ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-UNITED STATES: Environmentalists Reject Anti- Immigration Move

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Danielle Knight

WASHINGTON, May 2 1998 (IPS) - Members of the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s largest and most influential environmental groups, have turned down an initiative calling for more restrictions on immigration to the United States.

The proposal, put to the Club’s annual ballot, sparked a nationwide debate on immigration and environmental degradation. It called for the environmental group to adopt policy limiting immigration into the United States in place of the organisation’s current position of neutrality on immigration.

Of the 550,000 club members who voted, 60 percent voted to keep the current policy, while 39.9 percent voted in favour of the anti- immigration position.

Board members of the Sierra Club, opposed to the anti- immigration initiative, were relieved at the majority of members who spurned the proposal mounted by a minority faction within the group. “The Sierra Club cannot protect our environment by building a wall around our borders,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the group. “Our members want us to get on with our real work – fighting pollution, cleaning up our air and water, protecting our wild lands and wildlife, and reducing global overpopulation.”

But Alan Kuper, a Sierra Club activist who led the initiative for a moratorium on immigration into this country, maintained that population pressure imposed by immigrants contributed to environmental degradation. “Slowing U.S. population growth from all sources – including immigration – will yield environmental benefits over the long term,” he said.

“Environmental initiatives will amount to little more than mopping the floor while leaving the spigot on unless immigration and population growth is slowed,” added Leon J. Kolankiewicz, vice president of the Carrying Capacity etwork, an anti- immigration group.

Currently, according to Census Bureau data, about 800,000 legal immigrants take up residence in the United States each year and illegal immigration adds amount 300,000

During the past few months, tireless campaigning on both sides of the immigration issue split the group. Sierra Club leaders and others accused outsiders of interfrng in the club’s international politics by drumming up support for the anti- immigration initiative.

The San Francisco-based Political Ecology Group, an environmental group that advocates immigrant rights, produced a study showing how several anti-immigration groups had worked on behalf of the ballot proposal.

Right-wing organisations including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, and Reform and Californians for Population Stabilisation – who were behind the Californian Proposition 187 that cut off undocumented immigrants’ access to education, most health care and other government services – provided support for the Sierra Club initiative.

With the help of these anti-immigration organisations, other environmental groups – such as Earth First! and the Wilderness Society – have adopted policies similar to the defeated Sierra Club proposal to reduce annua immigration. But, immigrants aren’t the problem, declared opponents of restrictive measures who won the debate within the Sierra Club vote.

“Anti-immigration and population proposals draw attention away from the real factors responsible for environmental degradation: corporate greed, militarism, inappropriate technologies and the ever-growing gap between the richest and poorest segments of society,” said Andy Smith of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

The root cause of environmental degradation is not related to population size because not all people consume resources and generate pollution equally, says Cathi Tactaquin, member of the Sierra Club’s National Population Committee and director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Middle and upper class people in the United States contributed more per capita to the world’s environmental problems than anyone else, says environmentalist Bill McKibben, author of the ‘End of Nature.’

“If we’re not willing to reduce (our own consumption) then cutting immigration is piggish scapegoating,” McKibben wrote in the New York Times recently. And, in a nation of immigrants, he asked pointedly “who are environmentalists to decide whom should be kept out?”

“In a world full of desperate poverty, it is hard for the richst nation to argue that the door should be closed, especially since nearly all of us can recall our immigrant roots,” McKibben said.

Sierra Club leaders also warned that a vote to take a stand against immigration would drive away ethnic minority groups as well as weaken their relationships with international environmental groups. The board members’ fight against the proposal had the ironic effect of encouraging ties with minority organisations.

“Our leadership and grassroots members joined together to fend off this misguided policy,” said executive director, Pope, “Now we can return to protecting the environment with renewed vigor and strengthened coalitions.”

Other environmental groups, including Greenpeace and Earth Island Institute, have steered clear of any anti-immigrant moves and, instead, have joined ethnic minority groups in fighting against incinerators and toxic waste dumps in their communities.

With the rejection of the anti-immigration proposal, Sierra Club leaders hoped they could get back to work on real environmental issues, including environmental justice.

“Environmentalists of all races and ethnicities will continue to work together to stop corporations from polluting our air and water,” said Adam Werbach, president of Sierra Club. “As partners, we will continue our fight t protect our children’s health and clean up our communities.”