Tree Huggers Waffling On Illegals Issue

This piece in The Christian Science Monitor on May 12 notes that Environmental Groups are having a hard time rationalizing their support for the illegals in the border issue.

"We've got to talk about these issues - population, birth rates, immigration," says Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which confronts whalers, seal hunters, and those who poach wildlife in the Galapagos Islands. "Immigration is one of the leading contributors to population growth. All we're saying is, those numbers should be reduced to achieve population stabilization."

What an unholy alliance! Us real conservatives, and others who really care about our kids' (and the nation's) future may actually have some allies in the Green movement.
While some in the environmental groups are against border enforcement for "humanitarian" reasons, the numbers are there, staring them in the face.

...the US population is far from stabilized, and immigrants (legal and illegal) are one of the main reasons. There are about 11 million illegal immigrants in the US today, 57 percent from Mexico, and another 24 percent from other Latin American countries, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Of the US foreign-born population, nearly 30 percent is illegal, according to Pew.

There are more numbers of note:

The US Census Bureau this week reported that Hispanics - the largest minority at 42.7 million - are the nation's fastest-growing group. They are 14.3 percent of the overall population, but between July 2004 and July 2005, they accounted for 49 percent of US population growth. Of the increase of 1.3 million Hispanics, the Census Bureau reported, 800,000 was because of natural increase (births minus deaths), and 500,000 was due to immigration.

And this on the Hispanic birth rate in the US:

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, finds that once women emigrate to the US, most tend to have more children than they would have in their home countries. "Among Mexican immigrants in the United States fertility averages 3.5 children per woman compared to 2.4 children per woman in Mexico," he wrote in a study last October. And the same is true among Chinese immigrants. Fertility is 2.3 in the US compared with 1.7 in China. However, typically these high fertility rates decline in the successive generations as immigrants assimilate into America.

And the impact of all of this:

Harvard University ecologist Edward Wilson figures that the "ecological footprint" - which he defined in a Scientific American article in 2002 as "the average amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated by each person in bits and pieces from around the world for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce, and waste absorption" - is about 5 acres per person worldwide. In the US, each individual's ecological footprint is about 24 acres, according to Dr. Wilson.

Maybe some of the Leftie Loons are seeing the light....

I'll be back

CC