IMMIGRATION AND IMMIGRANT CONTROL

Immigration and Immigrant Control

Immigration and Immigrant Control

Immigrants to the developed world have frequently been blamed for unemployment, crime, and other social ills.  Attempts to reduce or block immigration have been justified as necessary measures to protect "our way of life" from alien influences.

Today, some environmentalists go farther, arguing that sharp cuts in immigration are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change.  However sincere and well-meaning such activists may be, their arguments are wrong and dangerous, and should be rejected by the climate emergency movement.

"Environmental" arguments for reducing immigration aren't new.  In a 1974 article, "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case against Helping the Poor," US biologist Garrett Hardin argued that "a nation's land has a limited capacity to support a population and as the current energy crisis has shown us, in some ways we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our land."  Immigration, he said, was "speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries." Elsewhere he wrote: "Overpopulation can be avoided only if borders are secure; otherwise poor and overpopulated nations will export their excess to richer and less populated nations."

Hardin's ideas have been very influential in the development of the right-wing, anti-immigration movement in the US and elsewhere.  In 1979, he helped to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant lobbying group that has been named a "hate organization" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.3  In addition to the usual array of anti-immigrant arguments, FAIR has made a particular point of linking concerns about the environment with opposition to immigration.

Virginia Abernethy, a Hardin collaborator who calls herself an "ethnic separatist," argues that the ability to migrate to rich countries gives people in poor countries an incentive to have bigger families.  "The U.S. would help, not harm, by encouraging an appreciation of limits sooner rather than later.  A relatively-closed U.S. border would create most vividly an image of limits and be an incentive to restrict family size."

In the past, the "environmental" anti-immigration argument was: immigrants should be kept out because their way of life is a threat to our environment.  That argument is still made by anti-immigrant groups and some conservationists.

Recently, as concern about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming increased, the anti-immigrant argument has taken on a new form.  Now the argument is: immigrants should be kept out because our way of life is a threat to the world's environment.

That's the argument made in a recent briefing from the US Centre for Immigration Studies, a "think tank" founded by FAIR: it says that immigration worsens CO2 emissions "because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher polluting country."  CIS calculated that the "average immigrant" to the US contributed four times more CO2 than in their country of origin.

Otis Graham, a founder of FAIR, made the same argument in his 2004 book Unguarded Gates: Most immigrants . . . move from poor societies to richer ones, intending to ...