Environmentalism and Immigration: Clashing Forces
By Otis L. Graham (Viewpoints, October, 2000)
Introduction by James M. Banner, Jr.:
A major element of the American nation's self-image has been, since colonial times. that it is a place of asylum for people from everywhere else; a "land of opportunity." As a result, with the exception of roughly the 30 years after 1924, the nation's borders have been open. But, as Otis Graham argues in the following essay, this venerable tradition now clashes with another strain of American thought and endeavor: environmentalism. Two great forces, two historical traditions, are now in conflict. Should history or present realities decide the battle between them? Have they been reconciled in the past? How do national cultures. American and other, change under stress?.
The American environmental movement began in the late 19th century-and just in time. Industrial and urban expansion were causing the depletion of resources and threatening intolerable damage to our natural heritage. In response, writer and naturalist John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892. President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) set aside public lands, and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, gave these efforts a name: the "conservation crusade." To end the devastation of natural resources, other conservationists successfully pushed for federal management of public lands by two dedicated bureaucracies-one each for the national parks and national forests. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the New Deal of the 1930s, went further-more public lands set aside, regional planning in the Tennessee Valley, and conservation programs for farmers. Conservation at mid-century, was seen as a task best handled by the Federal government and was, overall, successful.
Environmentalism at Mid-Century
Then bad news mounted. A growing and affluent post-war population generated suburban expansion at the expense of forests and wetlands. Autos and freeways encouraged millions to visit the existing system of national parks and forests and thus place them under mounting stress. Then Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring (1962) illuminated a new enemy of the environment, the poisonous blanket of pesticides that American farmers bought from agricultural chemical companies to reduce crop loss. The new organic chemical pesticides leached away from fields to waterways and entered the food chain that leads from marine and bird populations to humans.
Environmental wake-up calls came from other sources in a cascade of grim discovery. America's industrial-urban lifestyle produced toxic wastes that had for decades been dumped in waterways or landfills. wastes that inevitably seeped toward the groundwater and air of nearby communities. Automobiles, industrial processes, power plants producing the cheap electricity that was the foundation of America's post-war prosperity, even backyard barbecues dumped "greenhouse," or heat-trapping, gases into the atmosphere and launched a global warming that scientists feared would raise ocean levels and undermine ecological systems.
The 1960s: Environmentalism's Successes and Failure
These and other ecological wounds generated vigorous responses-a growing social movement calling itself "environmentalism." scientific studies, and, beginning in the 1960s, a growing list of federal and state laws and regulatory agencies to clean up the air and water and protect natural ecosystems and wildlife.
U. S. history textbooks convey this story, but usually briefly, as it if were a minor theme. and a problem being solved. Two serious flaws mark these accounts. The environmental crisis is not a minor topic in American history but a major theme destined to be at the core of American and planetary life in the 21st century. And despite many gains, the environmental battle is being lost.
There are many reasons why even an affluent, scientifically and technologically advanced country like the United States. with a robust environmental movement supported by public opinion, is, on balance, losing the battle to prevent the relentless degradation of its ecological endowment. These include much that is familiar - entrenched opposition by those with an economic stake in nature-destroying ways of living, public ignorance of the costs being imposed on both nature and humanity. and a heritage of frontier abundance and optimistic individualism. But the central reason is little discussed or understood (and you will find it in no history textbook known to me): Too many Americans crowd their national space.
Sustainable Population-An Attainable Goal
The goal of environmentalism is a "sustainable population"-the number of people who, given their chosen modes of life, can inhabit a given habitat without undermining the ecological foundations on which future generations depend. Estimates of the sustainable population of the U. S. run from 50 to 180 million Americans. depending on their modes of production and consumption. Given our current population, 276 million of the most environment-polluting people on earth, we are far over any reasonable population total. Informed environmentalists know that we must lower these unsustainable numbers as well as adopt more environmentally friendly modes of life.
These appeared to be attainable goals - a smaller population and "greener" lifestylesin the early 1970s. when it was widely understood that they were linked together. Public support for environmental cleanup translated into an invigorated "Green" movement, a batten of environmental laws. and promising changes in behavior by individuals and, in time, corporations. As for population size, a Presidential Commission on Population and the American Future announced in 1972 that domestic fertility rates were dropping and had reached replacement level - 2.1 live births for each female over her life span.
This rate soon dropped to 1.7, which meant that the U.S. population that would stabilize in two generations and then decline toward sustainable numbers. This unprecedented but highly desirable demographic trend, freely chosen by Americans, promised to combine with wiser, more ecology-friendly modes of production, consumption and disposal to lead to an America our descendants could enjoy for millennia. Environmentalists rightly seek the greatest good for the greatest number but understand that this does not mean that all environmental gains are likely to arrive at one time.
Relentless Population Growth
Yet instead of continuing gains, three decades later the American environmental horizon is dark with formidable and intensifying problems (as. too, is the global horizon, which is another subject). While there are many causes of this mounting crisis, the central reason why virtually all environmental problems are worsening in the face of improvements in laws and behavior is the relentless growth of the U.S. population.
How could this be? Domestic fertility rates have risen slightly, and remain at or below the replacement level of 2.1 live births per female. Yet the United States has the fastest growing population of any developed nation. It adds 3 million people a year, at a rate leading to a doubling every 70 vears. Between 1970 and 1998 the nation's population grew by 70 million people, or by one third. The growth ahead, according to recent projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, is stunning and ominous. A middle (between high and low) projection shows the U.S. population doubling to 571 million by 2100, and the High estimate is 1.23 billion, or the size of today's China.
The driver of this growth is not domestic fertility. It is immigration. which Congress increased by a factor of four in the Immigration Act of 1965 and subsequent expansions of refugee flows, amnesties for illegal entrants, an open door to Cubans, and non-enforcement of the nation's borders against illegal entry. The 1972 Population Commission noted that immigration contributed 20 per cent of U. S. population growth and must be curbed in order to reach the overriding goal of population stabilization. But immigration has instead been allowed to increase, and now is responsible for 60-70 percent of the nation's population growth, and still rising.
The Effects of Immigration
The mass migration to the United States over the last four decades of the twentieth century - has many roots - as does the failure to control it. But the leaders of the environmental movement, while vaguely committed to U. S. population stabilization, refuse to acknowledge the link between large-scale immigration and their own goals and thus fail to place their substantial lobbying power behind immigration restriction. Sierra Club officials in late 1999 rebuffed a members' revolt on this issue, fearing that a strong stand on lower immigration numbers would bring criticism from ethnic and religious lobbies. American environmentalists today, gallant and talented and commendably dedicated to future generations, conduct a futile battle against pollution, sprawl, and wildlife extinction as immigration-driven population growth overwhelms their efforts.
The study of our own history would provide a reorienting perspective. At the beginning of this century the pioneers of the environmental movement were, like Theodore Roosevelt himself, progressive reformers whose list of reform causes included ending unregulated mass immigration. They welcomed a small flow of regulated immigration. and worked to replace a regime of open borders with a system yielding smaller numbers selected in the national interest. The immigration reforms of the 1920s achieved lower numbers, though many people, especially later, did not think the basis used by reformers to select immigrants was sound. As a result, the policies of the 1920s were changed between 1952 and 1965. In the process, serious controls or limits did not accompany the new method of selection. Our ineffective immigration policy thus functions as a population expansion policy, unintended but powerful.
One hundred years after the origins of American environmentalism, many environmentalists seem to have forgotten what the founders of conservation knew, that population limitation through immigration controls was inescapably on their agenda. If it is kept off today's environmentalists' agenda, they have chosen failure.