Obama’s stance on energy/environment doesn't jibe with his immigration goals
The president has talked a lot since taking office about creating new energy guidelines, and the White House paid the usual lip service to Earth Day. But I’m wondering: How does this president square his energy and environmental concerns with his apparent willingness to continue fueling our population growth with a reckless immigration policy that benefits only vote-hungry politicians and companies fearful of losing their abundant supply of cheap foreign labor?
In other words, when those charged with establishing these “needed” energy guidelines that would include reducing greenhouse gases finally sit down and begin their calculations, will they take into account the Census Bureau’s population projections for 2100? Whichever Census projection one chooses to believe - 600 million or 1 billion – I’m thinking: Good luck!
Look at it this way: If for years it’s been nearly impossible to convince the American people that they must reduce what today is commonly known as their “carbon footprint,” just how much success will the federal government have in convincing millions more immigrants, especially those from impoverished countries, that they’re going to have to scale back their search for a better life? Will, for example, the government have to place limits on the number of children per household? Outlaw new homes exceeding a set number of square feet? And (gasp!) allow no more than two cars per family? How will all this work if the Congress refuses to deal with the central question?
Unless we get serious about cutting back legal immigration levels and removing all incentives for illegal immigration, then I think the gloomy forecast offered by George F. Kennan in his 1994 book “Around the Cragged Hill” will come to pass:
It is obviously easier, for the short run, to draw cheap labor from adjacent pools of poverty…than to find it among one’s own people. And to the billions of such prospective immigrants from poverty to prosperity, there is, rightly or wrongly, no place that looks more attractive than the United States. Given its head, and subject to no restrictions, this pressure will find its termination only when the levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now so anxious to escape.
DAVE GORAK is a retired career journalist and has been executive director of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration since 2001