Immigration opponents move toward taking over Sierra Club

By Shawn McCarthy
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

January 28, 2004


NEW YORK – Anti-immigration activists have launched an aggressive bid to take over the Sierra Club, one of the most respected environmental groups in North America.

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The immigration issue is not a new one for the Sierra Club. For years, the organization has championed world population control as a key element in global environmental protection. But a vocal minority in the club is urging a stronger focus on population control within the United States, including measures to decrease immigration.

In a 1998 referendum, Sierra Club members rejected calls to adopt what critics said was an anti-immigrant position. Now, a group calling itself Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization is supporting three new candidates for the board of directors, telling backers that their election would allow virtual control of the 112-year-old club.

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Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/wed/news/news_1n28sierra.html

of leftist groups? Imagine that.

It's kinda scary either way.

That Zuckerman guy sounds like he is concerned about overuse of resources. I.e., if a Mexican comes to the US, his use of resources suddenly jumps from the relatively low level he used in Mexico to the vastly higher amount used in the US. That ain't exactly a freeper worry.

I'm a liberal, and I'm anti-illegal immigration, but for different reasons (excess immigration drives the American laborers standard of living down). It sounds to me like this is a ideological takeover by a group who supports the environment, but who support taking a really strong stance against immigration.

It is kinda scary though. To me, the Sierra Club is more about protecting the environment, preservation of natural resources, etc. This group seems to be distracting it from it's original purpose.

"In a 1998 referendum, Sierra Club members rejected calls to adopt what critics said was an anti-immigrant position. Now, a group calling itself Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization is supporting three new candidates for the board of directors, telling backers that their election would allow virtual control of the 112-year-old club."

This doesn't appear to be new..and a knee-jerk response of "It's the right wing' will not have any positive effect on the outcome..and will make those jerking look silly...

If our overuse of resources is the problem, then it needs to be fixed here.

Global thinking is needed. Increasing justice for all workers will decrease their need to emigrate. Raising standards of living & education help reduce population--voluntarily.

It's a big order, but turning the USA into a gated community is not the answer. Pollution does not respect national barriers.

I was simply saying that I don't think it's necessarily a right-wing group.

And I agree about the 'global thinking'. NAFTA and WTO are jokes without all countries agreeing to laws which respect worker rights to organize and which create environmental protections.

Unfortunately, in the absence of those provisions in NAFTA and WTO, American jobs are fleeing to Mexico and China, and Mexican illegals are pouring into the US taking jobs that many Americans WOULD do (and DID do for most of our history), if the wages were halfway decent.

You can't tell me that no American would hang drywall or paint or do landscaping work if he could make a decent living. Americans are being priced out of those markets though by illegal workers who will do the job for less, and who can then be further screwed by their employers since they are 'illegal'.

Regardless of whether the immigrants use more resources here than they do in Mexico, they use way less resources per person than Americans. And, they tend to have fewer offspring once they move here as well (they probably have more than the average American family, but ultimately fewer than they would in their country of origin.)

This issue is maddening and all the more so because I have liberal friends who got on board with this last time. The Sierra Club did the right thing last time but I guess if it goes through, I'll have to shift my environmental donations back to Greenpeace.

I too have had friends who got on board the last time. Every ten years or so the Sierra Club trots out some similar perspective. Interesting that none of the other environmental groups do.

Although easy to rally support - historically at least there is a strong republican grounding to the environmental movement too (Teddy Roosevelt, Nixon) - this campaign appeals to isolationist tendencies in some environmentalists -- this is a limited strategy for dealing with both national and global environmental concerns.

Those on the right are of course utterly unconcerned with the fate of the poor anywhere on the planet, except to the extent that they secretly gloat in their suffering, and they could give a shit about the environment. But we on the left care about the environment AND the poor, and there's no denying that one of the most pressing assaults on the environment in the Third World is the sheer explosive growth of human population. The reference to Malthusian in a subsequent post is a cheap dodge -- world population growth is projected to level off at 9 or 10 billion, but there's not guarantee that these projections are accurate, any more than Malthus' projections were right. I would like to think we can keep pulling techno fixes out of our hats to allow the ecosystem to remain intact as the human race grows more numerous and more resource-intensive, but it's foolish to count on that -- as the right wants to do on global warming issue.

I'd say taking a hard look at immigration and population growth from an environmental viewpoint is a responsible thing to do. Of course, this conflicts with the general principle that we should try to help poor people everywhere lead better lives, but there's no helping it -- it's a real point of conflict.

A lot of environmentalism is reactionary garbage--population control, anti-technology, real Malthusian politics.

Ugh.