Immigration and global warming: If ever there were two public policy issues that would seem unrelated, it’s these two. One well-heeled group, however, sees them as inextricably linked.
A recent TV commercial, sponsored by Santa Barbara-based Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), purports that increased immigration—both legal and illegal—will quadruple America’s carbon footprint.
In the commercial, running in heavy rotation on local channels, a 20-something male with spiked hair and a 5 o’clock shadow looks into the camera.
“Concerned about Americans’ huge carbon footprint?” he asks, casually thumbing to a large cutout of a footprint. “Then you should be concerned about immigration.”
Then he strolls over to a table topped with four identical cutouts, which he explains will be a reality in America if immigrants continue to flood the country.
CAPS’ argument is that when immigrants move to the United States, they become assimilated into the high-polluting lifestyle. In other words, more immigrants mean more Americans and more Americans mean more global warming.
The commercial is based on a study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a group with a similar philosophy to CAPS. According to CIS, the national population will grow by about 100 million people by 2040 and 82 percent of them will be immigrants, who will clog the air with more pollution.
“Reducing immigration won’t solve global warming, but it is a part of the solution,” the commercial actor says. “We’ve got some tough choices to make.”
The global warming commercial is not CAPS’ first foray into the immigration debate. The group released a series of commercials throughout California that slam immigration for leading to rampant crime and overpopulation. Last year, CAPS spent a little more than $1 million, about half of which was spent on campaigns.
But immigrant-caused global warming is an almost unprecedented argument, one that caught at least one political expert off guard. Mike Latner, a political science teacher at Cal Poly, said the linkage is an odd one, if not an outright logical fallacy. According to Latner, the CAPS commercial misses the point.
“The root problem is America’s CO2 emissions,” he said.
CAPS, however, holds firm that there will never be an end to global warming if the U.S. population continues to increase, even if per-person emission levels go down.
“You keep your final goal further away if you just keep on doing that successfully and allowing more and more people,” said CAPS President Diana Hull.
One pro-immigration group believed the latest commercial is one part of a larger effort by CAPS to turn the public against immigrants. The California Immigrant Policy Center is a statewide nonprofit that promotes immigrant rights. The center’s director, Reshma Shamasunder, was livid about the commercial, CAPS, and what she described as a network of anti-immigrant groups with a prejudicial agenda.
“The ad is utter nonsense,” she said. “It uses information from CIS, which is clearly an anti-immigration group.”
CAPS has come under fire before for its ties to the anti-immigration movement. The group began in 1986 after splitting off from Zero Population Growth. John Tanton, founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) also helped create CIS and has been labeled as one of the fathers of the anti-immigration movement in America. Tanton served on the Zero Population Growth executive committee for five years.
But critics were loudest when FAIR received money from the Pioneer Fund, a grantor with roots in eugenics and genetic behaviorism.
Asked about the funds, Hull said in an e-mail, “Anyone involved in trying to stabilize population or work for a sensible U.S. population policy is accused of being a racist and a hater.”
“I think that the right wing, or particularly these anti-immigrant organizations, have a strategy of basically churning up people’s fears, of creating divisiveness; of scapegoating; of attacking immigrants,” Shamasunder said. “And I think for them it’s really about creating an environment where immigrants are not welcome.”
CAPS is also heavily tied to the environmental movement. Many members of its board of directors are environmentalists who hold advanced degrees in everything from biology to astronomy.
Anti-immigration and environmentalism are two ideologies that typically fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. Latner believed it was out of the ordinary for one group to straddle both sides, but he said, “This is one of those areas where politics can have strange bedfellows.”
So why run the commercial now? There were no immigration propositions on the ballot this year and the issue has been largely overshadowed by the economy in the presidential and other political campaigns.
Asked about the commercial’s timing, Hull said, “The voice of the people on this issue is, ‘We’re not hearing this any more in the national presidential campaigns. Why not?”
Responding to the same question, Shamasunder said, “It’s kind of a long-term campaign to create that hate and to create that environment.”
Colin Rigley is a staff writer for New Times, the Santa Maria Sun’s sister paper in San Luis Obispo. Contact him at [email protected].
