Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm. “When someone says they want to control U.S. population growth, they’re talking about the brown population.”
June 2004
The Politics of Immigration
Why State Officials and Some Environmentalists Find It Too Hot to Handle
by Christopher Hammond
That scuffle you hear is election-year posturing. Congressional Democrats and the White House both are courting the Latino vote by urging immigration policy reform. And the politicians have completely missed the point. At least that’s what some scholars who have studied immigration think. Most of them agree that the United States — and California specifically — are headed for trouble simply because of an inability to talk sensibly about unlawful immigration and overpopulation. This failure to hold a civil debate on immigration even threatened to tear the Sierra Club asunder during a contentious vote in April.
“If we don’t get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially the American Dream.” That’s the conclusion of Frosty Wooldridge, a confirmed bicyclist who has ridden around the globe and written about his adventures. His editorials have appeared in the Rocky Mountain News and the Christian Science Monitor. Wooldridge attended an overpopulation-immigration conference in Washington, DC last fall. His candid account of one policy thinker spread like, well, wildfire. Right-wing media seized on his report — from David Horowitz’ Front Page magazine, to the Washington Dispatch, the Federal Observer, and Bible Believers‘ Web sites.
Wooldridge says that he sat in the audience — “filled to capacity by many of America’s finest minds and leaders” — spellbound as he listened to former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm describe how to “destroy America.”
“If you believe that America is too smug, too satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America,” Lamm said. “It’s not that hard to do.
Lamm went on to spell out a number of ways that he thought America is digging its own grave: by allowing bilingualism, by encouraging immigrants to maintain their culture, by giving immigrant children a second-rate education, by celebrating diversity over assimilation, by starting “a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population,” and by not enforcing U.S. immigration laws.
“Next to last, I would ... make it taboo to talk about anything against the ‘cult of diversity,’” Lamm said. “I would find a word similar to ‘heretic’ in the 16th Century that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobe’ that halt discussion and debate.”
Wooldridge wrote: “In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. The profound silence allowed me to hear my heart beating. He said, ‘Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis Hanson’s book Mexifornia. His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America. If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don’t read that book.’
“There was no applause,” Wooldridge said. “A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference.
Mexifornia or Calexico?
Population growth, namely unchecked illegal immigration, is the subject of Victor Davis Hanson’s book Mexifornia, the one singled out by Lamm. Hanson writes that California immigration is the result of “a tacit alliance of Right and Left [that] has created an open-borders policy, aimed at keeping wage labor cheap and social problems ever fresh.”
A Classics professor at California State University at Fresno, Hanson is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. He’s also a fifth-generation Californian who lives and farms near Fresno, which he calls “living at illegal immigration’s intersection.”
“Each week I pick up trash, dirty diapers, even sofas and old beds dumped in our orchard by illegal aliens,” Hanson writes, “Yet I also walk through vineyards at 7 am in the fog and see whole families from Mexico, hard at work in the cold — while native-born unemployed of all races will not — and cannot — prune a single vine.” Hanson praises these laborers as “some of the most intelligent and industrious people in the world” but warns that, if not assimilated, they have “the potential to cost the state far, far more than they can contribute.”
Hanson believes that one reason Mexican-American immigrants don’t assimilate as easily as the immigrants from Southeast Asia, Punjab, and Armenia who now live in California’s Central Valley, is that Mexican-Americans never experience the physical or psychological distance from their home country that most other immigrants find. After all, it’s only a six-hour drive from Fresno to the Mexican border.
Let’s Talk
Can you call for limits on immigration without sounding like a racist? Some population researchers do believe that’s a tall order.
“If you look at the structure of the population in the U.S., immigration control means controlling the population of non-white people,” says Professor Arun Agrawal, population and environmental policy researcher at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment. Agrawal says most U.S. immigrants today are Latino and Asian. “When someone says they want to control U.S. population growth, they’re talking about the brown population,” he says.
The U.S. population is expected to grow by more than 100 million people in the next generation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And most of the new Americans will be immigrants or the children of recent immigrants who — like the rest of Americans — will drive cars, turn up the heat in winter, and need a place to live.
“There are two reasons that people adopt policy decisions that are mistaken,” Agrawal says. “One, they don’t have enough information on the issue. Two, they adopt the policy because of politics.”
Population scientist Paul Ehrlich agrees. When asked during a recent Living on Earth NPR radio interview whether the United States should even hold a debate on immigration control, the Stanford professor replied: “There is no organization that I know in the United States at the moment that has looked broadly and carefully at the immigration issue — at all of its dimensions, at its environmental dimensions, at its consumption dimensions, at its ethical dimensions, at how it interacts with family size and so on — and drawn sensible conclusions. And that includes the United States Congress.
“We have a Congress that’s insane enough to debate immigration policy without debating population policy,” Ehrlich said. “It’s like arguing over how many people-a-minute you want to design an aircraft to load without asking how many people it’s going to fly with.”
One Nation, Supersized, with Cars and Houses for All
The impact of thousands of new immigrants on the U.S. environment became a hot-button issue for the Sierra Club this spring. Former Governor Lamm ran for a seat on the club’s board of directors. His supporters said that people who migrate to the United States increase environmental stress. Lamm said that if elected, he would use the club’s powerful lobbying arm to push for reduced immigration.
Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope lashed back in the May/June issue of Sierra magazine, calling the attempt to sway club policy a “virus of hate ... that now threatens to infect the Sierra Club.”
Lamm took umbrage at the implication that he was in cahoots with bigots. He says he and the other reform candidates are not racists. On his Web site, Lamm noted that he and his family scraped together the funds so that his wife could march in Selma.
However, Lamm does hold advisory positions with national lobby groups that push Congress to adopt strict immigration reforms. According to watchdog group Media Transparency, the money to support these groups mostly comes from conservative bank-rollers such as Richard Mellon Scaife, whose foundations have poured nearly $2 million into projects at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Lamm serves as chairman of FAIR’s national board of advisors.
One might wonder at a time like this, what would David Brower think? The esteemed Sierra Club leader passed away in 2000. Lamm said he considered Brower a friend. Brower served a combined four terms on the club board in the 1980s and ‘90s, prodding them to be bolder and less bureaucratic. In 1999, when he ran in his last election, Brower was asked to clarify his position on immigration.
“No mountain is more imposing than the population and immigration question,” he wrote. “I offer the following sound-bite for openers: Overpopulation is a crisis, over-migration is a part of it. We can ignore neither and must address the causes of both.”
Brower said the media disdained his sound bite, calling it impractical and unsexy. “From one pole of irrationality, my options are being ‘a real environmentalist’ or being a ‘head-in-the-sand liberal lacking the political spine to address the population question,’” Brower wrote. “From Pole B (so to speak), I can choose between being ‘a responsible and sensitive citizen of a multicultural nation,’ or a ‘racist white environmentalist.’ I choose ‘None of the Above’ and I think you might also.”
International Solutions Needed
Some researchers suggest that the answer to the immigration dilemma lies outside the U.S. “What we want to do is develop a foreign policy that reduces the need of other people to come here,” Paul Ehrlich told NPR. “[We’ve got] to change our agricultural policy so that farmers in poor countries, instead of having to send their children to the US to get money, would be able to thrive on their own. But, right now, our trade policies, which are free-trade-for-the-rich and high-tariffs-for-the-poor, are just hurting the poor people of the world and forcing them to try and come and make a living in our country.”
Asked what he would advise the current president, Ehrlich replied: “What we say about immigration is that it’s a social issue, whether we want to have fewer children and more immigrants, or fewer immigrants and more children. My own personal view ... is that we want to have enough immigrants to keep our culture diverse, rich, and getting input from other cultures. But we also don’t want to have unlimited immigration.”
Words that David Brower wrote four years ago sound downright prescient today: “I maintain that the goal of stabilizing the U.S. population (which increases through fertility and, yes, migration) must be part of our global plan to save the world from, and for, humanity. But does closing our borders address the root causes of U.S. population increase? No, but I think that’s what many people think of when anyone mentions limiting immigration. We must learn to be far more generous and creative and far less reactionary.”
Chris Hammond is a local freelance journalist.
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