The environmental argument for reducing immigration into the united states

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 5-30

  Cafaro, Philip ^a   Staples III, Winthrop ^a  

^a Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences   (United States)

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EID: 64649101970     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics20093113     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (45)

1. Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz, "The Environmental Movement's Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998): A First Draft of History," Journal of Policy History 12 (2000): 123-56.
2. U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Censuses of Population, 1900 to 2000.
3. Leon Bouvier, "The Impact of Immigration on United States' Population Size: 1950-2050," Negative Population Growth, Washington, D.C., 1998 (http://www.npg.org/forum-series/imm-impact-usgrowth. htm).
4. "National Resources Inventory 2001, Urbanization and Development of Rural Land," Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/technical/land/nriOl/nriOldev.html).
5. D. S. Wilcove, D. Rothstein, J. Dubow, A. Phillips, and E. Losos, "Quantifying Threats to Imperiled Species in the United States: Assessing the Relative Importance of Habitat Destruction, Alien Species, Pollution, Overexploitation, and Disease," BioScience 48 (1998): 607-15.
6. Roy Beck, Leon Kolankiewicz and Steven Camarota, Outsmarting Smart Growth: Population Growth, Immigration, and the Problem of Sprawl (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2003), p. 5.
7. Ibid
8. Ibid., pp. 68-69.
9. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, "Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2005," November 2006 (ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/oiaf/1605/cdrom/pdf/ggrpt/057305. pdf).
10. See for example Philip Cafaro, "Less is More: Economic Consumption and the Good Life," Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 26-39;
11. and Philip Cafaro, "Economic Consumption, Pleasure and the Good Life," Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (2001): 471-86.
12. 2 Emissions-All Countries" (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre-coun. htm).
13. U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Base, "Country Summaries." All census bureau publications referenced in this article may be accessed at http://www.census.gov.
14. Simple logic suggests that endless human population growth is incompatible with (in chronological order) generous sustainability, anthropocentric sustainability, basic human happiness, and the laws of physics. Sooner or later, human beings will have to face population issues squarely. Better sooner!
15. Indeed, there are good reasons to think that 300 million Americans is already much too high. David and Marcia Pimentel, "Land, Energy and Water: The Constraints Governing Ideal U.S. Population Size," Negative Population Growth, Washington, D.C., 1990, suggest a U.S. population of 40 to 100 million might be truly sustainable, given the right environmental policies.
16. Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, "Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next Fifty Years with Current Technologies," Science 305 (2004): 968-72.
17. Daniel Lashof and David Hawkins, "An Action Plan to Reduce U.S. Global Warming Pollution," Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, D.C., 2006.
18. We say "might" have increased immigration by this amount, since supporters of this bill took great care to obscure its impact on overall immigration levels.
19. 2 emissions since 1980."
20. Even those holding narrower anthropocentric conceptions of sustainability should arguably advocate reducing U.S. immigration, for the good of future generations in the United States and abroad. Even if all you care about is people, you might think there can be too many of us. We are grateful to Ian Smith for emphasizing this point.
21. The same holds true for most other developed nations, whose total fertility rates tend to be even lower than the United States' total fertility rate.
22. President's Council on Sustainable Development, Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment for the Future (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1996).
23. See for example the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950) or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). Article 13 of the UN Declaration asserts: "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state" (emphasis added). Here the right of movement and residence is clearly limited to a citizen's home country. Article 14 asserts: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." But this is a right to temporary refuge, not permanent settlement or full citizenship. Most immigrants to the United States are not fleeing persecution but trying to better their lives; hence the right of asylum does not come close to justifying their right to immigrate into the U.S. Since our immigration proposal accommodates legitimate asylum claims, it does not run afoul of article 14.
24. Chandran Kukathas, "Immigration," in Hugh LaFollette, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 586.
25. Ibid., p. 574.
26. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 62. Current attempts to increase immigration into the U.S. run afoul of the right to self-government more directly. Polls consistently show Americans want less immigration, not more. Surely in a democracy, their desires should be taken into account.
27. In researching a book on the ethics of immigration, the lead author has asked numerous immigrants from Mexico and Central America why they came to the United States. Invariably, they have spoken of "corruption" and the fact that a poor man or woman cannot make a good life in their countries. What is the proper response to this? Surely not: "well then, let Mexico go to the dogs! Come to America, and bring all your relatives!" Better: "Mexico needs to reform itself. You need to get to work; what can Americans do to help?" Respondents usually snorted with incredulity at the suggestion that their countries might be reformed-but we think their fatalism is part of the problem.
28. Henry David Thoreau, Journal (New York: Dover Press: 1962), vol. 8, pp. 220-21 (23 March 1856).
29. As Holmes Rolston, III puts it, "Human rights are welcome where they are nonrival with the health of the [ecological] system. But human rights that claim to trump the system are doubtful rights." Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 233.
30. Thanks to Simon James, Clare Palmer, and Ron Sandler for helping us formulate this argument.
31. George Borjas, Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
32. Ryan Pevnick, Philip Cafaro, and Mathias Risse, "An Exchange: The Morality of Immigration," Ethics and International Affairs 22 (2008): 241-59.
33. Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
34. One caveat is that particularly for some Latin American countries, remittances from workers in the United States are an important source of income for immigrants' families. But these economic benefits must be weighed against the dispersal and break up of families, an important social cost. They must be weighed against the cost of enabling these countries' continued failure to create just and sustainable societies.
35. Recent evidence also suggests that immigration leads to increased family size: 3.5 children for recent Mexican immigrants in the United States, compared to 2.4 children for women remaining in Mexico. Steven Camarota, "Birth Rates Among Immigrants in America: Comparing Fertility in the U.S. and Home Countries," Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, DC, 2005.
36. United Nations Population Division, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, "National Trends in Population, Resources, Environment and Development 2005" (http://www.un.org/esa/popula-tion/publications/ countryprofile/index.htm).
37. Tamar Jacoby, "Immigration Nation," Foreign Affairs 85 (November/December 2006): 55.
38. Borjas, Heaven's Door, p. 13.
39. Ibid., p. 11.
40. George Borjas, "Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration: Measuring the Impact on Native-Born Workers," Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, D.C., 2004, p. 6.
41. Stephen Macedo, "The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigration Policy: Open Borders vs. Social Justice?" in Carol Swain, ed., Debating Immigration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
42. Herman Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996);
43. Brian Czech, "Economic growth as a limiting factor for wildlife conservation," Wildlife Society Bulletin 28 (2000): 4-15.
44. Aldo Leopold, "A Criticism of the Booster Spirit," in Leopold, The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 99-100, 105.
45. Leopold also addresses population issues in his lecture "Ecology and Politics" in the same volume (pp. 281-86).