For the purpose of this editorial, “mass immigration” will be defined as a million or more legal permanent immigrants coming into the USA per year.
With our severe water problems in many parts of the American West, with our society sprawling over 4000 acres of our countryside daily,[1]and sprawling over 40 acres of farm and ranch land per hour,[2]and with our population using approximately 20% to 25% of many of the world’s most critical resources while only comprising under 5% of the world’s population,[3]it’s definitely time to slow down population growth in the USA. Mass immigration is the main driver of that population growth in the USA and so that means that immigration needs to be decreased to something near the average of historic immigration levels between 1915 and 1988[4]of well under one million legal immigrants per year, on the order of 500,000 or less per year.
With our severe water problems in many parts of the American West, with our society sprawling over 4000 acres of our countryside daily,[1]and sprawling over 40 acres of farm and ranch land per hour,[2]and with our population using approximately 20% to 25% of many of the world’s most critical resources while only comprising under 5% of the world’s population,[3]it’s definitely time to slow down population growth in the USA. Mass immigration is the main driver of that population growth in the USA and so that means that immigration needs to be decreased to something near the average of historic immigration levels between 1915 and 1988[4]of well under one million legal immigrants per year, on the order of 500,000 or less per year.
If we continue on our current
course of one million or more legal immigrants per year, the U.S. population
will almost certainly be over ½ billion people by the year 2100, and if the
proponents of increasing mass immigration and the promoters of so-called “Comprehensive
Immigration Bills” have their way, the U.S. population could be a billion or more by 2100 - that’s within the
lifetimes of today’s toddlers.[5] Can you imagine California, for example,
having 3 to 4 times it’s current population of approximately 40 million people?
- ridiculous! Can you imagine New York
City with 4 times as many people as it’s current population of 8.6 million? - absurd! If we change our immigration levels to well
under 1 million per year we can keep our population from going over ½
billion for many decades and buy time to develop policies to always keep it
under that level.
All recent Gallup Polls show
that a large majority of Americans do not want immigration levels increased,[6]][7]yet the mass immigration lobbies along with an elite minority of the Democratic Party and along with the Republican dominated Chamber of Commerce all continue to advocate and lobby for massive
increases in immigration that will push U.S. population towards one billion
people at the turn of the century. An extreme example of how those individuals
think can be seen in this wacky article promoting massive immigration
increases that would bring the U.S. population to 1.6 billion by 2100, written by an East Coast elite on a Yale University website: “US Could Be World’s Most Populous Country"[8](Has the author of the Yale article ever even travelled to the arid American
West?). It’s time for Americans to take
control of this issue and make it clear to the Federal Government that the majority of Americans do not want immigration levels increased.
As far as the DACA and other “Pathway to
Citizenship” people are concerned, we can pass legislation to give every one of
them a green card and pathway to citizenship while simultaneously passing, in the same legislation, a national, universal, mandatory,
strictly enforced E-Verify system for all employers so that employers will be
financially punished for hiring future undocumented workers and so that we can avoid ever again getting into this situation of having so many undocumented people with
insecure status in the USA. Legislation should also be included to prevent extended-family immigration (cousins, aunts, uncles, etc) so that as the DACA and other "Pathway to Citizenship" people become citizens it will be harder for them to bring in their extended (non-immediate) family members.
Remember, no environmental problem in America is improved by increasing
the U.S. population, and mass immigration is now the main driver of population
growth in the USA. For now, let’s
at the very least stop the elites of the Democratic and Republican Parties from
massively increasing immigration levels into the USA, and it’s time to start
contemplating a large decrease in immigration to the historic levels previously
mentioned in this editorial, so that we can tackle our country’s major environmental problems before they become insurmountable.
John Brainard, Editor, The EarthDirectory Network
John Brainard, Editor, The EarthDirectory Network
Editor's Update, October 1, 2017: Readers of the above post keep bringing up the issue of world population growth, which is not covered in the post. It's been established over and over again that in countries where women have something approaching equal rights, population growth tends to rapidly decrease and ceases to be a problem, and so the answer to world overpopulation is universal women's rights, emancipation and liberation. Current projections are that world population growth will stop at a level somewhere between 9 and 12 billion sometime within the next 100 to 150 years. Full granting of women's rights worldwide in the immediate future will help stop world population growth much sooner rather than later.
[6] “In
U.S. Support for Decreasing Immigration Holds Steady,” GALLUP NEWS and [7] "Overall U.S. Desire to Decrease Immigration Unchanged in 2017," GALLUP NEWS
