Do these persons being surveyed have any idea how many million [...]]]> Rasmussen published an immigration poll last Thursday that had an interesting detail that may indicate a dangerous ignorance in the public: more than a third of US likely voters thought open borders would be fine as long as terrorists and criminals were kept out.

Do these persons being surveyed have any idea how many million that might be? There are billions of poor people on earth who would like a shot at “a better life” that the US might provide to them. But excessive immigration causes all sorts of problems in American society, like skyrocketing costs for education, falling wages and pressures on insufficient water supply, to name a few.

Interestingly, a 2012 Gallup poll found that 150 Million Adults Worldwide Would Migrate to the U.S., and those persons would come from cultures very different from our own:

Potential migrants who say they would like to move to the U.S. are most likely to come from populous countries such as China (22 million), Nigeria (15 million), India (10 million), Bangladesh (8 million), or Brazil (7 million).

In 2012, the world population was around 7.1 billion, and today there are more than 7.7 billion humans on earth. Transportation and communication have gotten easier in the intervening eight years, so that number was likely to increase.

In fact, a 2018 Gallup survey found that More Than 750 Million Worldwide Would Migrate If They Could, and the top choice for 158 million was the United States:

Anyway, the point overall is that the ignorance of the public concerning world population growth gives rise to some very unwise opinions about immigration. You can’t blame the average voter that much because the word “billion” — as in referring to the number of planetary residents — has disappeared from the immigration discussion. World population growth is a major factor in the immigration equation, but it is overlooked for some reason.

Here are details of the Rasmussen poll:

Most Still Want Tight Border Control, Not Open Borders, Rasmussen Reports, Thursday, January 30, 2020

Voters still favor tough border control and say it’s too easy to get in and stay in the United States illegally. But they also think illegal immigration is getting a little harder these days.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey shows that 52% of Likely U.S. Voters think it is better for the United States to tightly control who comes into the country. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree and say it’s better for us to open our borders to anyone who wants to come here as long as they are not a terrorist or criminal. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure.

One memorable example of overpopulation was the government’s reallocation of Beijing-area water for the 2008 Summer Olympics [...]]]> Introduced in 1979, China’s one-child policy was seen abroad as an overreach of communist government controlling the people, even though that nation has basic resource problems that should have brought environmental limits more gently into the public conversation.

One memorable example of overpopulation was the government’s reallocation of Beijing-area water for the 2008 Summer Olympics from agriculture and general use to the sports events and guests — since nothing screams “third world” like insufficient water for a big international celebration.

Beijing is known for its polluted air, but water supply may be a more pressing environmental problem.

Yet shrinking demographics may have persuaded Beijing to not only trash the one-child policy but to mandate two-kid families for economic reasons — it’s being seriously considered. Good luck with that.

Tucker Carlson recently analyzed the complicated China situation with expert Gordon Chang:

Spare Audio:

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, every day China edges closer to overtaking the United States as the world’s richest country, but just because they are getting stronger economically doesn’t mean the Chinese people are more free. They are not. China is still imprisoning its Muslim population in the west. Ordinary Chinese still lose access to travel or education if the government says they have poor social credit and now a hacker has discovered a bizarre Chinese database that evaluated millions of Chinese women on whether they were quote, “breed ready.”

Gordon Chang is a columnist and author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” can’t come too soon. He joins us tonight. Gordon, thanks very much for coming on. What does “breed-ready” mean, and why would the Chinese government be assessing that?

GORDON CHANG: Well, breed-ready means they are able to breed children. And the reason why is because China has declining demography.

You know, if you start to look at some of the statistics, they are really frightening. So for instance, last year, their birth rate fell about 12%. Perhaps to the lowest rate in the history of the People’s Republic going back to 1949.

And we are seeing that the workforce has already topped out. The population as a whole will top out soon. China’s officials are just in a panic.

CARLSON: So they are identifying women who are breed-ready but then what do they do with that information? Is there going to be a coercive breeding program in China?

CHANG: There very possibly could be because some Chinese officials are now talking about having a two-child policy which is not a maximum two children, but they are talking about requiring couples to have two children.

Now, of course, China is not there yet. But you can see where they are going largely because they have been taken by surprise by a collapsing demography. They shouldn’t have been. People have been warning Chinese officials about this for the last 15 years. But they have sort of sloughed off the warnings but, you know, a couple of years ago they really started to see the consequences of declining demography.

CARLSON: But I mean, I have been hearing from Democrats in this country who are very concerned about having any kids because of global warming, it sounds like the Chinese aren’t as concerned about global warming as we are.

CHANG: No, and largely because every social problem, every economic problem they have, almost all of them are made worse by declining demography and the Chinese leaders start to notice and that’s starting with their economy because, you know, they grew during what was called the demographic dividend years. That was expanding workforce. Now, the workforce since 2011 has started to get smaller and it’s gotten smaller fast.

CARLSON: So we have the same demographic problems here, obviously and so does Western Europe declining below replacement rate. We just import new people from the developing world. Has it occurred to the Chinese to do that?

CHANG: No, you know, the Chinese don’t want to do that because they have a system and then basically, it’s based on racial superiority where they do view the rest of the world in inferior terms.

And you know, Tucker, on demography, within maybe three years, for the first time in at least 300 years, maybe all of recorded history, China is not going to be the world’s most populous society.

The world’s most populous society will be India and the Chinese both disdain the Indians because of this racial superiority view but also, they fear India. So people are concerned that China is seeing a closing window of opportunity and will lash out on that Himalayan border.

CARLSON: So, very quick, you just said something that almost nobody ever says which is that China may be the most racist country in the world, maybe after North Korea, but certainly, it is right up there.

The country is based on racial superiority and yet liberals in this country suck up to China constantly. Why does no one ever point that out?

CHANG: You know, that, to me, is a mystery because this nation of Han superiority is bred into the Chinese political system and you see it, for instance, they put on a skit on the China Central Television’s program, 900 million people saw it that depicted Africans as primates and it is just incredible, Tucker.

CARLSON: It’s unbelievable. But Jerry Brown is happy to call them wonderful, and so is Dianne Feinstein. Unbelievable. Gordon Chang, it is great to see you. I hope we will see you again soon, thanks.

Excessive population growth used to be a topic among environmentalists, but now you rarely hear it mentioned. For example, today’s politically correct Sierra Clubbers would [...]]]> I’ve decided as my (doable!) New Years Resolution to emphasize world population growth more going forward because it increasingly is driving issues in America and beyond in a negative way.

Excessive population growth used to be a topic among environmentalists, but now you rarely hear it mentioned. For example, today’s politically correct Sierra Clubbers would never dream of telling a Congolese woman not to have six children (the average) particularly if she can’t feed them because it’s so much easier to talk about diverse hiking.

In general, when a gradual problem is perceived to have become unsolvable or is just too prickly, it may disappear from the public debate menu.

Today, the world population counter shows nearly 7.7 billion persons. That figure is a doubling of the number of earth’s residents in 1972, 3.9 billion. A lot of Americans can remember 1972, when Richard Nixon was president and the Watergate break-in occurred, eventually destroying that presidency. So the world population is growing more rapidly than has been seen before.

Here’s the history and projected future:

Here’s another important chart:

Good news and bad news are revealed in these trends. First, population growth is happening in the Third World, so there is less resource use and pollution. But these are the same people who see First World affluence on television and want to come here and get some. (Sparkly media portrayals usually don’t include America’s poverty and homelessness.)

Sadly, illegal immigration is just too easy now, something many Americans voted against in 2016. Foreigners desiring a “better life” with lots of free stuff (funded by hard-working taxpayers) can just hop a train or join a well-funded leftist caravan headed north to the Open Borders America. A few decades ago, some Latin Americans engaged in revolution to reform their own countries — remember Castro’s Cuba? Che? but there’s no urge to self-determination of that sort now.

None of the foreign moochers mind that illegal immigration is theft and shows little patriotism for their homelands. It was odd to see the Honduran invaders flying their flag on their long trek, perhaps as a sign to show they hadn’t totally abandoned their homeland. (Not to worry: Hondurans sent $4.3 billion in remittances home in 2017.)

Speaking of the population explosion, the number of Hondurans has quadrupled since 1960.

Climate change is a major environmental problem these days according to the media — the topic is conveniently vague, plus it can be blamed on America even though Red China emits more carbon from burning fossil fuels than the United States and Europe combined.

Many times when climate change is brought up as a being the cause of a problem, a major factor is extreme population growth. For example, reports on the recent drought in Cape Town South Africa (Drought-Stricken Cape Town Limits Water to 13 Gallons Daily) usually overlooked the city’s growth from 800,000 residents in 1960 to 4.1 million in 2015 — that’s quite an increase in water users.

To the billions of poor around the planet, America is the Welfare Office to the World, and we taxpaying citizens exist to serve them. Foreign moochers don’t think of themselves as invaders at all: they believe we need their cheap labor to maintain our luxurious lifestyle.

Actually, we don’t need unskilled workers at all, since smart machines will be performing nearly all of the basic tasks very soon. In fact, the technology revolution of robots, automation and artificial intelligence makes immigration obsolete in America’s future economy, something Washington should notice.

The world’s population is now nearly 7.7 billion persons which renders any idea of fixing human suffering by relocating some [...]]]> The new Social Contract journal is online, including my article discussing the liberal ideal of immigration as virtue signaling which is losing ground every day because of the continuing population explosion in the Third World.

The world’s population is now nearly 7.7 billion persons which renders any idea of fixing human suffering by relocating some of them to the civilized zones as so much craziness.

The nice printed version is here. A few paragraphs of text follow:

The World Refugee Rescue Project No Longer Makes Sense, The Social Contract, by Brenda Walker, Fall 2018

The immigration-as-rescue program is a fool’s errand because it is becoming less effective as the number of people needing help has multiplied enormously. Refugee resettlement has devolved into largely a national virtue-signaling exercise from First World nations to each other about their generosity and loyalty toward diversity (liberals’ secular religion).

Meanwhile, the growing world population — now standing at around 7.6 billion persons — continues to crush the effectiveness of rescue programs because of the expanding numbers of needy, yet that subject is rarely mentioned in polite discussion as a force obviating the work of do-gooders. The number of poor on earth explodes with no end in sight, yet United Nations bureaucrats and other globalists act like they are doing something genuinely useful.

The numbers no longer make any sense, and in fact there’s some lying and denial going on about the big picture. Remember when demographers used to say the world population increase would “taper off” at around 10 or 11 billion? The experts don’t say that any more, so we must assume there will be no natural lessening but rather worsening crowdiness, followed by population control the hard way via drought, disease, and wars over resources. Overpopulation brings bad choices.

The population growth of First World nations has slowed, but the Third World keeps producing babies it can’t always feed. A graph of world population growth now and going forward shows the more developed world has basically flatlined, but less developed countries are adding billions from now to 2050 (and beyond we can safely assume).

The refugee redistribution system is run by the United Nations, as has been the case since the UN’s creation at the end of World War II. At that time (when world population was around 2.5 billion), millions of persons displaced by the war were a big problem in Europe. To help, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which brought 415,000 European refugees to the United States over the next few years.

Today, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at its founding in 1950) reports 68.5 million people were displaced worldwide as of the end of 2017. This is not a problem that relocation can solve, yet the liberal mind plugs away, believing immigration is the great globalist cure-all.

California illustrates the liberal craziness of the rescue project. It currently accepts the most refugees of any state — 5,160 in FY2017 — even though it has the highest poverty rate in the United States, worse than Mississippi or West Virginia. The soaring cost of living, particularly housing, has forced many a middle class Californian to flee to more affordable locales in recent years, yet the Golden State is happy to welcome poor unskilled refugees who don’t speak English into a situation that may be difficult for them to navigate.

A July article in the San Jose Mercury-News illustrates how thoughtless the resettlement bureaucrats can be. The subject of the piece was a refugee family from Afghanistan who were struggling financially. Khisrow Jan, the father and breadwinner, was working 12 hours a day as an Uber driver, which doesn’t pay the rent of $1,850 for a two-bedroom apartment in Antioch, a suburb 45 miles east of San Francisco. He has a stay-at-home wife and four kids to support, so the expenses won’t be decreasing any time soon. The agency that allowed the family to relocate into one of America’s most expensive areas did them no favors.

Interestingly, the education level of the incoming refugees has declined substantially, so hopes of eventual assimilation are misguided. As the First World becomes a more technological society, it is becoming less forgiving of low schooling. A 2018 paper from the Center for Immigration Studies titled “Refugee Resettlement Is Costly” had several sobering statistics; e.g., refugees age 25 or older averaged 8.7 years of education prior to arrival in the U.S., and 29 percent of refugees aged 25 or older listed their prior educational attainment as “none.” (Continues)

In fact, 27 percent of the state’s population is foreign born as of 2016 according to the Census.

But California’s popularity has caused a huge crunch in affordable [...]]]> California remains a popular place to live, where millions from around the world have come to experience the moderate climate, excellent restaurants and easy going law enforcement.

In fact, 27 percent of the state’s population is foreign born as of 2016 according to the Census.

But California’s popularity has caused a huge crunch in affordable housing, where a downturn in employment or plain bad luck can make some people homeless because of the high cost of anything with four walls. Others who would like to buy a house simply can’t afford one. Supply and demand can get ugly.

Plus, from an environmental viewpoint, California’s 40 million residents make it highly overpopulated. Last year’s winter rainy season was intense and broke a brutal five-year drought. But a very dry fall this year makes another drought look like a real possibility. It’s curious how the environmentalists in the state never speak up about the obvious immigration-fueled overpopulation problem.

Below, new housing in the San Francisco Bay Area shows how open space is paved over to build more suburbs.

Overpopulation also shows up in California’s famously horrible traffic.

William La Jeunesse reported on California’s skyrocketing housing costs:

California housing crisis affecting middle class the most: It’s ‘a broken system’, Fox News, By William La Jeunesse, December 14, 2017

For all of its claims of being an economic paradise, California is a failure when it comes to housing.

Not just low-income, affordable housing, but middle-income, working-class housing for teachers, firemen and long-time residents hoping to live anywhere near work.

“California has a housing crisis. We can’t provide housing to our citizens,” said Rita Brandin, with San Diego developer Newland Communities. “In Georgia, Texas and Florida, it can take a year and a half from concept to permits. In California, just the process from concept to approvals, is five years – that does not include the environmental lawsuits faced by 90 percent of projects.”

Numbers tell the story of California’s housing crisis.

* 75 percent of Southern Californians can’t afford to buy a home, according to the state realtors association.

* 16 of the 25 least affordable communities in the US are in California, according to 24/7 Wall Street.

* Officials this year declared a homeless emergency in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties.

* 56 percent of state voters say they may have to move because of a lack of affordable housing. One in four say they will relocate out of state, according to University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

* A median price home in the Golden State is $561,000, according to the realtors association. A household would need to earn $115,000 a year to reasonably afford a home at that price, assuming a 20 percent down payment. Yet, two thirds of Californians earns less $80,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

* The household income needed to afford a median-priced home in the Silicon Valley town of Palo Alto is $450,000.

* In San Francisco, a median priced home is $1.5 million, according to the Paragon Real Estate Group.

* Home prices in California are twice the national average, and 70 percent can’t afford to buy a home, according to state figures.

* Median household income in L.A. is $64,000. That’s half what is necessary to buy a home.

*1 in 10 residents are considering leaving because they can’t afford a place to live, according to a state legislative study, while US Census figures show 2 million residents, 25 and older, have already left the state since 2010.

* In 2016, 30 percent of California tenants put more than 50 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, according to the California Budget & Policy Center. Economists consider 30 percent the limit.

* California needs to double the number of homes built each year to keep prices from rising faster than the national average, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

(Continues)

The Los Angeles Times had a well illustrated front-page article.

Last year’s rains were [...]]]> Here in California, the lack of precipitation during this year’s fall-winter rainy season is already prompting worries of another terrible drought. So Tuesday’s headlines warning about climate change in the polar region leading to endemic drought in California were chilling.

The Los Angeles Times had a well illustrated front-page article.

Last year’s rains were huge and saved the state from disaster. But a future of no rain is frightening because history has shown that long-term drought is a civilization killer.

Below, the depleted Almaden Reservoir near San Jose, California, in February 2014.

If the science is correct, then continuing to grow California’s population via immigration and open borders seems unwise, since a desert state cannot support the water requirements for 40 million residents already here. I tend to be skeptical about climate change generally, but a reduction in polar ice can’t be good.

Governor Jerry Brown believes in climate change very strongly, as he shows by traveling around the world giving speeches about it. Yet he has welcomed an unlimited number of Mexican illegal aliens to come here, and he recently signed a bill making California a sanctuary state which is another kind of invitation.

Yet the governor imagines himself to be an environmentalist, despite his active promotion of overpopulation in a state that continues to face a threat to its most basic and important natural resource — water. Democrats are well known hypocrites, but Brown is over the top here.

Climate scientists see alarming new threat to California, Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2017

California could be hit with significantly more dangerous and more frequent droughts in the near future as changes in weather patterns triggered by global warming block rainfall from reaching the state, according to new research led by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Using complex new modeling, the scientists have found that rapidly melting Arctic sea ice now threatens to diminish precipitation over California by as much as 15% within 20 to 30 years. Such a change would have profound economic impacts in a state where the most recent drought drained several billion dollars out of the economy, severely stressed infrastructure and highlighted how even the state most proactively confronting global warming is not prepared for its fallout.

The latest study adds a worrying dimension to the challenge California is already facing in adapting to climate change, and shifts focus to melting polar ice that only recently has been discovered to have such a direct, potentially dramatic impact on the West Coast. While climate scientists generally agree that the increased temperatures already resulting from climate change have seriously exacerbated drought in California, there has been debate over whether global warming would affect the amount of precipitation that comes to California.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, provides compelling evidence that it would. The model the scientists used homed in on the link between the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic and the buildup of high ridges of atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean. Those ridges push winter storms away from the state, causing drought.

(Continues)

The story focuses [...]]]> Sunday’s front page on the New York Times features an important story that looks at the perilous situation in Africa, where overpopulation’s effects are being seen in local warfare over food resources, particularly land. The farmland is becoming depleted, while a skyrocketing number of people fight over what’s available for use.

The story focuses locally on Kenya which has many of the same problems as large areas of Africa — overgrazing and overfarming caused by the growing number of hungry people lead to conflict. The drought now occurring eastern Africa accelerates the process of desertification, further reducing the available land.

The article does not mention the number of Africans who are pushed by difficult circumstances to head north to Europe, as many already have. And they come from throughout the continent.

Africa’s population growth guarantees that huge numbers of illegal migrants will continue flooding into Europe. The possibility of four billion Africans by 2100 should focus Europe on defense now before it is completely overrun.

Disappearance of Fertile Land Fuels ‘Looming Crisis’ in Africa, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times, July 30, 2017

LAIKIPIA, Kenya — The two elders, wearing weather-beaten cowboy hats with the strings cinched under their chins, stood at the edge of an empty farm, covering their mouths in disbelief.

Their homes — neat wooden cabins — had been smashed open. All their cattle had been stolen. So had their chickens. House after house stood vacant, without another soul around. It was as if some huge force had barreled into the village and swept away all the life.

Sioyia Lesinko Lekisio, one of the elders, had no doubts who did this. Swarms of herders from another county had invaded, attacking any farm or cattle ranch in their path, big or small, stealing livestock, ransacking homes and shooting people with high-powered assault rifles.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” he said. “They want our land.”

Kenya has a land problem. Africa itself has a land problem. The continent seems so vast and the land so open. The awesome sense of space is an inextricable part of the beauty here — the unadulter- ated vistas, the endless land. But in a way, that is an illusion.

Population swells, climate change, soil degradation, erosion, poaching, global food prices and even the benefits of affluence are exerting incredible pressure on African land. They are fueling conflicts across the continent, from Nigeria in the west to Kenya in the east — including here in Laikipia, a wildlife haven and one of Kenya’s most beautiful areas.

Large groups of people are on the move, desperate for usable land. Data from NASA satellites reveals an overwhelming degradation of agricultural land throughout Africa, with one recent study showing that more than 40 million Africans are trying to survive off land whose agricultural potential is declining.

At the same time, high birthrates and lengthening life spans mean that by the end of this century, there could be as many as four billion people on the continent, about 10 times the population 40 years ago.

It is a two-headed problem, scientists and activists say, and it could be one of the gravest challenges Africa faces: The quality of farmland in many areas is getting worse, and the number of people squeezed onto that land is rising fast.

(Continues)

David Brower [...]]]> Is it ungenerous to experience shock when Tucker Carlson says he’s never heard of an environmentalist who spoke out against excessive immigration until he ran across Professor Philip Cafaro? Do not foundational figures like David Brower and Gaylord Nelson ring a bell somewhere in memory?? Have the giants really been forgotten so soon?

David Brower was a widely celebrated activist conservationist who steered environmental organizations and led campaigns to save the Grand Canyon and other unique places. He also declared to a stubborn Sierra Club, “The leadership are fooling themselves. Overpopulation is a very serious problem, and overimmigration is a big part of it. We must address both. We can’t ignore either.”

Senator Gaylord Nelson was a voice for the wilderness inside the halls of power. He also founded Earth Day and believed that a population policy that included immigration limits was central to protecting America’s natural heritage, saying, “The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become… The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it’s phony to say ‘I’m for the environment but not for limiting immigration.’ “

More immigration means more traffic and more traffic congestion.

Certainly the subject matter of Friday’s segment was important — that excessive immigration is destroying America’s natural treasures, not to mention severely taxing resources like water supply and farm production to maintain human life. But erasing conservationist history serves no one.

On the subject of true environmental history, Professor Cafaro carefully evaded the reason for the Sierra Club’s reticence, saying, “for complex reasons and really starting about 20 years ago environmental leaders dropped the ball on population.”

“Complex reasons”?? How about a $100 million secret bribe given to the Sierra Club on the proviso that immigration would not be mentioned as an environmental factor. It should have been a major scandal, but the left press and correcto environmentalists won’t repeat that evil truth even now that Wall Street investor David Gelbaum gave a generous donation with strings attached. As reported in the Los Angeles Times (The Man behind the Land, Oct 27, 2004), Gelbaum said, “I did tell [Executive Director] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

The Sierra Club had previously been an immigration realist until the secret money changed management’s mind. A group of traditional members got together in 1996 to reverse the bad policy using the club’s democratic process by bringing the issue before the membership for a vote. We were surprised at the ferocity of management against our reasonable initiative to return the club to its earlier position, not knowing that a lot of money was involved. We got three like-minded individuals elected to the Sierra Club board over 2002-03, and when it looked like population sanity might prevail with a possible election majority, the Sierra old guard’s character assassination became very shrill. And then the Gelbaum bribe was revealed.

For lots of gory details, see my Sierra Club series in Vdare.

So anyway, back to Cafaro, it’s quite amazing that liberals are still covering up for the corrupt post-environmental Sierra Club more than a decade after the immigration controversy.

In addition, I reviewed his book How Many Is Too Many a couple years back in The Social Contract. Cafaro’s coverage of members’ efforts to fix the Sierra Club is incomplete, to be kind. I wrote:

However, the treatment of the struggle for reform in the Sierra Club starting in 1998 leaves out vital elements, and they are important. Were any of the reformers interviewed? Apparently not. The book quotes Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope as saying that he had once believed that immigration should be reduced for environmental reasons, but that the issue could not be debated in the organization “without stirring up racial passions.”

Here’s the interview. The actual facts about immigration and population growth are important, although there are distractions. The immigration part starts at 1:25:

TUCKER CARLSON: The President is pushing for restricting immigration into the United States, focusing on the alleged economic, criminal and cultural problems caused by heavy immigration here, but those aren’t the only reasons you might oppose mass immigration: what about the classic liberal cause of protecting the environment? Phil Cafaro is a philosophy professor at Colorado State University; he’s the author of the book “How Many Is Too Many?” the progressive argument for reducing immigration into the United States. Professor Cafaro joins us tonight. . .

It seems I was looking for you for a year because when I was a kid — there were liberals and sincere liberals, progressives who said, no I’m not against immigrants or anything but too many people is bad for the environment — it seemed an obvious point I can’t find anybody on the left who says that, other than you. What’s your argument?

PHILIP CAFARO: Well the argument is relatively straightforward, Tucker, immigration currently is driving US population growth and population growth is a big part of many of our environmental problems in the United States, so part of the progressive argument has to do with with that if you care about creating a sustainable environment, you need to look at immigration driven population growth.

CARLSON: Yeah because you don’t go to midtown Manhattan for nature, you go to Yellowstone because there are fewer people there. I mean it seems an obvious point wise. Is the Sierra Club and the NRDC pushing for reductions in immigration?

CAFARO: Well I mean years ago if you go back to the 70s and even into the 1980s the Sierra Club did have a policy that the US should reduce immigration to levels that would stabilize the US population but over time that got to be a harder and harder argument to make for complex reasons and really starting about 20 years ago environmental leaders dropped the ball on population, so there are quite a few of us though who still believe it’s an important component of sustainability and we’re trying to make that case.

CARLSON: Crowded countries are dirty, all of them, it’s obvious if you travel. So what does our population look like if current trends continue say 100 years from now? What are the effects on the environment be in the population be?

CAFARO: Well currently our population is 326 million people in the United States, and if we keep immigration levels where they are, we’re on track to add 200 million more people by 2100 so that would put us at about 525 million people. On the other hand if we reduced

CARLSON: Wait, wait, We’re on track to be the 500 million by the end of of when, in how long?

CAFARO: By 2100.

CARLSON: By the end of this century?

CAFARO: By the end of this century, that’s right, and most of that population growth is driven by immigration. if we could simply cut back to the levels of immigration we had 50 years ago, we’d be on track to stabilize our population in a few decades; so basically what’s happened is the American people have chosen to stabilize our population. We’re having about enough children to replace ourselves, but Congress has increased immigration in recent decades, and so we’re on track to add hundreds of millions of more people and of course that has a pretty large environmental impact, whether you’re talking about greenhouse gas emissions, sprawl on loss or wildlife habitat. People make a difference.

CARLSON: Five hundred million people by the end of this century, so if you’re watching, your children will live in a country with 500 million people — that’s a remarkable number. Professor I hope you’ll come back. I’m sure you take a lot of crap for saying stuff like that on the left but good for you for doing it anyway.