Too Many People?

In January 1972, the British magazine Ecologist devoted an entire issue to “A Blueprint for Survival,” a manifesto that became one of the most influential statements of environmentalism in Britain. Reissued as a book, it sold more than 750,000 copies and is often credited as the document that led to the creation of the Ecology Party, later renamed the Green Party.

The Blueprint’s central thesis was that “if current trends are allowed to persist, the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet, possibly by the end of the century, certainly within the lifetimes of our children, are inevitable.” A substantial part of the document was devoted to an argument that Britain’s population was “well in excess of the carrying capacity of the land” and so should not be just stabilized but reduced.

Our task is to end population growth by lowering the rate of recruitment so that it equals the rate of loss . . . Governments must acknowledge the problem and declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should include an end to immigration .² (emphasis added)

The idea that immigrants were a threat to the pristine wilderness was common among US conservationists before World War II, but the “Blueprint” was one of the first documents of the new environmental movement to advocate a “gated community” approach. Instead of defending the global environment and decent living conditions for humanity, the authors of the “Blueprint” urged defense of Britain’s environment for the British, by keeping others out.

It is often assumed that all environmentalists hold progressive political and social views, but Garrett Hardin disproves that belief. He called himself an “eco-conservative,” but reactionary would be a better term. Before he adopted the label “human ecologist,” he was a eugenicist who wrote:

Studies indicate that as long as our present social organization continues, there will be a slow but continuous downward trend in the average intelligence—there seems to be little danger of society’s being deprived of something valuable by the sterilization of all feeble-minded individuals—more spectacular results could be obtained by preventing the breeding of numerous members of the sub-normal classes higher than the feeble-minded.³

Hardin’s most famous article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”⁴ is usually cited for its claim that commonly owned resources will always be overused, but Hardin actually wrote it to promote compulsory measures to reduce population. The “pollution problem,” he wrote, “is a consequence of population,” a result of too many people “using the commons as a cesspool.”

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all . . .

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.⁵

Hardin denied that voluntary birth control programs could end population growth. He criticized the slogan “Every child a wanted child” because “women want more children than the nation needs to achieve zero population growth . . . if only wanted children are born the population will grow out of control.”⁶

In “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” published in 1974, Hardin compared the United States to a lifeboat with little space to spare. Admitting more people would cause everyone to drown. “World food banks move food to the people, hastening the exhaustion of the environment of the poor countries. Unrestricted immigration, on the other hand, moves people to the food, thus speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries.”⁷

Giving foreigners access to American food would just help them win the breeding race:

Every day we [Americans] are a smaller minority. We are increasing at only 1 percent per year; the rest of the world increases twice as fast. By the year 2000, one person in 24 will be an American; in 100 years, only one in 46 . . .

If the world is one great commons, in which all food is shared equally, then we are lost. Those who breed faster will replace the rest . . . In the absence of breeding controls, a policy of “one mouth, one meal” ultimately produces one totally miserable world. In a less than perfect world, the allocation of rights based on territory must be defended if a ruinous breeding race is to be avoided. It is unlikely that civilization and dignity can survive everywhere; but better in a few places than in none. Fortunate minorities must act as the trustees of a civilization that is threatened by uninformed good intentions.⁸

The logic of lifeboat ethics

“Sending food to Ethiopia, for instance, does more harm than good . . . The more we encourage population growth by sending more and more food, the more damage is done to the production system. Every time we send food to save lives in the present, we are destroying lives in the future . . .

“Our best chance of solving these problems is to let each country produce as many babies as the government decides is appropriate. This means each country must take care of the babies it produces. No rich country should be an escape hatch for a poor country . . .

“The quickest, easiest, and most effective form of population control in the U.S., that I support wholeheartedly, is to end immigration.”

—Garrett Hardin, from an interview published in OMNI magazine, June 1992

Barry Commoner condemned Hardin’s argument in The Closing Circle: “Here, only faintly masked, is barbarism. It denies the equal right of all the human inhabitants of the earth to a humane life . . . Neither within Hardin’s tiny enclaves of ‘civilization,’ nor in the larger world around them, would anything that we seek to preserve—the dignity and the humaneness of man, the grace of civilization—survive.”⁹

In the United States in the 1970s, Hardin’s anti-immigration argument had very concrete implications. As historian Robert Gottlieb points out, the growth of anti-immigration sentiment in the environmental movement paralleled and was influenced by the US government campaign against undocumented workers from Mexico.

By 1973, the new head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), former Marine commandant Leonard Chapman, would initiate in conjunction with other border control advocates a militaristic-sounding campaign against “illegal aliens” from Mexico, claiming the country was being overrun by poor Mexicans in search of jobs and economic benefits. This campaign not only increased INS budgets but helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of a new and powerful anti-immigrant coalition that prominently included mainstream environmental population control advocates.

By the late 1970s, population control was becoming synonymous with efforts to control the flow of Mexican migrants.¹⁰

In that political context, Hardin’s lifeboat ethics were popular with the right wing of the environmental movement, but his “let them all starve” rhetoric repelled progressive greens. It was left to Paul and Anne Ehrlich to promote a more acceptable environmental argument against immigration.

The Ehrlichs didn’t mention immigration in The Population Bomb, but by the late 1970s it had become central to their thinking about US population. In 1979, they and historian Loy Bilderback published a book on US-Mexico border issues, The Golden Door, which argued that the problem with Mexican immigrants was not that they were different from Americans but that they wanted to be the same:

If native Americans continue unrepentantly in their traditional “prosperity,” that is, a resource-gobbling, environment-destroying life-style, then America will continue to attract immigrants, legal and illegal, who will strive to do the same. If the past is any guide, most immigrants will sooner or later achieve a standard of living that is not significantly different from that of the native-born. After all, this is what attracts most immigrants in the first place. Thus, adding people to the United States population by migration would increase the total American impact on global resources and environment, as well as contributing to domestic problems, just as adding people by natural increase would.¹¹

Migration from poor to rich nations represents a very different kind of threat, however. To the degree that immigrants adopt the lifestyles of their adopted countries they will begin consuming more resources per person and to do disproportionate environmental damage . . .

The flow of immigrants into the United States should be damped, simply because the world can’t afford more Americans.¹²

In 2004 they added the claim that immigrants are actually more damaging to the environment than “native Americans” because they reproduce faster and because by immigrating they reduce incentives for improvements in their homelands.

Migrants understandably move towards jobs and financial rewards, and overall they appear to find them. That means that, on average, they better their condition, become more affluent, consume more, and thus add more to the overall environmental impact of human beings than if they had stayed home. International migrants may also import high-fertility habits from poor nations into rich nations, raising birthrates among the more affluent—and environmentally more destructive—people of the world. And they often bring great economic benefits to rich economies, contributing to the ability of affluent local people to consume more . . .

To the degree that migration as a “safety valve” keeps poor nations from squarely facing their own demographic problems while swelling the numbers of higher-income consumers, migration will have a negative influence on the chances of reaching global sustainability.¹³

Danish environmentalist Inge Røpke calls such reasoning ethically problematic, “implying that the already established citizens of the affluent countries have more right to maintain high consumption levels than newcomers have to approach a high standard . . . Restrictive immigration policies appear as an egoistic defense of privileges rather than a contribution to sustainability.”¹⁴

Eric Neumayer, a professor of environment and development at the London School of Economics, is much harsher: “I would define eco-fascism as a position that holds that some people have the right to consume a lot of resources and pollute much based on nationality, citizenship or race, but all the rest, which is the vast majority of people, do not have this right. And to ensure this, they need to be kept where they are.”¹⁵

As the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope wrote, this anti-immigration argument amounts to telling the world: “We know that our way of life is fatal to the biosphere, but we don’t plan to change it, and we can’t afford to have you join us. Please don’t imitate us back in your own countries either.”¹⁶

• Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR): “The United States will not be able to achieve any meaningful reductions in CO₂ emissions without serious economic and social consequences for American citizens unless immigration is sharply curtailed.”¹⁷

• Center for Immigration Studies (CIS): “Continued American population growth is incompatible with sustainability, nationally or globally. Therefore environmentalists committed to sustainability should support reducing current high levels of U.S. immigration.”¹⁸

• NumbersUSA: “There are 305 million people in the U.S. today. We’re on track, with current immigration numbers, to add another 135 million in just 40 years. That means more stress on the environment. More roads. More cars. More oil.”¹⁹

The three organizations quoted above are Garrett Hardin’s direct political heirs in the United States today. Although they appear to be separate, they are, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “fruits of the same poisonous tree.”

FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA are all part of a network of restric-tionist organizations conceived and created by John Tanton, the “puppeteer” of the nativist movement and a man with deep racist roots . . . He has met with leading white supremacists, promoted anti-Semitic ideas, and associated closely with the leaders of a eugenicist foundation once described by a leading newspaper as a “neo-Nazi organization.” He has made a series of racist statements about Latinos and worried that they were outbreeding whites. At one point, he wrote candidly that to maintain American culture, “a European-American majority” is required.²⁰

Tanton chaired the Sierra Club’s Population Committee in the early 1970s and was president of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) from 1975 to 1977. After ZPG refused to endorse his proposal for an anti-immigration campaign, he founded FAIR in 1978; the founding directors included Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich. Since then he has initiated and funded many other anti-immigration groups, each designed to appeal to a specific audience, each presented as independent of the others.

It’s tempting to dismiss Tanton and his associates as marginal cranks, but their influence is significant and growing. FAIR, which focuses on lobbying federal and state governments, claims to have been invited to testify before congressional committees more often than any other organization, and in association with NumbersUSA it has successfully used mass lobbying to derail legislative proposals to give legal status to undocumented workers.

FAIR’s legal affiliate, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), assisted in drafting SB1070, the anti-immigrant law approved in Arizona in 2010. FAIR president Dan Stein describes SB1070 as “a law that both represents the interests of legal Arizonians and serves as model legislation for other states.”²¹ Elected politicians in forty-one states are members of FAIR’s legislative arm, State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI); in May 2010 it was reported that SLLI-affiliated politicians had proposed Arizona-style laws in at least seven other states.²²

CIS provides intellectual ammunition for the anti-immigration movement. Although it claims to conduct “independent, non-partisan” research, it has, as Mark Potok comments, “never found any aspect of immigration that it liked.”²³

A frequently cited CIS research paper attempts to assign hard numbers to the argument that by coming to the United States immigrants increase global greenhouse gas emissions. The authors claim:

If the current stock of immigrants in the United States had stayed in their countries of origin rather than migrating to the United States, their estimated annual CO₂ emissions would have been only 155 metric tons, assuming these immigrants had the average level of CO₂ emissions for a person living in their home countries. This is 482 million tons less than the estimated 637 tons they will produce in the United States. This 482 million ton increase represents the impact of immigration on global emissions. It is equal to approximately 5 percent of the increase in annual world-wide CO₂ emissions since 1980.²⁴

They reach those conclusions despite their admission that “one obstacle to estimating annual immigrant and native-born per capita CO₂ emission rates is that there are no data that disaggregate rates of these two population cohorts.”²⁵ In place of real numbers, they use their own estimates, which they base on per capita income figures that are themselves estimates.

NumbersUSA, the populist voice of the Tanton network, blames immigration for unemployment, low wages, urban sprawl, congestion, overcrowded schools, lost open spaces, and more. Its president, Roy Beck, says such problems are caused by “bad recent public policies that raised the volume of national immigration above social, economic, educational, cultural, and environmental thresholds.”²⁶

The group’s website promotes the idea that US citizens of foreign ancestry aren’t real Americans. For example, a graph headed “Question: If Congress doesn’t change immigration policies, what will happen by the end of the century?” claims to show that immigrants will outbreed Americans—but the “immigrants” section includes several generations of people born in the United States, all of whom are citizens under the US constitution.

It is headed by former Canadian ambassador to Sri Lanka, Martin Collacott, now a senior fellow with the right-wing Fraser Institute, and former Conservative Party candidate Margret Kopala. Its advisory council includes Derek Burney, a longtime Conservative Party strategist who was chief of staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1987 to 1989 and who headed Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s transition team in 2006.

Immigration currently accounts for most population growth in Canada, and population growth is by far the major pressure on the environment. In addition, immigration to Canada from developing countries (which is where most of our immigrants now come from) has significant negative effects on the environment in the world as a whole because, according to some estimates, such immigrants have an ecological footprint four times that which they had in their countries of origin. It is worth noting in this regard that, while Canada is often criticized for the environmental consequences of its oil sands development, the impact on the environment of our immigration intake is significantly greater. Immigration in fact has major environmental consequences.

The site gives no source for any of these claims, and its Links page includes only seven “organizations with useful analyses of immigration and refugee issues”—three of which are the Tanton groups FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA.

They have used the wedge directly, by creating pseudo-green groups whose real goal is to draw sincere environmentalists into the morass of nativist politics. Groups such as Apply the Brakes, Population-Environment Balance, and Carrying Capacity Network (CCN) have a light green veneer over a hard core of anti-immigrant ideology that verges on outright racism.

For example, the chair of CCN is Garrett Hardin’s longtime associate Virginia Abernethy, who calls herself an ethnic separatist. She is also on the editorial advisory board of the Occidental Quarterly, a magazine whose statement of principles says, “The European identity of the United States and its people should be maintained. Immigration into the United States should be restricted to selected people of European ancestry.”²⁹ She is also on the editorial advisory board of the official magazine of the Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly known as the White Citizens’ Council.

Historian David Reimers explains that environmentalism can provide political cover for racists: “The population-environmental issue offers the possibility of avoiding the racist issue. By making the environment and overpopulation the issues and not who is coming, anti-immigrant voices can say they are not racists and at the same time can tie their crusade to a relatively popular issue.”³⁰

The far right has also used the immigration issue as a wedge to split or capture genuine environmental groups. The best-publicized case was the attempt, coordinated by a coalition of anti-immigrant groups, to take over the oldest and largest environmental organization in the United States, the Sierra Club. After losing a 1998 membership vote on their proposal to commit the Sierra Club to an immigration restriction program, a secretive group called Sierrans for United States Population Stabilization (SUSPS) launched a multi-year campaign to win a majority on the club’s board. The campaign culminated in the 2004 board elections, when anti-immigrant groups across the United States urged their supporters to join the Sierra Club to vote for three SUSPS-endorsed candidates.

The SUSPS candidates were defeated, but not without a time-consuming and divisive battle that diverted attention and effort from Sierra Club’s ongoing environmental programs. If they had won, anti-immigration forces would have had effective control of an environmental organization with 750,000 members and over $100 million in assets.

These wedge campaigns show why it’s important for environmental activists to understand the nature and background of groups such as FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA. These pseudo-green organizations, and the anti-immigrant program they promote, undermine and weaken our efforts to build mass democratic movements to confront and defeat the real causes of environmental destruction.

The US Center for New Community, which has helped organize against attempts by far-right groups to infiltrate environmental movements and groups, has explained the dangers posed to the real environmental movement by anti-immigration groups:

This environmentalism represents a new and dangerous form of eco-politics. It is an eco-politics that acknowledges energy constraints, resource depletion, and climate change as scientific phenomena, but its response—to keep out immigrants—denies the possibility of effective solutions. Border fences, racial profiling, and mandatory identity cards will not cap carbon or prevent oil spills. Nor will they bring about the necessary transition to renewable energy and a green economy. Instead, this version of environmentalism desperately wants to promote an American dream of unlimited consumption—for whites only.³¹

Unfortunately, the Sierra Club weakened its own position by continuing to support populationist policies and by declaring a position of neutrality on immigration. Instead of actively defending the rights of immigrants, Sierra voted “to take no position on U.S. immigration levels and policies.” Whatever the political realities that led to that position, its real effect is to leave a wedge between greens and immigrants.

Guarding the American lifeboat

“The world can’t afford more Americans”

The greening of hate

Greening the anti-immigrant right in Canada

The immigration wedge