In early 2004, immigration foes sued the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental organization, as part of their bid to secure most of the fifteen seats of its board of directors. With five seats open for votes, the Los Angeles Times described the suspense:  “Three prominent immigration control advocates -- UCLA astronomy professor Ben Zuckerman, Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug LaFollette, and Paul Watson, leader of the group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, already had won seats to the board in recent years, putting majority control within the grasp of the dissidents in this year’s election.” [1]  And the immigration debate had already struck an ominous note. After winning a seat in 2002, Ben Zuckerman reportedly gave other board members an article claiming that migrants spread disease and crime in the U.S., facilitated by “Hispandering politicians.” [2] The article came from VDARE.com, a site named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born in a U.S. colony. [3]

The restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) encouraged readers to hustle their $25 fees right to the Sierra Club in order to gain membership and have a hand in building the board. [4] Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, who was then running for the Sierra Club board, has also chaired the FAIR advisory board. [5] Sierra Club leaders became increasingly nervous about intermeddling by the Center for American Unity, Coloradans for American Immigration Reform, Limitstogrowth.com, the National Alliance (“ideology from a white racial perspective”), the National Immigration Alert and White Politics Inc. [6]  The plot thickened as a hunting organization urged its members to join the Sierra Club, in order to counter board member Paul Watson, who not only argues for immigration restriction but is also a vocal animal protectionist. [7]

Frank Morris, former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, appeared as a board candidate in 2004, stating that “it is really important that I point out what is obvious to most African-Americans but unfamiliar to most other Americans. That is the fact that high flows of immigrants into the American labor supply have been an important part of the long history of American racism against African-Americans in the U.S.” [8]  Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm and entomologist David Pimentel joined Morris as new board candidates. [9] “Immigration is the ultimate environmental issue,” Lamm stated. [10] And although Pimentel’s candidacy statement listed such pesticide, soil degradation, water pollution, invasive species and energy use as the key environmental issues, the Cornell professor is also director of the restrictionist Carrying Capacity Network [11], and has expressed the fear that California, due to the “high immigration rate, both legal and illegal” will, by 2035, “approximately double to 64 million, if current population growth continues!” [12] 

Keeping the Wretched Refuse at Bay

In 1979, John Tanton founded FAIR, now the largest U.S. immigration restrictionist group. [13]  Key financers are the heirs to the Mellon Bank fortune; Richard Mellon Scaife also played a key role in starting the Heritage Foundation. [14] Dr. Tanton, long active in mainstream environmentalism, chaired the Sierra Club’s national Population Committee in the early 1970s. [15] According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Tanton had something akin to a conversion when he came across The Camp of the Saints, a lurid, racist novel written by Frenchman Jean Raspail that depicts an invasion of the white, Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees. Tanton helped get the novel published in English and soon was promoting what he considered the book’s prophetic argument. “Their [Third World] ‘huddled masses’ cast longing eyes on the apparent riches of the industrial west,” Tanton wrote in 1975. “The developed countries lie directly in the path of a great storm.” [16]

Over a decade later, Tanton posed the question, “Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren’t controlled?” [17] And in the mid-nineties, Tanton was backing efforts to make immigration a Sierra Club election issue. [18]

Today, the Sierra Club takes no formal position on the question. Yet in our political climate, neutrality is a position, and not a particularly generous one.  To control immigration, the U.S. Congress applies methods that have disproportionately impeded entrance and naturalization of people classified as non-white, poor, or political non-conformists. Barring non-citizens “likely at any time to become public charges” -- the most common substantive form of exclusion -- hardly seems a fit for a group whose mission involves preserving lands that all are free to enjoy.

People need the valve of free movement to ease the tension of political sturm und drang, and the interest of most human beings in striving to live up to our capacities leads us to seek chances to escape poverty, persecution, war, and natural disasters. But arguably the main reason to allow migration, in an era when U.S. capital is displacing millions around the globe, is justice. Climate change brings to the forefront one aspect of that dynamic.

Courting Disaster

Predicted temperature rises, following in the wake of decades of wealth-creation through the burning of fossil fuels, threaten to wreak overwhelming havoc. The United States is responsible for disproportionate amounts of excess greenhouse gases; yet, together with Australia, it has courted disaster by undermining the relevant international emissions limits. [19]  Already, Bikeman island, of the Kiribati group of Pacific islands, is submerged. [20]  Such changes are poised to accelerate. [21]  Climatologists who met at the British government’s conference in February 2005 heard that a rise in global temperatures of just 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.8 Fahrenheit), almost certain to happen this century, will confront as many as three billion people with water stress. [22] In such a case, people will be migrating for their very lives. But where are they to go? What is the environmentalist’s logical reason for agreeing that they go somewhere else, but not here? Such questions must be asked in an informed setting. Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope has acknowledged this need, writing that “[i]mmigration restrictions don’t solve environmental problems, they merely shift them elsewhere.” [23]

The National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences provides confirmation of this position, noting that “immigration involves primarily a redistribution of the world’s population, not an absolute increase,” and additionally stating: 

Indeed, since the fertility of immigrants tends to decline after they come to the United States, total world population will be slightly lower…From a world perspective, (negative) environmental effects in the United States may be counterbalanced by possible (positive) effects in the sending countries that are losing population. Total consumption by immigrants will typically be higher in the United States than in the places they left (which, after all, is one reason they immigrated), but efforts to abate environmental effects at any given level of consumption may also be higher in the United States. [24]

A critical question, then, is how to transcend a lifestyle based on fossil fuels, animal agribusiness, deforestation and disposable plastics.  Some immigrants embrace this lifestyle, likely because it’s wrapped in the notion of the American dream rather than the environmental nightmare it really is. Moreover, flashy fast-food restaurants proliferating throughout the world promote it as palatable, and turn environmental neglect into a badge of affluence.  The energies of our environmentalists would be more effectively focused on curbing this national vice, rather than on campaigning in vain against the aspirations of human beings in motion.

The Blowback of Fairness

A general agreement to advocate for fair trade policies -- decided upon in a way that takes seriously the input of those in the global south whom they are designed to impact -- would be a critical step, as higher wages for workers in financially poorer countries would help to reduce the intense economic pull of people across U.S. borders. Come mid-century, the United States will retire the youngest members of its baby-boom work force. [25]  In contrast to reliance on adjustments in the birth rate amongst the U.S.-born while barring migrants, fair trade and liberal migration would offer sensible, just ways to anticipate demand for workers.

Neither fair trade nor liberal migration policies would automatically end racism; but both would play significant roles in answering Frank Morris’s concerns about displacement of African-American workers. Together, such policies offer a positive alternative to campaigns that undermine the long struggle to end racial or ethnic profiling -- a struggle that immigration enforcement has eroded in recent times.

In short, if a policy can be used as fuel for hate, it’s probably not green. And yet, although their efforts to control the Sierra Club’s board were foiled again over the past two years, the restrictionists’ efforts continue. [26] They showed up again on the Sierra Club’s 2005 ballot, and one of their recent efforts included support for a new ballot measure designed to move the Sierra Club in the direction of advocating greater restrictions upon immigration into the United States. [27] The mood of the nation, combined with the persistence of restrictionists, would suggest that they could yet secure significant backing. [28]

This is the first part in a two-part series. 

Next:  Part II -- Where Does Animal Advocacy Come In?