If mass immigration slowly destroys democracy, there is only one sustainable course of action. Sustainable immigration requires: Reducing legal immigration and Stopping illegal immigration. What limits – if any – will the next administration seek? I’m Rob Harding with Jeremy Beck. Welcome to the Sustainable Immigration Newsletter! Today, we are remembering the late physicist Albert Bartlett’s warning: “we are allowing our immigration driven population growth to slowly destroy democracy at home in the U.S.” But first… NumbersUSA in Greater Yellowstone Scientific Director Leon Kolankiewicz and CEO James Massa were in Big Sky, Montana earlier this month to unveil our Greater Yellowstone Sprawl Study at the 16th Biennial Scientific Conference on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The scientific study analyzes how sprawl – fueled largely by population growth, including growth from immigration – is transforming the ecological function of Greater Yellowstone, America’s most iconic wildlife-rich ecosystem. Presentation of the study’s findings was well-received and local media took notice. After the conference, the study’s release received a prominent introduction in the newsletter of Yellowstonian, the Livingston, Montana based conservation journalism organization co-founded by eminent environmental journalist and author Todd Wilkinson.  |
Leon (center) and James (right) in conversation with Todd Wilkinson (left), Big Sky MT
An e-version as well as a limited number of hard copies of the study will be available soon. See a preview of what’s to come at https://yellowstonesprawl.com/, including Todd Wilkinson’s inspiring foreword to the study.
In related news, be sure to read Leon’s personal report from Greater Yellowstone and Henry’s article on America’s overcrowded national parks.
Diluting Democracy
“In a few generations,” Henry Barbaro writes, “an individual’s ‘voice’ has become a mere whisper” in the halls of Congress. In 1900, there was one U.S. representative for every 197,000 people. Today, the representation ratio has dropped to one for every 772,000 people. This is what Bartlett was talking about. Mass immigration drives U.S. population growth in an unsustainable direction. Henry continues:“Having the will of voters diluted in such a way can lead to voter apathy — a lack of interest among voters to participate in elections. In other words, a sense of disconnection and a belief that one’s vote doesn’t matter, which leads to low voter turnouts and less participation in other types of civic responsibilities. This creeping indifference towards the electoral process undermines the very foundation of democracy.”
And yet, our individual “whispers” echo through the halls of power when we take action together. When we eschew indifference and embrace the audacity of Democracy, our voices carry a thunderous message.
Limiting immigration on a crowded planet
NumbersUSA Board Member Philip Cafaro co-authored an excellent response to a recent discussion paper titled Migration in Hotter Times: Humanity at Risk. The response effectively outlines a series of benchmark arguments against sentimentalist, globalist support for continued mass immigration.
“Does the responsibility developed countries carry for greenhouse gases oblige them to take in any migrant affected by climate change?” ask Cafaro and co-author Jane O’Sullivan.
The authors’ cautionary answer: “Forcing countries to accept more immigrants than they can sustainably absorb, or their citizens want, would mean the end of national sovereignty, representative democracy and any functional social contract. Strong welfare systems only persist where population growth is low and social cohesion is high.”
Read the articles and tell us what you think.
Advice for Trump and Harris
We cannot say how Professor Bartlett, who died eleven years ago this month, would respond to President Trump’s claim that we need to import more workers to do American work. But we suspect he would have urged the former president to “think about this for a moment”:“If a country has to import people to do the work of the country, then that country is not sustainable.”
“We have all heard the plaintive cry,” said Bartlett, “that ‘We can’t get Americans to do the work, so we have to import workers from other countries.’ Think about this for a moment. This is an absolute indicator of national unsustainability!”
A better approach for Trump would be to reclaim his well-stated position from his 2018 State of the Union Address:“The United States is a compassionate nation. We are proud that we do more than any other country to help the needy, the struggling, and the underprivileged all over the world. But as President of the United States, my highest loyalty, my greatest compassion, and my constant concern is for America’s children, America’s struggling workers, and America’s forgotten communities. I want our youth to grow up to achieve great things. I want our poor to have their chance to rise.”
As for Vice President Harris, Dr. Karen Shragg applauds her instinct to decry anti-immigrant sentiment, but says that alone is not enough:“She must address our nation’s voters and say, ‘Of course we don’t hate immigrants, we are a nation of immigrants, but we are at a different time in our history. We are no longer dominated by amber waves of grain, we are full of over 366 million Americans and can no longer fool ourselves that we can accommodate mass immigration, much of it illegal, because of how it will hurt most Americans. There are complicated reasons for the fuel behind the desires of migrants to come to our shores. Unsustainable growth in many countries is certainly one of them. Blaming the US history of exploitation of global resources as the only reason for the misery and suffering of those at our borders is no excuse to dissolve the sociological and ecological integrity within our sovereign borders, dashing the hopes and dreams of our own citizens.’”
EarthX recorded presentations now available on demand
You may recall seeing in May’s newsletter that our sustainable immigration outreach and education efforts got an energizing boost from EarthX’s Congress of Conferences in Dallas, Texas, where NumbersUSA and America’s immigration-driven population growth problem were on the agenda. Formal panels and on-stage presentations provided an avenue to disseminate our unique studies concerning the drivers and impacts of urban sprawl in America (for example, our Colorado study continues to inform the housing debate in Denver).
Leon presenting on the EarthxTV Stage, Dallas TX
View Scientific Director Leon Kolankiewicz’s presentation here. View ally Dr. Karen Shragg’s presentation here.
The big picture: too many people are consuming too much
In Losing Our Minds, conservationist Brad Meiklejohn asks:”Fifty years ago, the brightest minds in the United States were deeply concerned that 210 million Americans were too many and that 280 million would be “much too many.” Now that we total 335 million Americans, the titans of Silicon Valley claim that we are running out of people.
”How did we lose our minds so quickly?”
Meiklejohn observes that “very few prominent public intellectuals these days…have the courage to assert that 335 million Americans is “much too many”, and that a declining population might be a good, easing, dawning opportunity.”
Indeed. Now remember that federal immigration policy is the overwhelming driver of America’s current population growth, and federal immigration policy is projected to drive nearly all future population growth. Therefore, confronting unsustainable growth at its source requires reducing immigration to a level America can sustain.
In The Unbearable Anthropocentrism of Our World in Data, freelance journalist and author Chris Ketcham makes the case that “there’s no room for the wild things when humans, cows, chickens, pigs, dogs and cats crowd out everything else, so that 96 percent of mammalian biomass now consists of Homo sapiens and our domesticated animals.”
Ketcham shares a statistic that hits home: “Ninety-nine percent of the tallgrass prairie in North America, once the largest such ecosystem on Earth, has been wiped out.”
Will continuing to add 3.5 million people a year to America’s population through immigration make our conservation challenges easier to confront or harder?
In the age of limits, a sensible immigration policy means less immigration.
Thank you for all that you do,
| Rob Harding and Jeremy Beck |