Immigration and the Environment
A couple of weeks ago I referenced a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) study, which tell us that, "Immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher-polluting country."
Most of you agreed that the study was nothing more than anti-immigrant propaganda. While I tend to agree, it would be irresponsible for us not to acknowledge that more people equals more impact on the environment. Environmental Issues Guide, Larry West, discusses this in his article, "Is Immigration Bad for the Environment?"
So what's the answer? The more I read, the more it becomes clear that there is no easy solution to the immigration-environment issue. Population stabilization advocates tell us that we will only achieve environmental balance by limiting immigration. However, the CIS research shows that immigrants produce 18% less carbon emissions than native-born Americans. Perhaps we should be focused on becoming a lower-polluting country by reducing the carbon footprint of every American before we rush to close our borders.
Photo: Dougal Waters/Getty Images
Comments
Carbon footprints moving from lower polluting to higher polluting countries Immigrants pollute less than the Native Born Urban Sprawl the concepts today have become so high tech that people tend to forget about the most basic of all environmental issues, the ability of the environment to support the people who live there. This is also called carrying capacity. The Salton Sea, the Antelope Valley, Mono Lake, and other places in California are dead or dying because the needs for water in California have outstripped the supply.
Try living with the fall-out of our current unrestrained, illegal immigrant driven population growth. Here in Minnesota we have a water resource depletion driven Sword of Damocles hanging over our head. The Oglalla Aquifer that runs from the Dakotas to Texas is so depleted of water that there are serious plans to divert Great Lakes water westward, ripping up our State in the process and messing with the ecology of the Great Lakes. The only thing stopping it so far is figuring out how to get the project past our treaty with Canada. But that will not last as in many places the Aquifer is seriously close to failure.
All over our nation people see our wide open spaces and think that our population can grow forever. But so much of the U.S. ranges from semi arid to out and out desert that we cannot support large populations like in China. As stated earlier, the limiting factor has less to do with population density that it does with carrying capacity. If an aquifer is about to fail it does not matter if the population density is one person per square mile or 15,000 people per square mile. You risk ecological collapse by increasing the population period. In addition to the problems with the Oglalla Aquifer, EVERY city in the American Southwest is on the verge of running out of water resources. Around Phoenix they have pulled so much water out of the ground the land is actually sinking. San Diego is only surviving because they found a way to clean up the polluted ground water there as they ran out of water from the Colorado River, which now all but disappears at the Mexican border.
Many people do not realize how bad our water situation is becoming in the U.S. because half our population lives within five hundred miles of Chicago where water is more plentiful. People see the falling reservoirs along the Colorado River out west and think that it has nothing to do with them. They hear that the Salton Sea in California is now dead thanks to overuse of water by cities and they say that is not us. But uncontrolled Immigration means we get to the bottom of our wells and find them dry all that much faster.
And then there is food production. It takes one square mile of farmland to feed 1,000 people. New York, the U.S. City with the highest population density has is rated at 27,282 people per square mile (ppsm) so each square mile of city requires 273 square miles of farmland. As people look at the U.S. they say that we have so much open land we do not need to worry. But in fact less than half the U.S. is tillable and even less than that is actually tilled because of our Forests and Prairies that are locked up as preserves and parks. So in fact we will run out of farmland to feed people long before we run out of places to put people. At New York Population Densities we could barely support 0.2% (50%x1/273) of our land used as city space.
Currently in the U.S. most of our cities are much less densely populated than New York. Chicago has a population density of about 12,470 ppsm, Los Angeles 8,205 ppsm, Minneapolis 6,791 ppsm, St. Louis 5,696 ppsm, San Diego 3,872 ppsm, Houston 3,701 ppsm, Des Moines has 2,621 ppsm, and Indianapolis 2,152 ppsm. But this presents a different problem. These cities are sprawling over our very best farmland. The Pew Center estimated that there are 12,000,000 Illegal Immigrants in the U.S. (as of 2007). At Chicago population densities his represents additional urban sprawl from Illegal Immigration covering over a farm land area of about 1,000 square miles and represents one million people loosing their food supply to Illegal Immigration. At Des Moines population density 12,000,000 Illegal Immigrants cost us an area of farmland the size of Connecticut that used to feed almost five million people thanks to Illegal Immigrant driven U.S. urban sprawl. If this is “spaceship Earth” as they used to say in the early days of the modern environmental movement then the huge net tonnage of food that the U.S. exports each year is the pantry of that spaceship. And we are destroying that pantry on the alter of unlimited immigration.
After reading the Larry West Article I am mindful of something John F. Kennedy said: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
Mr. West’s article starts off with a promising discussion of carrying capacity but then it strays into the time worn strategy of claiming that the solution to the problem is to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. It does nothing to really attack the root causes of uncontrolled population growth and immigration.
First, Immigration happens because people chase jobs. If job growth were to happen in the countries that have few jobs then few people would have a need to immigrate. It has been proven that as a society gains in affluence the birth rates go down and respect for the environment goes up. While here in the U.S. we add about a half million native born people to our workforce each year and we create one and one half new million jobs each year. Do we really need more job growth than we have population growth?
People forget that economies cooperate. It is Businesses that compete. Are we competing against the Japanese economy? No! Our companies compete against Japanese companies. But it is even more complicated that that. Do you buy a Toyota or a Chevy because one is better than the other for what you want? Or do you buy the Chevy because it is made by an American company and skip the Toyota? Most people do not realize that both cars are manufactured in the U.S. So buying one or the other makes less difference than one might think. Yet both companies compete.
If we truly needed lots of Immigrants to fill extra jobs in the U.S. what would happen if we sent those jobs to where the Immigrants are from? Since it is easy to analyze because of the readily available figures lets use Illegal Immigration from Mexico as an example. Per the Pew Hispanic Center six million Mexicans have illegally immigrated to the U.S., over three million of which are working. Per the CIA World Fact Book the 2006 GDP of Mexico was $741.5 billion and the Labor Force numbered 38 million. That means the average GDP per working person was $19,513. If the U.S. had exported three million jobs to Mexico and paid the average GDP rate, the six million illegal immigrants would have stayed home, and we would have pumped $59 billion in wages into the Mexican economy. In the U.S. approximately 57% of our GDP is made up of wages. Assuming this same job multiplier effect for Mexico means an additional $59 billion in wages added to the Mexican economy would increase their GDP by more that $103 billion or 14% so Mexico is better off. And here is the really interesting part. As much as five billion dollars of that money would come back to the U.S. as profits each year. It would boost our economy in the U.S. without a single Illegal Immigrant coming to the U.S. Talk about a win-win scenario. So why does this not happen?
I would propose that it is a combination of lazy business practices, greed, and self serving politicians that prevents people from seeing all this. Lazy business practices because it is perceived to be a lot easier to build a business in your back yard and import people that it is to open a branch of your business in another country. Greed because hording all business in the U.S. keeps us on the top of the heap economically and having foreign entities compete for limited resources is a scary proposition. So if we hoard everything we do not have to be scared. And finally self serving Politicians can easily to be elected if they claim that they will fight the export of jobs to protect the American Worker. Yes, American jobs need to be protected. But do we really protect anything by creating more jobs than we need? Since 1980 the number of workers worldwide connected into the global economy has increased by about 1.5 billion. During this same time the U.S. Workforce increased by 47.9 million people. That alone blows away the contention that if we create jobs in foreign lands it is at the expense of the American Worker.
We are in a changing world. With communications what they are it is no longer necessary to move people to business. We can now easily move business to the people. If we just get beyond the myths of immigration and environmentalism past and look at the future we could become free of the need for mass international immigration.
Yes, why not increase our population to infinity? More is better right? We could all live on a teaspoon full of water every day and have one oat (oatmeal) for breakfast. Is there a limit? If so what are the limits? Why are we all of a sudden racists or zenophobes if we point out the fact that there is such a thing as environmental degradation due to over use of resources?