“Greening” Again: The Anti-immigrant Movement’s Slide to Environmental Racism

April 1, 2009 by Rev. David L. Ostendorf
Filed under: Ecopolitics, Immigration 
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“If we look at the conservation ethic of some of the countries from which large numbers of immigrants are coming, we don’t find the same sort of respect for the land and our fellow creatures that has developed here. We certainly don’t see this in many of the southeastern Asian cultures or in Latin America. They don’t have the same sort of conservation ethic we have here.”

-John Tanton, 1989

“And with every new U.S. resident, whether from births or immigration, comes further degradation of America’s natural treasures.”

-Ad for “America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning,” 2008

Windmills. Water. Bulldozers. Gridlock. Sprawl. Appearing in the New York Times, the slick, quarter-page, info-ads reflect the nation’s deepening concern about energy and the environment, and invite the reader in to learn more—not about resource conservation, but about controlling immigration, the source of all ills.

There at the bottom of the ads, of course, are their sponsors—the stellar cast of America’s white nationalist, anti-immigrant movement. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) posts up at center, along with American Immigration Control Foundation, Californians for Population Stabilization, NumbersUSA, and Social Contract Press proclaiming to be “America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning.”

The key words in the ads, of course, are immigration and population—not environment, and certainly not rampant consumption by the world’s most resource-intensive nation, since at least the mid-twentieth century. Immigrants, we are told, are THE source of America’s population explosion and, thereby, THE cause of its energy/water/land use/metro sprawl challenges, rising property taxes, and schools “bursting at the seams.” Aimed not only at the passing reader, the ads clearly reach out to environmentalists; one is specifically aimed at “progressive thinkers” and picks up on the worn-out mantra that immigration restrictionists are the only ones courageously linking “The Dots That Nobody Really Wants to Connect,” that is, immigration, population, and degradation.

This renewed “greening” of FAIR and its allies is but a piece of a strategy to lure progressives into the anti-immigrant web. Tried and true, the strategy reflects the long-standing, abject use of environmental and population issues to advance an agenda laden with racism and white nationalism, and derisive of peoples of color. It is environmental racism in a pure form.

FAIR founder John Tanton’s decades-old assessment of the conservation ethic of Asian and Latin peoples is a clear and concise indicator of the racial derision that has infused this movement. Tanton’s roots in the conservation and population control movements are original and deep, dating back to the 1950s and his work with the Michigan Natural Areas Council, and to the 1960s when he helped set up a Planned Parenthood Clinic in northern Michigan. By the ‘70s he was active nationally in both movements, which were strong and vocal during a period when limits to economic growth at the expense of the environment were openly discussed at all points on the political spectrum. Yet, with others in these movements, Tanton ignored any semblance of racial analysis and traversed to the deep ends of white nationalism and the preservation of “Western Culture” for white Americans.

While the decades have passed since Tanton founded FAIR, his voice then is FAIR’s voice now, behind yet another of its many facades—this time with (white) “America’s Leadership Team…” mining for new recruits to help assure the longevity of the dominant culture, its environment and resources.

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One Response to ““Greening” Again: The Anti-immigrant Movement’s Slide to Environmental Racism”

  1. Wonk Room » Climate Change Expert Slams Premise Of Environmental Argument Against Immigration on August 25th, 2009 3:29 pm

    [...] aspect of immigration it likes.” Several groups which are designated hate groups such as the American Immigration Control Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform have also made the same environmental argument [...]