Illegals turn parts of U.S. Southwest desert into environmental disaster area

October 1, 2006

Sheila McFarlin sees illegal immigration is an environmental issue. She seen firsthand the tons of trash dumped in the fragile Arizona desert by border-crossers.

For illegal aliens have turned parts of the Southwest desert into an environmental disaster area. They dump an estimated 25 million pounds of trash in the Arizona desert, carving out hundreds of miles of roads through the wilderness and destroying thousands of acres of habitat with cooking fires that have gone awry.

"The desert environment is fairly sensitive, so we're concerned about the damage to habitat, plants and animals," says McFarlin, who authored the Bureau of Land Management's 2006 report on environmental damage from illegal immigration. "It's not at all inviting to see toilet paper, fecal matter and backpacks by the thousands. Not at all."

Once the immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive, the scenario isn't much rosier. Immigration is now the primary factor in U.S. population growth, which drives such environmental woes as housing sprawl, pollution and traffic.

But  mainstream environmental groups are firmly and uniformly agnostic on the issue. "We've never taken a position pro or con on immigration," Sierra Club spokesman Eric Antebi said. "We don't have the expertise to deal with that [illegal immigration]," Wilderness Society spokesman Ben Beach said.

Such responses exasperate environmentalists such as Dick Lamm, former Democratic governor of Colorado and a 30-year member of the Sierra Club. Lamm broke ranks with the movement years ago by insisting that a responsible environmental policy has to include population and immigration controls.

He is among the most prominent of a small-but-hardy band of environmentalists who have tried for years to push the movement toward an anti-immigration stance. So far, they haven't had much luck.

"The environmental movement refuses to acknowledge that immigration and population are environmental issues," Lamm said.

Why? Politics, he said.

"The environmental movement has gone politically correct," Lamm said. "They're committing political malpractice by ignoring population."

But Jenny Neeley, Southwest representative for Defenders of Life, said her group hasn't taken a stance on immigration reform in Congress because "I don't think we're knowledgeable enough to say, 'This will stop the illegal crossings.'"

Faced with a difficult choice, critics said, the environmental movement has abandoned its primary mission -- protecting the planet -- rather than deviate from the liberal establishment.

Some environmentalists counter that population control is an issue that doesn't respect borders. Whether the estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States chose to live in New Mexico or Mexico City, they are still part of a global overpopulation problem.

"Do people who migrate to the United States increase environmental stress? It depends on where they would end up otherwise. Los Angeles, for example, could handle 10,000 Ecuadoreans more easily than the Galapagos Islands could," Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope wrote in a 2004 article in the group's magazine.

Alan Kuper, a longtime Sierra Club member and a critic of its immigration stance, said this is an unfair comparison because Americans are greater consumers of resources than people living in other countries.

"Our immigration policy can't make a dent in world poverty, and we take in two times more immigrants as any other country already," Lamm said. "The question is how can the U.S. best help the environment? By building a sustainable society."

Other environmentalists acknowledge that they tread lightly when it comes to illegal immigration in order to protect their work on other environmental issues.

"Because it's such a charged issue in this country, it's hard to get involved without getting caught in the crossfire," Antebi said. "We have a history of working with a large number of constituencies, and we want to continue to work with them.  If we'd gotten involved with the immigration issue, we would have burned a lot of bridges."

At one time, stabilizing the U.S. population was indeed a central tenet of the environmental movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, when it was just taking root, the call for "zero population growth" was as loud and insistent as the cry for cleaner air and water.

In 1970, the Sierra Club adopted a policy calling for the nation to "bring about the stabilization of the population first of the United States and then of the world." Three years later, Pope told the New York Times that "we can't hope to absorb all who want to come in. ... Immigration is a sentimental symbol whose day is long past."

By 1998, however, the environmental movement was in full retreat from both the population and immigration issue. Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz of NumbersUSA attribute the phenomenon to a number of factors, including the drop in U.S. fertility rates.

However, the researchers from the immigration-reform group conclude that the primary cause was demographics: The immigrants were Hispanic, and there were millions of them. Environmental leaders soon decided they couldn't afford a political skirmish with a large and increasingly influential minority group.

One issue that could pull the environmental community back into the immigration debate is the degradation at the border. The Bureau of Land Management estimates that only 1 percent of the 25 million tons of garbage left in the Southern Arizona desert has been hauled off since 2002.

"If we don't start reducing the total number of crossers, the problem is only going to get worse," Neeley said. "And so far the environmental community really hasn't had an adequate response."