Immigration Reform: An Environmental Perspective

Immigration, as a policy issue, is politically explosive. It is politically explosive because it necessarily involves making choices between bad options, each of which has supporters and detractors with political power.

In advocating for their option, it is not uncommon for some supporters to engage in inaccurate and unjust accusations against their opponents, such as claiming the other is guilty of racism or traitorhood. The situation is further complicated by the small numbers of supporters on either side who are racist or traitorous.

It is unsurprising that the engagements between opponents are volatile. How could decisions about who belongs, and who does not, be otherwise? What is the best way to disentangle a complex web of family relations, personal convictions, and obligations that must be shared between citizens if they are to be a nation, all in the context of the question of how the franchise is to be extended to non-citizens, if at all? It is no wonder that the issue is avoided like the plague.

Plague-avoidance strategies that do not address the causes of the plague, or bolster the immune system against its effects, are doomed to failure, however, and the cost of failure in avoiding the plague is serious illness and death. In this sense, the lack of a workable resolution of the immigration issue endangers the health of the body politic.

At present, the lack of meaningful policy action is, in effect, backdoor advocacy for the situation as it currently stands, in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” sense. This abrogation of responsibility is dangerous beyond its obvious bad effects. It cultivates a sense of powerlessness among the citizenry, who perceive their elected governments as incapable of effecting meaningful change. History has enough examples of what happens when democratic and republican assemblies appear incapable of providing effective leadership in difficult times. This underscores why difficult challenges must be addressed to maintain the health of the body politic. If our leaders will not lead for us, they must be lead by us, if we are to avoid being lead by powered interests. This short, oversimplified post is intended to be a step in the direction of citizen leadership.

The framework that follows views immigration from an environmental perspective that takes into account citizenship within a nationalist framework. I think it practical because we are citizens in nationalist frameworks and because immigration is a normal environmental phenomenon. My intent is to propose a framework for immigration based upon the environmental concept of sustainability, which is also practical, because it is social suicide to adopt models that are not sustainable.

In this post, I shall not address anti-nationalist perspectives, despite their value, because the scope of the issues is already too daunting for a short post. Furthermore, I shall not address economic or ethical perspectives that disregard the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I consider it to be inarguable that the Earth has a more or less finite amount of non-renewable and renewable resources, in human terms, and that their availability is governed by the Law of Diminishing Returns and the Principle of Net Yield. For example, the only reason immigration is an issue is because there is competition for scarce resources. If there were plenty of everything that everyone needed and wanted, then there would be no grounds for disputes and no reason to have systems of justice, except to deal with the actions of the pathological.

The ideas that follow are predicated on the notion that there are limits to growth. The only dispute is about the extent of these limits. Living beyond these limits is not sustainable.

What is sustainability?

“Sustainability” refers to the capacity of a system to persist through time. With respect to environmental practises, sustainability refers to the capacity of human systems to meet human needs without undermining the environmental systems that form the material basis for those needs. The upper limit of the population that can be sustained without degrading the system is referred to as the system’s carrying capacity. Sustainability advocates work to decrease stealing sustainable capacity from future generations to provide for today’s excesses.

I = PAT is a formula developed by Erlich and Holdren that expresses this relationship.

I = humanity’s impact.

P = population.

A = affluence, i.e. per capita resource consumption.

T = environmental impact per unit of affluence.

According to IPAT, to be sustainable, humanity’s impact must be less than the actual impact that the planet can sustain. The largest population the world can sustain, therefore, is dependent upon per capita resource consumption and environmental degradation. If each person consumes and degrades less, the planet can sustain more people and vice versa.

Threshold Point

Communities that live at the threshold of their maximum impact are courting suffering or death. This is because any small occurrence that temporarily reduces the capacity of their ecosystems to produce their consumables or absorb their toxins necessarily puts their population at risk. Famines are a case in point. The planet is littered with the remains of civilizations that surpassed their thresholds.

Importantly, when populations overshoot their carrying capacity, they often undermine the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, salinization of soils, and feed specie extinction are only a few of the more significant outcomes of such undermining. Once undermined, the area is no longer able to sustain the number of people that it was earlier. When people eat their seed grain to survive a poor harvest, Catton opines, what will they eat in the future?

Resiliency

Sensible societies build resiliency into their systems. They keep their impact below the maximum, which is akin to building a surplus for future use, such as saving during the seven years of feast as a way to survive the following seven years of famine.

Rationing

When communities find themselves on the wrong side of the threshold, they are forced to ration as a means of reducing their impact, if they are unable to access the carrying capacity of other ecosystems. They ration by reducing their consumption, degradation, population or a combination of these. Migration, for example, is a rationing response that reduces the demands on the stressed ecosystem by transferring the population to a less stressed ecosystem.

Migration

Species migrate for habitat advantages. In the case of human migration, generally-speaking, people are either driven from their home, which creates advantages for those who remain, or they leave their homes to gain advantages that exist elsewhere. The set of factors that cause this push or pull is manifold and need not be driven by material factors. “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us” stands as an example. People can migrate for religious, economic, class, health, family, environmental or political reasons, to name a few. The move can be temporary or permanent.

The United States is a destination of choice for many migrants. Are they right to view the US as a less-stressed environment?

Is America’s current way of life sustainable?

That the US offers more desirable opportunities for migrants than their points of origination does not mean the US is less-stressed in terms of environmental impact. For the sake of this post, America’s ecological footprint will be considered equivalent to a nationalized notion of IPAT. America’s ecological footprint is about 40% in arrears, which means that America is living beyond the means of its ecosystems to sustain its population.

{Social justice advocates will note that this figure does not jive with their notions of the unequal resource distribution that exists between north and south. They are right. The point to take here is that each nation is graded based on its carrying capacity, which is part of a global total, and resource consumption is only an aspect of an IPAT or ecological footprint calculation. Further, if America reduces its consumption of southern resources, acquired through present international trade structures, the south’s ecological account will improve.}

To become sustainable, without increasing its own area or reducing the impact in other areas, through conquest or other means, the US must choose to decrease its consumption and degradation in accordance with the population numbers it is willing to sustain. Accordingly, if the US wants to maintain its present population, its per capita consumption and degradation must decrease by 40%. If it wants to sustain a higher population, it must reduce consumption and degradation by a greater percentage. If America chooses to embrace a population reduction strategy, then its degree of per capita sacrifice can decrease. It is true that future technologies could expand the pie, but technological innovation has also decreased pie size. Planning for surpluses created by as-of-yet developed technologies is like depending on the lottery to fund your retirement.

The citizens of the US are faced with a future of diminished material opportunities. For example, why is the US drilling in environmental reserves? The unpalatable reality is that there is only so much pie to go around. Increasing the number of pieces means decreasing their size, unless it means stealing from future generations.

This situation is exacerbated by the reality that the US is a high energy society, which means that participating in American society has a greater effect on environmental impact, then participating in less energy intense societies. Participating in the US lifestyle increases the global impact effect of most migrants.

Would you kill a sacred cow to feed your great grandchildren?

It is likely to be argued that the ancestors of migrants have no right to argue against migration into their country. It is true that waves of migrants transformed the United States into what it is today. Should this history impact how people should choose to act in the future? Are aboriginal peoples justified in seeing this transformation as bad?

On its face, the argument that it is hypocritical for the ancestors of migrants to argue against continuing immigration feels convincing. That any of us are not the product of migration is difficult to conceive. Then again, the existence of a practice is not an argument for its continuation. For example, is it the case that the ancestors of slave holders have no right to legislate against slavery? Is it the case that the ancestors of a society that treated women as property have no right to legislate women into personhood? Is it the case that the ancestors of a society that was ruled by kings have no right to fight for democracy?

To be fair, slavery, chattel, and monarchies do not have the upsides of migration. The point is that it is nonsensical and somewhat immoral to argue that immigration is always a good, especially when it involves displacing existing populations. The fact is that emigration and immigration can bring good results, but they can also cause harm, as in cases when populations escaping post-threshold areas drive other stressed areas into threshold. Frankly, the issue boils down to what obligations we feel we owe to the different groups we do and don’t share membership with?

Why does America have a problem with illegal immigration?

America presents migrants with opportunities that are not available to them in their home countries, be they legal or not. Many of the migrants are economic migrants. The complex patterns of migration and colonization that created this circumstance, as manifest in the social systems that govern the world’s nations, are the facts on the ground. Given the need to reduce America’s environmental impact, what can be done to deal with illegal migration?

One way to reduce the number of illegal immigrants is to work to create opportunities in their countries as well as to act so as to not decrease their opportunities at home, by ending exploitative trading arrangements, for example. An aspect of this process is to reduce the discrepancies between American consumption and degradation and their own, by reducing that of the US.

Of course, this is easier said than done in a world that is encroaching upon, or has surpassed, its threshold point, whereupon a drastic population crash is unavoidable. Humanity forewent acting sooner, so it limited its material and moral choices to act now, and tainted innocence with environmental original sin. Clearly, and as noted earlier, the only options that are left are not good. It will take courage, honest, integrity, and sacrifice to address the immigration issue in a way that does not compromise our humanity.

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