the 1960s/70s—a movement that often wavered between its racially-tinged, eugenics edges and full-bore blame on overly-consumptive “Americans” (i.e., whites) for the environmental crisis of that era. Today the movement has resolutely staked its claim on those old, racially-tinged edges in a disingenuous move to lure environmentalists into its fold. By doing so it has completely abandoned assigning any responsibility for the contemporary environmental crisis on a still-wealthy nation that consumes some forty percent of the world’s resources, regardless of immigration levels.

That FAIR and its allies would lay blame for urban sprawl, water shortages, and a host of other problems on immigrants is utterly ludicrous—as if struggling, low-wage immigrant workers have purchased all those high-cost suburban homes on the nation’s relentlessly expanding metro edges, or generated the tons of waste that characterize the consumer society.

In recent years, NumbersUSA has pitched restrictionist policies as environmental policies, with ad campaigns targeting environmentally-conscious consumers and a new Astroturf group called Progressives for Immigration Reform.

Blaming immigrants for global warming lets policy-makers and citizens alike off the hook on environmental issues, which may be a feature, not a bug for the right-wing politicians who get NumbersUSA’s highest grades.  This approach is a twofer for certain conservative politicians, allowing them to restrict immigration and block environmental legislation in one fell swoop.

That’s fine for conservative politicians who don’t believe global warming is an important issue.  But it poses a problem for organizations that base their legitimacy on protecting the environment.