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Article Immigration-based growth is unsustainable by Mike McGarry, Other Voices Editorial Colorado Springs Gazette June 11, 2002 At town meetings in Colorado, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell has glibly and correctly said it is not immigrants but interstate migration, especially from California, causing Colorado's population crunch. The senator was both right and wrong. Statewide - with glaring localized exceptions - Californians do represent the greatest number of Colorado's more recent arrivals, but overpopulation driven by mass immigration is a main cause of their coming. In 1970, California had a population of 20 million. It is now a huge 35 million - larger than most of the world's countries - and it will be a gargantuan 52 million in 25 short years. Ninety-five percent of California's explosive growth in the 1990s resulted from new immigrants and their children. California's Central Valley, a breadbasket of the country and the world, is expected to be 50 percent bulldozed within 25 years to accommodate overimmigration. A besieged California farmer recently featured on the CBS Evening News looked into the camera and plaintively asked, "Don't you realize we will need to feed folks in 50, 75 years?" (The American Farmland Trust reports we have degraded and urbanized nearly 34 million acres of US farmland since 1970 to facilitate population growth. We now are importing 15 to 20 percent of fruits and vegetables we otherwise would have grown at home.) Californians must now build a new elementary school 365 days a year, in perpetuity, to support immigrating numbers creating China-like density. Reporting on the "dysfunctional" Los Angeles Unified School District, the Washington Post said, "[to] accommodate a surging population, composed overwhelming of children of recent immigrants, the beleaguered school district is going to have to build a new school every two weeks just to keep up." It's no wonder California's school system, once the pride of the country, is now the educational scandal of the country. Add the ongoing energy and water crises Californians probably will never overcome - How could they! - it's clear Californians are fleeing to Colorado because of stressful social conditions and environmental degradation created by overpopulation. Nearly 70 percent of US population growth of 83-million-plus since 1970 was the result of mass immigration. Currently, we accept more than 1 million legal immigrants annually, more than accepted by all the world's countries combined. We now endure more than 500,000 permanent illegal aliens yearly. Ninety percent of US population growth to 2050 will be immigration driven, that is, post-1970 immigrants and their descendants. Those numbers will rocket U.S. population from its current 286 million to more than a half-billion within the near future. No amount of "smart growth" can defend us against these numbers. Population and immigration are riding tandem a juggernaut that is now moving at runaway speed. It's often said - with little thought and no perspective - "America is a country of immigrants", implying any amount of immigration, regardless of the numbers, is traditional and proper. But from 1776 to 1976 America averaged only 230,000 immigrants, yearly. Remember, that average includes the great immigrating numbers during the turn-of-the-century's Great Wave, when the US was only 76 million inhabitants, industrializing and still expanding west. From 1925 to 1965 we averaged a nourishing 178,000 immigrants, yearly. Contrasting those averages with today's nontraditional immigration engorgement should provide a perspective usually absent from a debate mired in platitudes and charged with acrimony. Incredibly, there are proposals now receiving serious consideration in Congress to push immigration numbers even higher. If today - right now - we were to adopt a sensible immigration reduction moratorium consistent with our history and tradition, we still would not stabilize our population until, at best, 64 million additions. Without such a nation-saving policy, the US Census Bureau is projecting an American human pile-on of a possible 1.2 billion by century's end. There is a Chinese proverb which says: "If we continue going in the direction we are headed, we will end up going where we are headed." It is tantamount to perpetrating a hate crime against our children and grandchildren to force onto them a ravaged, overpopulated, state and country we would not want or tolerate for ourselves. America and Colorado are full. Mass immigration is not "smart growth." The writer is a spokesman for the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform (CAIR) Back Home |