Thursday is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Roy Beck is the President of NumbersUSA and today he has a message for America about how the high levels of immigration (legal and illegal) have an unsustainable impact on our environment. For the rapidly increasing numbers of immigrants we lose open space as we must provide land for schools, roads, housing, and as the population expands we will undoubtedly see a degradation of air and water quality as well. As Beck points out in his message today, I too wonder why the leftwing Democrats don’t see that.
Sustainability was the big idea 40 years ago when much of the nation’s attention was drawn to the events and news of the first Earth Day. I was a cub newspaper reporter covering the events. And I remember well that an important theme in 1970 was that sustainability required the U.S. to begin to stabilize its population after having added the SECOND 100 million in just 55 years.
Well, now we’ve added the THIRD 100 million in less than the 40 years since that first Earth Day and we’re on pace to add the FOURTH 100 million even faster!
[….]
Nearly all of the population growth is caused by the increases in immigration that Congress ordered or allowed since 1970. For every restriction and cost that the government has put on us since then to improve environmental quality, it has negated part or all of the benefits by forcing high population growth through radically increased immigration numbers.
[…..]
Without all the increases in immigration, our communities would have around 250 million inhabitants right now, with little likelihood of ever going over 265 million.
Instead, because of a quadrupling in legal immigration numbers, we have more than 310 million inhabitants and are on a trajectory to cross 600 million well before the end of this century!
How the Sierra Club and to a lesser degree the Natural Resources Defense Council sold out the environment.
I’ve written a lot of posts on the subject here, here, here and here for starters. Readers need to know that the Sierra Club and NRDC * are part of the far left, pro-union, pro-open borders Apollo Alliance which is credited with drafting the stimulus bill to redistribute the wealth (as Van Jones would say) to an increasing number of the world’s poor while hiding behind a faux green jobs agenda. Heck, one Apollo Alliance board member—John Podesta of the Center for American Progress— is a big open borders advocate and the CAP pushed for an airlift of 100,000 Iraqis to the US last year when we have no jobs let alone the mythical “green” ones. And, would someone explain to me how all the immigrants Podesta is pushing won’t compete with the union workers supposedly represented by union leaders on the Apollo Board.
* I note that since I wrote my first post on the Apollo Alliance that Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC, has gotten off the Apollo board (I’m glad I had copied the board of directors list in that earlier post), and she doesn’t even mention her Apollo Alliance role in her bio, here. I wonder why?
One more thing: After I posted this, I searched NRDC’s website and found only one obscure mention of the Apollo Alliance in reference to an employee who had previously worked there. Interesting—not proud of their earlier key role on the Board of the Apollo Alliance?