The Defensible Immigration Level is Zero |
Experience refutes Festinger. In both private and public spheres, people seem able to tolerate inherently self-contradictory policies indefinitely and without evident discomfort. The gains from psychological denial apparently far outweigh the costs of “cognitive dissonance.”
This is certainly true in the realms of population, environment, and immigration. Today’s middle-aged pundits and politicians craft policies as if these forces existed independent of each other in a steady-state universe. It seems irrefutable that, all else being equal, more population equals more environmental pressure.
Sustainabilatry or “carrying capacity” is defined as that population level whose present consumption level of renewable resources does not exceed the amount annually regenerated (exhaustion of non-renewable resources is ignored).
Every biologist interviewed for the 1992 Lindsey Grant book, “Elephants in the Volkswagen,” considered the U.S. had already exceeded its long-term sustainable population level. By definition, beyond that point each additional person from whatever source, native-born or immigrant, the environment being indifferent, imposes net negative environmental costs.
Given current consumption patterns Cornell University biologist David Pimentel pegs the sustainable level as between 40-100 million. Supporting 200 million Americans, our level on the first “Earth Day” in 1970, sustainability would require per capita consumption to be cut in half.
Small wonder that 1970’s environmentalists called for domestic “zero population growth.” In 1972 the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future echoed this cry. Alert to the systemic nature of population variables the commission noted that both reproductive health and immigration policies would have to respect demographic goals.
Congress compartmentalized its policies in these interrelated spheres, rejecting demographic accountability. It is verboten to ask how the largest flow of immigrants in U.S. history facilitates reaching our environmental goals or protecting our habitat for posterity, especially for our six greatest immigrant-receiving states California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
When one raises this issue, one is told that this country was built upon immigrant labor. This both denies that our era of greatest prosperity 1945 to 1970 took place at the nadir of immigration and is irrelevant. Immigration in 1900 when the nation’s population was 76 million is not the same as immigration into a country of 275 million.
Past history neither can nor should be a role model for the present and definitely not for the future. Immigration in the context of a world with mass air travel, roughly five billion residents of poor countries, and nearly all industrialized nations above carrying capacity requires different policies than those in 1900 when Europe and the U.S. were below carrying capacity and “only” one billion persons resided in pre-industrial nations. The world should quake at the prospect of further population gains by its largest consuming and polluting nation.
Immigration has emerged as the sole force fueling continuing U.S. population growth. The Census Bureau’s January, 2000, projections estimate that current levels of immigration will swell our present population of 275 million (up from 200 million in 1970 and 132 million in 1940) to 571 million by 2100. Expansive immigration quotas may bring us to one billion or more by century’s end. Descendants of these newcomers, a category often discounted by immigration apologists, will outnumber the foreign-born themselves.
Debating any non-zero immigration level is merely debating when the environmental destruction of the U.S. should be completed. Gradualism and compromise, the bedrocks of our political system, are inappropriate tools for dealing with absolute physical limits. Yet knowing the political costs of proposing unyielding, permanent population ceilings, our major environmental groups are warring within and between themselves. Cognitive dissonance abounds, as in the case of Sierra Club officials who have retracted its post-1972 call for population stabilization, let alone shrinkage. They now contend that environmental protection is consonant with perpetual immigration.
Cowardice, guilt, denial, and greed all explain why a nation whose wetlands have been ravished, whose cities have sprawled to extents unprecedented in human history, and whose richest farmlands are being paved over feels no sense of urgency in getting its demographic house in order. Our founding fathers subscribed to a time horizon encompassing a millennia of generations. Today’s election-driven politicians have a horizon of five or ten years. The politically incorrect demographic bottom line is that any immigration, legal or illegal, threatens posterity’s future. Evading discomfort today guarantees our doom within the next century.
The author is a Mensan and a demographer/economist, and is a Sr. Fellow, Negative Population Growth, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. She can be reached at MereBphd@aol.com