by Jesse Sanes
One group that has had some people in a panic after the announcement by the United Nations that the world’s population would reach 7 billion is the Vermont based New England Coalition for a Sustainable Population (NECSP).
Despite the fact that different people are responsible to different degrees for the wasteful, polluting systems that compromise the planet, groups like NECSP assign blame for social and environmental problems across the entire population evenly. They do not hold the parties most responsible for overconsumption and the hoarding of wealth, but rather they blame immigrants.
This is the inevitable consequence of a backwards logic that dictates that solving environmental, economic, and human rights problems foremost requires curbing population growth. Internationally that means fertility reduction. But domestically that means halting immigration. This is why NECSP is holding the spotlight to the immigrant saturated, population time bomb that is, wait for it, Vermont.
In a token #7billion article written about the plundering results of population growth in the United States, NECSP board member Mark Powell frantically rattles off a litany of fears. However, he is crystal clear about the source of the problem. It lies right here in the United States. The “problem is driven chiefly by immigration, both documented and undocumented,” Powell writes.
In Vermont, he claims, that with a record high population of 625,740 (yes, for the entire state) we are nearing a “human tidal wave.” He warns of inevitable famine, praising the “Green Revolution” as a temporary solution to staving off the swarming masses of the world back in the 1970s—but a solution that has ultimately exhausted any potential for escape from the inevitable.
And if that doesn’t scare you, Powell further fear-mongers by mentioning the xenophobe’s bogey man darling, China, where according to Powell “land grabbing” in order to feed a rapidly expanding population has apparently become the norm.
With rhetoric like this it should come as no surprise then that the numbers Powell uses to illustrate his view of immigration are supplied by the Tanton Network, specifically NumbersUSA. A constellation of groups founded, fund, or endorsed by white nationalist John Tanton, the Tanton Network includes NumbersUSA, with Roy Beck as it’s president, as one of its key mainstays.
On the NECSP website one can see the group’s actual stance on immigration policy:
“As current US migration policy precludes a stabilized national population, NECSP petitions the US Congress to alter it so that in any given year the number of people invited into our nation is roughly equal to those who freely chose to leave the previous year.”
NECSP claim that number is about 300,000 people per year. To quote the very same page on the organization’s website, “immigration does not occur in a vacuum.” How can an organization that supposedly defends human rights and environmental conservation also effectively advocate something similar to an immigration moratorium? Such a policy is patently far-right, and would adversely affect thousands of families here in the United States.
The repercussions of extreme anti-immigrant policy have been seen in Alabama and Arizona where the arrests, detention, and deportation of Latinos has laid precedent to systemic abuses of human rights and blatant economic sabotage.
And, even though these examples seem so far away from Vermont and the other idyllic pastoral niches of New England, an organization like NECSP’s lack of prudence when it come to forming allies is astounding. This is from the group’s website:
“NECSP notes that there are countless individual American citizens and organizations who, based on environmental & sustainability concerns, are advocating for migration policies similar to our own. We consider such advocates ‘sustainable population advocates’ and welcome them as colleagues and constituents.”
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Tanton Network cogs like NumbersUSA and Negative Population Growth cannot and should not be where groups concerned with global warming and local environments invest their political weight. The bottom line is that there is absolutely no room in environmentalism for charging immigrants with the responsibility of an “overcrowded, bankrupt, environmentally destroyed earth.”
Like most youth climate activists I have watched for nearly my entire life, the UNFCCC emerge as a forum for capital interest squabbling and political impotence with regards to action on greenhouse gas emission reduction. It is clearer now, more than ever, that swift decisive action, the accumulation of political will, and significant steps toward transitioning away from an inequitable fossil fuel economy is needed.
In no way whatsoever will these steps come from top-down fertility reduction initiatives or by scapegoating immigrants, like Mark Powell’s recent article suggests.