As a person who cares about the environment and who also believes in a balanced approach to economic policy, I understand that immigration reduction is essential to sustainable and equitable policy approaches on both these issues. It also means I am in a rather foul mood after listening to the same old grand speeches at COP26. Lots of meaningless "hot air" was expelled to talk boldly about what is needed to reduce GHG emissions. But what will actually happen? Not much. Why? Because nearly all of these actors, including our own president, are pro-immigration, pro-growth expansionists who refuse to acknowledge that limits, and periods of stabilization, are necessary to any kind of growth and its biggest drivers. And as ecologist William Rees says of COP26 also:
It is a great irony, if not tragedy, that so many well-intentioned people, especially climate-focused non-government organisations and ordinary citizens wasted so much time and effort at COP26 in Glasgow. It's not that the official negotiators achieved so little, but rather that climate change is not the real existential threat, OVERSHOOT is."
There are many reasons that are connected to the global obsession with growth, any kind of growth, that always turn all talk of saving or conservation of anything into complete hypocrisy. This event was no different than these six previous pat-ourselves-on-the-back-for-not-much elite parties.
Take President Biden's pressure on OPEC for example. He pressures OPEC to open up oil supplies in the Middle East, while talking tough on regulations and ending reliance on fossil fuels here at home. It's absurd. Remember when the decentralization of almost everything was touted to result in a future of international cooperation and prosperity to lift millions, even billions from poverty? Remember when such grand ponzi schemes sold the delusion that the measure of economic success here in the United States is keeping interest rates artificially low and keeping taxes low (also do not enforce tax evaders to pay up) because a "successful economy" is one where lots of consumer spending (forget investing in labor capital) is all that is really needed? (Consider that Household debt (mortgage + home equity loans + credit cards + student loans + auto loans) in the United States reached $12.58 trillion at the end of 2016, an astonishing rise of $460 billion for the year. The typical American household carries an average debt of $134,643).
I am getting into a lot of thorny brush here. I know that. I am a little more than angry at this point about many things running afoul in our fiscal, social and political systems these days. And some of you may agree, some may not on my take. That's fine.
But one thing we can agree on, and do, is that this American society faces a very grim future if it continues to ignore the number one population-consumption growth driver here at home: immigration.
Mass immigration plays a front and center role in its unintentional destruction of bio-diversity, quality of life, i.e. wages, traffic congestion, rapidly changing communities to sprawl, overcrowded facilities, rising prices, and denser living for us humans, etc., and loss of habitat and food sources for wildlife.
Framing immigration to have the sole purpose of "welcoming" millions, even billions into the U.S. under the disguise of humanitarian purpose is nothing more than a ponzi scheme all its own for importing more consumers to continue feeding the giant leviathan of international corporations and mega-banks that can further exploit and manipulate, both the new immigrants, and Americans already here. It's a crazy side-by-side plan to eco-shame ourselves into welcoming overpopulated countries' newly coined "climate migrants" as we refuse to acknowledge how these millions or billions of newcomers will continue to keep our consumption and emission rate position as the third largest in the world. Shoot, maybe we'll even move up to number one or two. But the plan, you're always told you must believe, will still include the saving of 30% of lands and waters within our borders. The sellers of that nonsense are hoping you and I slept through math class.
I've ranted on more than immigration here, though that is of course always NumbersUSA's singular focus. So before I give the impression that my displeasure is only with Big Brother brainwashed so-called "progressives'' on both immigration or population, I'll clarify by saying that greed, my friends, comes in blue and red and that is one reason Congress never seems very serious about doing anything but ultimately increasing the numbers. Red hides behind only going after illegal immigration. Blue pretends that open borders of any kind is the "nice" and "humanitarian" thing to do. My friends, ALL immigration needs to be reduced to protect the American worker, to conserve and protect wildlife and reduce our ecological footprint that is stomping all over quality of life in our communities and every day lives.
And I'll add one more holiday color to the mix of immigration & population deniers out there: Green. "Going-green" isn't about stabilizing or saving anything. It's an emotionally empty ruse by billionaires who want you to believe they care, yet are lobbying and investing heavily to keep a system in place that serves them separately on Wall Street apart from Main Street.
Green simply means for both the red and blue environmental virtue signalers to GO! Go as fast as you can and bring everyone with you right over an economic cliff of increasing inequality and social discord that distracts and paralyzes any sensible discussion about population growth and its life support system of immigration.
Red and Blue both want cheap labor whether they are recruiting programmers from India or breaking the backs of desperate Central American immigrants picking vegetables in the blistering heat of summer. Afterall, labor exploitation is the most equitable and systemic plan out there.
Red and Blue largely want the same thing. Limitless growth in immigration, limitless growth in consumption, limitless growth in everything for profit. How they argue about it has nothing to do with helping you or me. It's just different shades of the same selfish goals.
Roy Beck's new book, Back of the Hiring Line, illustrates perfectly how this ponzi economic system, empowered with mass immigration, first closed the doors of economic opportunity to the Black Americans following the Civil War to the present day. And since the 1970s the war on wages for all Americans, White, Black and Immigrants continues. It's a heinous system that pretends to care about minorities and working families in rhetoric while it steals from them in actual practice and policy. There are really only two minorities in America: a virtue-signaling elite class and the rest of us.
Is that the future we want for our children and grandchildren and their children's children? Is that the future we want that continues to undermine the small individual business owner in favor of monopoly corporations now buying power at every educational and governmental level to convince you and me that the problems they want to solve are only racial and social in nature, not fiscal or financial?
It is time to fix immigration. It is time to make labor work in favor of the actual American laborer. It is time to start telling the inconvenient truths about what it really will take to achieve a healthy and sustainable environment for humans as well as wildlife.
NumbersUSA has spent the past quarter century encouraging Congress to make immigration policy work for the American people, native born and newly arrived.
We have enough people in the country. Let's focus on lifting their prospects higher, rather than importing more poverty and job competition that diminishes everyone's outlook. And for goodness sake, let's demand that all these do-gooders stop pretending to care at all about saving wildlife, their habitat or even our own remaining open spaces to enjoy, because it is people like you and me who truly care, not those doing all the talking. I wonder what the emissions reduction (haha) would be if the media, politicians and mega-lopy elites just suddenly shut up for a while?
CHRISTY SHAW is the Member Services Manager for NumbersUSA
