Does immigration hurt the environment?

A new advertising campaign has got American progressives spluttering into their soy lattes. Plastered across the pages of the liberal American canon - newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, the New Republic, the American Prospect, the Nation and Harper's - are a series of full-page ads calling for progressives to join forces with anti-immigration activists in the name of saving the environment. The ads, which show bulldozers ripping up pristine forests while endless traffic jams snake off toward the horizon, blame overpopulation - driven, of course, by unchecked immigration - for suburban sprawl, greenhouse-gas emissions, depleted water resources and traffic congestion. "300 million people today, 600 million tomorrow," the ads warn darkly. "Think about it."
This isn't the first time that anti-immigration groups have tried to co-opt the American environmental movement. A few years back, the Sierra Club - itself founded by a Scottish immigrant - had to fend off a hostile takeover bid from right-wing activists who tried to win seats on the group's board of directors. In fact, anti-immigration campaigners' attempts to win over environmentalists date back to at least the 1970s, when Herbert Gruhl, a founder of Germany's Green party, made the ecological case for anti-immigration policies. When German Greens didn't bite, Gruhl went off in a huff and founded his own far-right ecological party. Since then, his ideas have been championed by German neo-Nazi groups and eagerly embraced by the British National party.
America's anti-immigration activists are doing their best to live up to that pedigree. Three of the five groups behind the current campaign are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Centre's Intelligence Project for their ties to white supremacists and their promotion of racist conspiracy theories. It's hardly surprising, then, that many of the ads' claims are best taken with a hefty pinch of salt. Suburban sprawl, notes the Sierra Club's energy programme director, Dave Hamilton, is "due to economic development without land use controls, not necessarily immigration". As for those pictures of endless traffic jams, studies show that, as a group, immigrants contribute least to congestion because they're more likely to carpool or use public transport.
In fact, it's debatable whether immigration has any significant environmental impact. US government scientists say there's insufficient evidence (pdf) to draw a conclusion one way or the other, while cornucopian economists like Julian Simon - a free-marketeer who's loathed by most environmentalists - have argued that immigration-fuelled population increases will make little or no long-term difference to the US environment. It's even been suggested that on a global scale, immigration helps to slow population growth. Immigrants from the developing world tend to reproduce more slowly than they would have done if they'd stayed home, while their remittances promote economic development and slow population growth in their home countries.
Of course, while there's scant evidence that immigration damages the environment, it's pretty clear that current efforts to curb illegal immigration are having a serious negative impact. The security fence being built along America's southern border slices through a number of key wildlife refuges, preventing the migration of animals such as black bears, grey wolves and jaguars. A study by the Mexican government found that the border fence would put as many as 85 endangered plant and animal species at heightened risk, in violation of a 1983 conservation agreement between the US and Mexico. That's apparently of little concern to the Bush administration. Homeland security chief Michael Chertoff has routinely waived environmental regulations in order to hasten the wall's construction.
The bottom line is that while environmentalists can't ignore population growth, it's a global issue that demands global solutions. The notion that America can solve or stave off environmental problems simply by sealing her borders is both factually incorrect and ideologically repugnant. At its core, the immigration lobby's cynical parochialism is based on the assumption that Americans can reasonably continue to pollute and consume at current levels, as long as they prevent anyone else from joining in. That's an ugly, nationalistic line of reasoning that some academics argue flirts dangerously with eco-fascism. Either way, it's a logic that has no place either in progressive circles or in the modern environmental debate.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/01/immigrationpolicy.usa