Demonizing or falsely labeling population-immigration activists is certainly not the answer to America’s immigration dilemma.  Calling people who care deeply about the future of all of us by shining a light on the dangers of placing unlimited demands on limited resources—racists—is an unsupportable, unjustifiable, undignified cop-out for those who think downstream and have their own agendas.  I agree that people's hostility towards population activists is often unjustified and uninformed. However, I find the critiques valuable to understand what is truly meaningful about our work.

“The Center for Biological Diversity has taken on overpopulation as an issue despite so many other environmental advocates warning us against it. As we have advocated for the protection of endangered species over the past two decades, we came to a point that it was simply impossible for us to ignore the role that population growth has in displacing entire species of plants and animals from the planet forever. The potential of losing species diversity and the current extinction crisis that we are facing is a matter of life and death for all of Earth's inhabitants. To advocate for an exclusionary view of the world is in direct conflict with the belief that diversity is life.”  Kim Lovell, Sierra Club Global Population & Environment Program

“Barbara Jordan (black Congresswoman from Texas) was not a racist or white supremacist when she called for reductions in U.S. immigration.  Tim Wirth wasn't those things when he called for the reductions in Clinton's sustainability effort.  Nor was Gaylord Nelson, etc.  If they weren't racists (and everybody knows they weren't), then anybody else ought to be able to call for the same thing and be challenged on the facts and not on aspersions of character.   That is how civil society should operate.”  Roy Beck, director of www.NumbersUSA.org

Each week, I work with a group of thinkers concerned with the immigration-population dilemma facing America.  Can this country add another 100 million immigrants within 38 years? Can it sustain the projected 138 million people added to America by 2050?

What about water, energy and resources?  How can we continue to live in denial as those resources become depleted and unavailable?

Robert Hardaway, working with a group of other population experts, gives us a deeper understanding of our predicament:

“Regarding the totally unjustified interjection of race into the immigration/population question, it might be interesting to note that this is the 116th anniversary of George Washington Carver's famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition, in which he gave his memorable plea to the titans of industry to "cast down your bucket where you are,” said Hardaway.  “Washington told the story of the sea captain whose ship had run out of fresh water, prompting him to call for aid from a neighboring ship. The captain of the other ship replied that the sea captain's ship was at the mouth of the Amazon River, and that he should "cast down his bucket where you are."

Carver then made his plea to the robber barons that had resisted hiring freed slaves in favor of importing cheap and illegal foreign labor: "To those of you who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth, 'cast down your bucket where you are.'"
              
“Carver's plea goes largely unheeded today by both corporations and demagogues,” said Hardaway.  “At a time when the unemployment rate of African-American teenagers approached 80%, the garment makers in Los Angeles were pleading with the INS to import cheap foreign labor on grounds that there was an "unskilled labor shortage".  In the 1970's unionized janitorial workers earned high wages and benefits, only to see their wages and benefits drop to poverty levels when the jobs were outsourced to illegal immigrants flooding the labor markets.
              
“Ironically, those who suffer the most from the importation of illegal labor are the legal immigrants, who are pushed into poverty in order to satisfy the demands for cheap labor and profits pursued by large corporations and forced to watch while illegal immigrants are rewarded by being allowed to jump to the front of the line when it comes to tuition and other benefits denied to legal immigrants.”

Corporate greed and 21st century cheap labor

“Meanwhile, demagogues continue to repeat the tired mantra that "Americans won't do the dirty work that illegal labor will perform,” said Hardaway. “In fact, no work is more dirty or dangerous than coal mining or trash collection, but there is no shortage of applications when wages of $35 an hour plus benefits are offered rather than the minimum wage or worse is offered when the market is flooded with illegal labor willing to work for pittance wages. The same demagogues try to seduce voters into voting for politicians who support the  Reagan/Bush amnesty agenda by promising  voters that they can save a few cents on their grapefruit if they support illegal immigration.          

“As Immigration researcher Gary Imhoff has observed, illegal immigration "widens the differences between classes in the U.S.; it keeps down the price of hiring a maid or gardener while it makes things worse for the poor." A exhaustive  1992 Study for Immigration Studies concluded: "When blacks ask why their economic plight as not improved since the Civil Rights Act took effect in 1965, the answer is the Immigration Act passed the same year.

“Since the importation of millions of foreign workers into U.S. inner cities has done two things: it has provided an alternative supply of labor so that employers have not had to hire available black jobseekers, and the foreign workers have oversupplied labor to lower-skill markets.  That has kept jobs in a seemingly perpetual state of declining real wages…Whether intended or not, the present immigration policy is a revived instrument of institutional racism."”

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents - from the Arctic to the South Pole - as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents "The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it" to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com He is the author of: America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans. Copies available: 1 888 280 7715