By P.A. Madison, The Federalist Blog, December 17, 2005

Ever since the subject of Congress taking up Birthright Citizenship have we seen the power of ignorance at work through the MSM [MainStream Media]. It is difficult to find any editorial or wire story that correctly gives the reader an honest and accurate historical account of the Fourteenth Amendment in regards to children born to foreign parents within the United States. Most often the media presents a fabled and inaccurate account of just what the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means.

Recent story lines go something like this: "Currently the Constitution says that a person born in this country is an American citizen. That's it. No caveats." The problem with these sort of statements other than being plainly false is that it reinforces a falsehood that has become viewed as a almost certain fact through such false assertions over time.

This is like insisting the sun rotates around the earth while ignoring the body of evidence to the contrary.

During the reconstruction period following the civil war the view on citizenship was that only children born to American parents owing allegiance to no other foreign power could be declared an American Citizen upon birth on U.S. soil. This is exactly the language of the civil rights bill of 1866: "All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States."

The author of the Fourteenth Amendment, Rep. John A Bingham (OH), responded to the above declaration as follows: "I find no fault with the introductory clause, which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen."

Already before we get to the Fourteenth Amendment Citizenship Clause we have the entire Congress declaring only children born to parents who owe no foreign allegiance shall be citizens. We also have the author of the Fourteenth Amendment declaring this is law of the land. It just gets worst for advocates who want to either believe or, revise history, to support their fable that the Fourteenth Amendment somehow magically makes anyone born in the United States regardless of the allegiance of their parents a natural born citizen.

Sen. Jacob Howard, who wrote the Fourteenth's Citizenship Clause believed the same thing as Bingham as evidenced by his introduction of the clause to the US Senate as follows:

Advocates for birthright citizenship for aliens either through ignorance, or deception, attempt to pretend "subject to the jurisdiction" means only one thing: location at time of birth. It does not, and never had such a meaning during the time period in question. The record of law is full of references to jurisdiction that had nothing to do with physical location. Take for example title XXX of 1875, sec 2165 where is states:

Simply being on US soil (limits) does not automatically put you under US jurisdiction like some pro alien advocates would like to believe. Under the common myth of the meaning -- simply being within the limits of a State automatically places an alien under US jurisdiction for Fourteenth Amendment purposes. It does not as Bingham and Howard plainly makes clear as well as laws regarding the subject at the time also make clear.

So than, what exactly did subject to the jurisdiction mean? Sen. Lyman Trumbull, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, framer of the Thirteenth Amendment told us in clear language what the phrase means under the Fourteenth:

Sen. Jacob M. Howard, responded to Trumbull's construction by saying:

One might wonder why did Jacob Howard use the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" rather than the language of the civil rights bill of 1866 and 1870? The answer is simple: there was confusion over what a Indian’s allegiance might be and most everyone in Congress at the time did not want to give blanket citizenship to all Indians across the board.

In other words, it was feared by some that an Indian might be considered to owe no allegiance to any foreign power, and therefore, could become a citizen at birth. Since Indians were not under the direct jurisdiction of the United States (they were under the jurisdiction of their respected tribes) the language of the Fourteenth Amendment would disqualify them. This is why the language of the Citizenship Clause ended up different than the language of the civil rights bill of 1866 and 1870 and made more restrictive as to who could become a citizen by birth.

Myths can be difficult to dispose of, and birthright citizenship to aliens is no exception. Pro immigration advocates will refer to the Supreme Court ruling U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark as a desperate attempt to keep the fable alive. The problem with relying on Wong Kim Ark is that it draws zero support from the Fourteenth Amendment. In fact, the ruling had nothing to with the Fourteenth Amendment at all, but everything to do with English Common Law, something the Fourteenth's Citizenship Clause had no connection because it was a virtue of "national law."

There is other significant problems with the Wong Kim Ark ruling other than having no basis in Fourteenth Amendment text, intent and history that will never hold up under review -- and that is how will any court with a straight face attempt to reconcile the civil rights bill of 1870. Remember that civil rights bill declared those children born to parents subject to a foreign power cannot be declared United States citizens.

You cannot simply revise he Fourteenth's Citizenship Clause to mean yes, it really was the intent of the Congress to grant citizenship to alien children born on US soil when the same Congress enacted law afterwards that did just the reverse. Try and explain why Congress would pass a Constitutional Amendment that grants citizenship to ANYONE born in the US and then turn around and pass a law that would deny automatic citizenship to aliens? Because you cannot, only leads us back to the to the exact construction of the clause for which it was intended and written to mean.

The Wong Kim Ark ruling is so badly flawed and irrelevant probably lead to the US Supreme Court in 1982 to say they "had never confirmed birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens."

By far the most relevant Supreme Court ruling on the subject to date, and indeed, fully supported by the Fourteenth Amendment itself came in Elk v. Wilkins 112 U.S. 94 (1884), where the court held that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction" requires "direct and immediate allegiance" to the United States, not just physical presence.

If pro immigration groups or individuals want to continue in believing the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to anyone born in the country regardless of their allegiance, fine -- but to continue to insist the Fourteenth Amendment supports their fable is both feeble and a disrespect to American history.

Reproduced under Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/)

Read the complete article.

By Al Knight, Denver Post, June 22, 2005

There's nothing quite as important as timing in politics. A fact that might go unnoticed for years can, at the right moment, help change the direction of national policy.

Consider the issue of anchor babies and what, if anything, should be done about them. Anchor babies, for those not yet familiar with the term, is the description given to babies of illegal immigrants who are delivered in the United States. These babies, under current interpretation of U.S. law, automatically become U.S. citizens and most qualify immediately for a variety of benefits, including Medicaid. Over time, they can open the door to citizenship to other family members.

Last week, there was a flurry of national news stories announcing the current estimate that 300,000 such babies are born each year in this country.

... Most people, however, would find the number somewhat shocking. Indeed, the news stories set off a new flurry of debate over whether the existing provisions relating to what is called birthright citizenship can or should be changed.

There is a special intensity in this discussion in some states - including California, Texas and Florida - with high anchor baby populations. But the issue is also being noticed in places like Georgia, where the number of anchor babies doubled from 5,133 in 2000 to 11,180 in 2002. Several years ago in Colorado, the number of such births was estimated at more than 6,000.

A measure pending in Congress would change the Constitution to deny citizenship rights to babies born to illegal immigrants. The proposed amendment is currently given little or no chance of passage but it certainly helps to focus attention on the nature of the problem.

More than a dozen years ago, Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith put it this way in their article "Consensual Citizenship," in the magazine Chronicles: "The present guarantee under American law of automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens can operate ... as one more incentive to illegal migration and violation by nonimmigrant aliens already here. When this attraction is combined with the powerful lure of expanded entitlements conferred upon citizen children and their families by the modern welfare state, the total incentive effect of birthright citizenship may well become significant."

That passage was written in 1992 when the number of such births was estimated at less than 150,000 per year. Since then, the number has more than doubled.

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States."

At the time the amendment was approved, the author of the clause, Sen. Jacob M. Howard, said the phrase relating to jurisdiction meant, "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners ... ."

In subsequent years, the courts invalidated the assurances of Howard; at this stage, an amendment to the Constitution seems the only means available to change the law....

Not so long ago in Ireland, there was a policy of granting residency and possible citizenship to anyone who had a baby there. In Dublin hospitals, births to foreigners made up 25 percent of the total. That fact forced a change in Ireland's constitution in 2004. It now reads:

"Notwithstanding any other provision, a person born on the island of Ireland who does not have at the time of birth of that person at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or entitled to be an Irish citizen is not entitled to Irish citizenship or nationality unless provided by law."

Change a couple of words, and it is a safe bet that that amendment would receive a high level of popular support in the United States.

A Denver talk show host recently announced confidently that the current policy on anchor babies could never be changed in this country. But then, a few years ago, no one in Ireland thought that the country's constitution could be amended, either.

Al Knight of Fairplay is a former member of The Post's editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.

By P.A. Madison
Former Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies
February 1, 2005

We well know how the courts and laws have spoken on the subject of children born to non-citizens (illegal aliens) within the jurisdiction of the United States by declaring them to be American citizens. But what does the constitution of the United States say about the issue of giving American citizenship to anyone born within its borders? As we explore the constitutions citizenship clause, as found in the Fourteenth Amendment, we can find no constitutional authority to grant such citizenship to persons born to non-American citizens within the limits of the United States of America.

We are, or should be, familiar with the phrase, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the States wherein they reside." This can be referred to as the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but what does "subject to the jurisdiction" mean? Jurisdiction can take on different meanings that can have nothing to do with physical boundaries alone--and if the framers meant geographical boundaries they would have simply used the term "limits" rather than "jurisdiction" since that was the custom at the time when distinguishing between physical boundaries and reach of law.

Fortunately, we have the highest possible authority on record to answer this question of how the term "jurisdiction" was to be interpreted and applied, the author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob M. Howard (MI) to tell us exactly what it means and its intended scope as he introduced it to the United States Senate in 1866:

It is clear the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had no intention of freely giving away American citizenship to just anyone simply because they may have been born on American soil, something our courts have wrongfully assumed. But what exactly did "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" mean to the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment? Again, we are fortunate to have on record the highest authority to tell us, Sen. Lyman Trumbull, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, author of the Thirteenth Amendment, and the one who inserted the phrase:

Sen. Howard concurs with Trumbull's construction:

In other words, only children born to American citizens can be considered citizens of the United States since only a American citizen could enjoy the "extent and quality" of jurisdiction of an American citizen now. Sen. Johnson, speaking on the Senate floor, offers his comments and understanding of the proposed new amendment to the constitution:

[Now], all this amendment [citizenship clause] provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign Power--for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us--shall be considered as citizens of the United States. That would seem to be not only a wise but a necessary provision. If there are to be citizens of the United States there should be some certain definition of what citizenship is, what has created the character of citizen as between himself and the United States, and the amendment says that citizenship may depend upon birth, and I know of no better way to give rise to citizenship than the fact of birth within the territory of the United States, born to parents who at the time were subject to the authority of the United States.[4]

No doubt in the Senate as to what the citizenship clause means as further evidenced by Sen. W. Williams:

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, considered the father of the Fourteenth Amendment, confirms the understanding and construction the framers used in regards to birthright and jurisdiction while speaking on civil rights of citizens in the House on March 9, 1866:

Further convincing evidence for the demand of complete allegiance required for citizenship can be found in the "Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America," an oath required to become an American citizen of the United States. It reads in part:

Of course, this very oath leaves no room for dual-citizenship, but that is another troubling disregard for our National principles by modern government. Fewer today are willing to renounce completely their allegiance to their natural country of origin, further making a mockery of our citizenship laws. In fact, recently in Los Angeles you could find the American flag discarded for the flag of Mexico in celebration after taking the American Citizenship Oath.

It's noteworthy to point out a Supreme Court ruling in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), where the court completely discarded the fourteenth's Citizenship Clause scope and intent by replacing it with their own invented Citizenship Clause. The court in effect, ruled that fourteenth amendment had elevated citizenship to a new constitutionally protected right, and thus, prevents the cancellation of a persons citizenship unless they assent.

Unfortunately for the court, Sen. Howard effectively shoots down this feeble attempt to replace his clause with their own homegrown Citizenship Clause. Firstly, Howard finds no incompatibility with expatriation and the fourteenth's Citizenship Clause when he says: "I take it for granted that when a man becomes a citizen of the United States under the Constitution he cannot cease to be a citizen, except by expatriation for the commission of some crime by which his citizenship shall be forfeited."

Secondly, Sen. Howard expressly stated, "I am not yet prepared to pass a sweeping act of naturalization by which all the Indian savages, wild or tame, belonging to a tribal relation, are to become my fellow-citizens and go to the polls and vote with me and hold lands and deal in every other way that a citizen of the United States has a right to do."

The question begs: If Howard had no intention of passing a sweeping act of naturalization--how does the court elevate Howard's Citizenship Clause to a new constitutionally protected right that cannot be taken away since this would certainly require a sweeping act with explicit language to enumerate such a new constitutional right? Remember, the court cannot create new rights that are not already expressly granted by the constitution.

A third problem for the court is the fact both Howard and Bingham viewed the citizenship clause as simply "declaratory" of what they regarded "as the law of the land already." This then requires flights of fantasy to elevate Howard's express purpose of inserting the Citizenship Clause as simply removing "all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States," and not to elevate citizenship to a new protected constitutional right. Citizenship is a privilege, not a right as say the right to freedom of religion is, and therefore, can be taken away just as any other privilege can be.

James Madison defined who America seeked to be citizens among us along with some words of wisdom:

What does it all mean?

In a nutshell, it means this: The constitution of the United States does not grant citizenship at birth to just anyone who happens to be born within American borders. It is the allegiance (complete jurisdiction) of the child’s birth parents at the time of birth that determines the child’s citizenship--not geographical location. If the United States does not have complete jurisdiction, for example, to compel a child’s parents to Jury Duty–then the U.S. does not have the total, complete jurisdiction demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment to make their child a citizen of the United States by birth. How could it possibly be any other way?

The framers succeeded in their desire to remove all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. They also succeeded in making both their intent and construction clear for future generations of courts and government. Whether our government or courts will start to honor and uphold the supreme law of the land for which they are obligated to by oath, is another very disturbing matter.

Footnotes

[1]. Congressional Globe, 39th Congress (1866) pg. 2890
[2]. Id. at 2893
[3]. Id. at 2895
[4]. Id. at 2893
[5]. Id. at 2897
[6]. Id. at 1291
[7]. James Madison on Rule of Naturalization, 1st Congress, Feb. 3, 1790.

Permission is granted to use, copy or republish this article in its entirely only.

By Al Knight, Denver Post, September 11, 2002 

The term "anchor baby" is unfamiliar to most Americans, but it nicely describes one of the more troubling aspects of American immigration policy.

Put simply, an anchor baby is the offspring of an illegal immigrant who, under current legal interpretation, becomes a U.S. citizen at birth and, in turn, is the means by which parents and relatives can also obtain citizenship for themselves by using the family reunification features of immigration law.

It's estimated there may be as many as 200,000 anchor babies born each year in the U.S. No single agency keeps track, but there is abundant, if fragmented, evidence that births are not limited to areas near the Mexican border.

In a recent year in Colorado, the state's emergency Medicaid program paid an estimated $30 million in hospital and physician delivery costs for about 6,000 illegal immigrant mothers. And the Nashville Tennessean reported last year that the Metro General Hospital in Davidson County had recorded 511 births during a one-year period, two-thirds of them to illegal immigrants.

...Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement, claims, "There is a huge and growing industry in Asia that arranges tourist visas for pregnant woman so they can fly to the United States and give birth to an American."

Although the exact number of such births is unknown, what is known is that, except for a limited exception applying to children of diplomats, every child born on U.S. soil currently earns what is called "birthright citizenship."

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, in part, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

That same amendment also says, "The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

Congress, of course, has done no such thing, although legislation has been introduced that would deny citizenship to a child whose mother is "neither a citizen or national of the United States nor admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident."...

No government agency keeps track of anchor births; hospitals rarely keep accurate information on immigration status, public schools and other agencies are virtually forbidden from tracking immigration status, and so the public has no clue as to the real effects of current policy. Because detailed information is lacking, it is easy enough to those who favor the status quo to simply announce that the effects are completely benign.

But saying it doesn't make it so, does it?

Al Knight is a member of the Denver Post editorial board. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday.

"Finding the Trimtab" is a talk by Jonette Christian, presented at the the third annual environmental conference on Global Environmental and Social Issues in Aspen, CO, hosted by the Sopris Foundation and the Worldwatch Institute during July 12-14, 2002.

This is a wonderful and insightful talk explaining the dysfunctionality of our society that refuses to examine the multiple and significant impacts of mass immigration. It is very worthwhile reading:

Our situation is serious. Global emissions of CO2 have quadrupled since 1950 and the climate of our planet is rapidly changing in perilous ways. Although a well designed effort to educate world elites is gradually producing results this movement is much much too slow. The solution to our problem is more complex than simply educating leaders. In short, the behavior, the expectations, and the thinking patterns of 6 billion people must change, and they must change rapidly in billions of unforeseeable ways. It is commonly said that we need leadership that is capable of thinking outside the box but ideas that come from outside of the box are jarring and uncomfortable and that is why they are outside of the box - and we only consider them unless we are absolutely forced to do so.

Twenty years ago I was introduced to a metaphor from Buckminster Fuller, called the "trimtab factor". Imagine you are on the deck of an ocean liner with l000 people. Rocks are looming ahead and you must find a way to steer the boat to safety. One person stands in the bow, pointing out the rocks, and the passengers try to steer the ship with their weight, running from side to side in response to the guide's gestures. It's a clumsy method with a doubtful outcome. However, in the steering mechanism of a real ocean liner is a piece of metal 6 inches square called a trimtab. One person moving the trimtab can steer an ocean liner more effectively than even 10,000 people running back and forth on the deck. As individuals, the problems confronting us are enormous and tremendously complex. Therefore, it is vital that we look for the trimtab - that place to take action which will maximize our leverage on the course of human history.

Many changes are essential in building a sustainable future, but our job right now is to find the action that is most powerful for this particular moment. We need to find a trimtab.

Twenty years ago I believed that the trimtab for a sustainable economy lay in a global commitment to ending world hunger a commitment which might shape all of our decisions in light of this one great unifying purpose. This goal would require long term planning, it would demand a whole new relationship with the environment, to natural resources and to each other. We would be forced to think differently, to look for new solutions and most important, it would unify humanity in achieving our most important purpose to feed our children. So I joined multiple hunger organizations, taught a mini course on the problems in developing countries, recruited friends and family to become monthly contributors to hunger organizations, and wrote many letters. I believed that we needed to live this goal seven days a week. And every year on the birthday of my children I fasted and gave more money to remind myself of this commitment.

I was a little short on the details of how the plan would work, but I made up for it with passion. And in any case, shooting from my good liberal hip, I was pretty certain I had the big picture right. It is a common failing of idealists that we sometimes become infatuated with the moral beauty of our vision for the world, and the moral beauty of ourselves working for that vision. It was hard for this global idealist to humble herself - to think small and to think locally but eventually I made the transition. And I consider it no small achievement to have successfully resisted that beguiling temptation to believe that I was chosen to save the world.

Today I see things very differently. I am still committed to a world with a sustainable future, but I am no longer a global idealist and I no longer believe that simply calling for the end of world hunger will lead mankind in some new and glorious direction. Today, I'm an older woman and more experienced with people. Today I believe that the trimtab meaning the place to put my weight to maximize my leverage lies right here in my native land, the land I feel most closely connected to, the land where I speak the language, pay the taxes and vote. I am working to stabilize the population of the United States because continuous population growth is simply not sustainable. We need to shrink our consumption and our footprint upon the world, to reduce our growth by moderating the predominant factor driving that growth immigration - to teach our people the importance of sustainable planning for our own descendants, to become responsible stewards of the land we inherited, and to bring the attention of this nation back inward to the needs of our own people. In short, I have downsized. In the media and among academics and globalist elites, people like me are dismissed as "nativist" or "xenophobic". But among the people I work with, we see our work as community activism directed toward preserving the local economy; livable wages for local people, and the local culture.

I started Mainers for Immigration Reform while working with Maine loggers who were being replaced by Canadian and Mexican workers. The lumber companies didn't have to pay health insurance for the Canadians, and both Canadians and Mexicans were willing to work for less because their dollar denominated wages bought more when sent home. The lumber companies were happy; the international workers were happy. Too bad for Maine loggers and their communities, who for generations had earned modest but livable wages performing this dangerous work. . Nearly all Maine loggers have now migrated out of state to find jobs to support their families they were told that in the service of a global economy, they must find better jobs by learning computer skills and leave their old jobs to foreign workers willing to work for much less. This chaos is called "efficiency" in a global labor market.

I wish I could report that Mainers organized on behalf of their loggers, many of whose families have lived in our state for generations, but in fact, the only group of Maine people who got involved was the local progressive community. Applying their tired old agenda rather than analyzing the current situation, they framed the conflict as workers against bosses and tried to organize a coalition of immigrant workers and loggers. Not surprisingly, the loggers were insulted; the effort failed, and it didn't build good feelings.

What happened to Maine loggers has happened all over this country in one industry after another: poultry processing, garment making, food processing, construction and agriculture. In l979 Iowa slaughterhouse workers made solid middle class incomes, and no company had trouble remaining profitable while treating its workers well. These jobs sustained whole communities and were jealously handed down through generations. Expressed in present dollars, these workers were making $18.32 an hour. By 2000, average wages had fallen to $10.32 an hour, and entry level wages were as low as $6 an hour.

Congress rewrote our immigration laws in l965, which led to spiraling family chain migration and introduced massive refugee resettlement operations swelling the pool of low wage workers. In the early l980's the meat packing industry was completely reorganized in response to the availability of cheap foreign workers.

Newly formed nonunion companies, like IOWA Beef Processors, took advantage of abundant foreign labor by slashing pay, speeding up the processing lines, and allowing safety conditions to deteriorate to an appalling level.

The old companies that had paid good wages, like Armour, Hormel, Swift and Wilson could not compete. They slashed wages or declared bankruptcy and Iowa Beef Processors acquired one third of the national red meat slaughter market.

Americans were not accustomed to such low wages and shameful working conditions. But immigrants, legal and illegal, were willing to take these jobs. And so the story was told that we needed immigrants to do the "jobs that Americans wont do". Just as Mainers used to cut their own trees, so Americans always slaughtered their own meat and earned a living wage doing it until Congress decided to rig the system for nonunion companies by swamping the labor market with millions of new workers. Dr. George Borjas, Harvard economist and this nation's most acknowledged expert on the labor impact of immigration, estimates that native born American workers are losing $160 billion a year due to competition from immigrant labor. The savings to business from cheap labor travels upwards to the employers and stockholders, contributing to the glaring income disparities we have today.

I am certain that if we were importing a million and half lawyers every year, shrinking their hourly billing rates, Congress would be passing legislation to reduce immigration before the day was over. But the fact is, immigration predominately impacts the working poor who do not have the political clout to determine policy.

In a recent New York Times story, Allan Greenspan made the following candid remarks regarding his support for immigration: "Unless immigration is uncapped . . . wage increases must rise above even impressive gains in productivity. This would intensify inflationary pressures or squeeze profit margins." In other words, a continual supply of cheap foreign labor is necessary to keep wages low and profit margins high. This economy is not designed to meet the needs of our people. We have created a behemoth that is requiring people to service it. Our government is rapidly pursing policies to dissolve our borders, and turn all workers into migrating economic units, each searching for a job with a livable wage. There is nothing kind or compassionate or even rational about this policy it is a vicious and shameful weapon against the working poor, forcing common laborers, minorities, and recent immigrants to compete against each other in a race to the bottom and those who mistakenly believe that we are "sharing America's wealth with the poor" are not the ones who do the sharing. Post l970 immigrants and their descendants have added more than 55 million people to our country; this is the equivalent of absorbing all of Central America in thirty years. To quote Voltaire: "The rich will always require an abundant supply of the poor".

And where will this breath taking population growth lead a nation of high consuming people and how will it impact the world? According to the Census Bureau, if we continue to grow at the current rate, we will DOUBLE our population in the lifetime of our children, and at least 70% of this growth will be due to just one government policy: our immigration policy. What legacy do we leave to the future when we have deliberately doubled the population of every American city, doubled the need for highways and petroleum, houses, shopping malls, schools, hospitals, prisons? Even if we manage to cut consumption in half we have achieved nothing if we allow this growth to happen. It is irrational to think that any consumption based plan, such as the Kyoto Treaty, could possibly succeed in the absence of a simultaneous reduction in population growth.

One of the consequences of our infatuation with global idealism is that America is no longer comfortable discussing our own welfare. We have been shamed and intimidated by past errors of Western civilization; the harm we have caused in other parts of the world; the greed of our corporations, and we feel enormous guilt for this wrong doing. And increasingly it seems that our success has become an illusion. Our children have grown obese and highly medicated for depression and hyper activity. We pay strangers to cook our meals, clean our homes, mow our lawns and perform the most intimate care of our loved ones. Our families are disconnected. We are stressed out, over worked, and lonely. We continually berate ourselves for materialism even as we slavishly enable the very policies which continue it. We teach our youth to sneer at the "dead white men" who founded their country and to idealize foreign people and foreign cultures, gushing and cooing about all kinds of diversity, and how foreign people will improve us, enrich us, and revitalize our communities- and we think nothing of how insulting and hostile that message really is.

Recently I read a story about a New York City school with many immigrant children. And the administrators reported that immigrant children were much better behaved, more respectful and hardworking. Studies are now indicating that as immigrant children assimilate they acquire the same level of teenage pregnancy, school drop out, obesity and drug addiction as their America peers. The point is, we have a problem which must be solved from within.

The guilt that we bear for America's history will not be absolved by pursuing a policy of mass immigration today. Our grandchildren do not deserve to be punished for the errors of their grandparents, and no global mission, no matter how altruistic, absolves us of responsibility to our own people

The world grew by 78 million last year, most of it coming from impoverished nations. The United States admitted about 1 million legal immigrants and 700,000 illegal immigrants. In terms of saving people from poverty, it was a trifle a little something to alleviate our western guilt which accomplished nothing for most of the world. The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a cruel hoax to promote the fantasy that we will take in the world's huddled masses, because we cant..

As a family therapist, I work with families who are trapped in dysfunctional patterns: domestic violence, alcoholism, abusive parenting, and poverty. These are not bad people. They were brought to their misery by a long series of disastrous choices with unintended consequences, and they do not see how to free themselves from the results they produce. What I bring to this conference on sustainability is my experience working with dysfunctional families which may have bearing upon the larger problem of dysfunction that concerns us today.

I will list a few basic observations which I believe are pertinent to our discussion.

First, there is a difference between saving people and building a relationship in which people see for themselves what they need to do to change. Much of our foreign policy in the third world has vacillated between using other people and generating grand plans to save them. Ultimately, neither response is helpful. They will see more clearly what they need to do, when we see what we need to do. We need to put our own house in order and build sustainability into national planning for this country.

Second, How people treat each other within a group will largely determine what result that group will produce. This is true for families, and it is true in nations. Poverty, overpopulation, authoritarian government, political corruption and high infant mortality rates are the product of cultures in which neither women nor children are truly valued or have a voice in group decisions. Having more children than you can care for is the product of a dysfunctional set of beliefs, and having many children is not the same thing as valuing children.

A third observation. Dysfunctional groups are dominated by what they don't talk about. Since l990 we have added 38 million people to America's population, and if we continue to grow at this rate, we will double ourselves in less than 70 years. And we are not talking about it! A recent study of media coverage of environmental problems, such as water shortages and loss of wildlife, found that fewer than l1% of these stories mentioned population growth as a cause and none of them suggested none-that stabilizing population could be part of the solution. This is lunacy. We are responding like deer with headlights in our eyes paralyzed or else indifferent and we would rather talk about almost anything else: urban sprawl, pollution, traffic, falling water tables, declining fish stocks, women's empowerment, housing shortages, economic justice anything to avoid blunt speech about population numbers and the painfully obvious connection between these numbers and nearly every problem we are trying to solve. How can we be so dense? Speaking as a therapist, this is the speech pattern of dysfunctional groups - avoiding or minimizing the "pink elephant" in the living room at all costs, and exhausting themselves in a flurry of chatter around peripheral matters. We have agitated and deluded ourselves with the illusion that we are being overwhelmed by many many problems, when in fact, we have primarily only one.

Fourth point. Dysfunctional families commonly take in outsiders in what appears to be a breathtaking gesture of generosity. A closer examination of this behavior often reveals that this generosity is not driven by kindness; it is not nice, it is not what it seems to be, it is a ploy to dominate and control other members within a family; and these relationships rarely last. America's current immigration policies have this nation engaged in a breathtaking gesture of self sacrifice and generosity to outsiders. But look carefully, this policy is destroying the living standard and the political power of working class Americans. Dysfunction commonly masquerades as something it is not, and that is why it is so difficult to see what it really is. But you will know it by the result it produces. Number five. In dysfunctional families everyone is responsible for every one else's business, and no one is responsible for any business of his own. We call it a boundary problem, and it always produces chaos and paralysis. Environmentalists often describe population as a "global" problem with a "global solution" meaning no one in particular is responsible for any piece of it because we're all responsible for it -- therefore no one ends up being responsible for any of it. This is dysfunction masquerading as a high moral plane.

Some comments about race and my sixth point. Race is the problem that never seems to go away, and it is always shaping and affecting our thoughts in subtle ways. In l970 when Earth Day gave birth to the environmental movement and America's population growth was primarily driven by the fertility rate of anglo-european Americans, we had no trouble speaking openly about the need to reduce our numbers . According to Senator Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, stabilizing the population of the United States was one of our top environmental priorities in 1970. Within a few years our fertility rates had declined, and we were on the road to stabilization. But when immigration became the primary source of population growth in this country, the environmental movement grew timid about the need to reduce our own numbers. Today, there are more than 60 environmental organizations in Washington, and almost none of them is working to stabilize the population of this country. 90% of our immigrants are coming from non-European countries. If immigration were driven by Europeans, we would be having a straight forward national debate about numbers and their impact on our society, just as we did in l970. And why cant we do that now? Stabilizing our population benefits everyone who lives here regardless of their race or national origin.

The eerie silence of the environmental movement over the past fifteen years concerning population growth has been disastrous. Just as we ask today, what did Germans know, when did they know it, and what were they talking about when that holocaust was looming on their horizon, so our descendants will ask, what did we know about population growth over the past three decades and what were we talking about. This silence has been especially cruel for the continent of Africa. Despite dumping billions of dollars of aid into Africa by Western nations over the past three decades, the population doubling rate today is about 30 years and the per capita protein consumption is less than it was in l970. The population juggernaut in Africa has been carefully documented and widely known for decades we cannot plead ignorance. We deliberately chose to minimize the subject.

If you see someone you care about barreling toward a cliff at 100 miles an hours, wouldn't you want to wave every red flag you could find, wouldn't you be jumping up and down pointing to that cliff, and would you give a damm because some people told you to mind your own business? Western people were told that the fertility rate of Africans was none of our business. And we went mute. Had we been motivated purely by compassion, we might have protested and responded with conviction: No way. Stabilizing population is about child survival, and it has nothing to do with race . People may not want to hear it. But that is no reason to stop talking about it. People don't want to talk about women's rights in Pakistan, and that is not a reason to be quiet or to minimize the subject. As long as we are intimidated by the word "racist" or "elitist" and we are still trying to prove that we aren't, we are not really free to speak the truth, or to act from pure compassion. And the accusation of racism will not go away until we face it down.

Number 7. About ending poverty. Experience has shown us that the most successful anti-poverty programs are those directed at educating women, supporting local community organization, and micro-enterprise at the grass roots level. We call it community empowerment. In other words, the dead opposite of the current bi-national plan to end poverty in Mexico which is focused on building gambling casinos, luxurious tourist resorts, maquiladoras and promoting the migration of poor people into a rich country causing unrealistic expectations, chaos and disconnection for communities in both countries. This is a plan concocted by oligarchs on both sides of the border to their mutual advantage. We need to take back our country, and they need to take back theirs.

And finally. The difference between an internationalist and a globalist boils down to this: an internationalist feels deeply connected and responsible to a particular group of people and a particular piece of land. He is respectful and generous to others; he is not an isolationist. A globalist feels no particular connection to any piece of land or any group of people, and he mistakenly believes that he has arrived at a higher moral understanding.

A few final thoughts:

This country was founded by English colonists whose feet were firmly planted in the Age of Enlightenment. They did not set out to save the world. They simply wanted to design the game plan for a nation that would be stable and wisely self governed, based on the ideal that all men are created equal before the law. These English colonists were mindful of the choices before them and how those choices would affect future generations. George Washington used the word "posterity" nine times in one of his speeches, and after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his beloved wife Abigail, "I do not know what will be the outcome of this. We may pay a very high price. But it is certain that posterity will profit from our sacrifice." With our welfare in mind, these men wrote the most brilliant Constitution for self-government the world has ever known. And today, passages from this document are found in the constitutions of democratic governments all over the world. We have been the very fortunate beneficiaries of their wisdom and humility, and the world has been inspired and changed forever by their brilliance. And now the torch has passed to us. Our descendants will live with the choices we are making for them today. And without a doubt, the single most important and timely choice before us is how populous this nation will become. We must decide are we a family of people with an obligation to ourselves and our descendants to plan for the long term well being of our nation or are we simply a rapidly expanding global mass? A mass is not a family.

Sustainability will be achieved in pieces, and America is our piece. And this alone will be a breathtaking challenge. Like territorial animals in nature, order is established by marking the borders and dividing national responsibilities. We cannot handle our piece, if we have open borders, multiple agendas, and global missions. We disempower ourselves when we assume more than we can possibly handle.

Human beings will solve the problem of sustainability within groups. The solutions will vary - there will be no all-purpose Walmart solution. The history and the culture of each group, including our own, must be respected. We will not build sustainability by turning ourselves into a multilingual regional mass. In a mass we are too numerous and too diverse to have meaningful conversation. We have tough choices before us, and these choices will not be reduced to neat little slogans for mass consumption. Sustainability will require exceptionally thoughtful discussion and most important: group cohesion. If we destroy group cohesion, we destroy our ability to act intelligently.

The world will save itself, and it will happen much quicker when America is clearly focused on saving herself. We must build a sustainable future in this country, and set the example for others. Just as we gave the world the game plan for democracy by building it for ourselves, we have inspired the world with a civil rights movement, a woman's movement, an environmental movement, a human rights movement, a men's movement,- where else would you find that one? -a labor movement, and even the movement to end world hunger was created and funded by middle class people in Western countries, and not the educated elites from poor countries who currently flock to this nation for high paying jobs. Whenever Americans have changed themselves and acted on their own behalf, the world has taken note.

Polls show that large majorities of Americans already support greatly reduced levels of immigration, and this support increases as we go down the economic ladder. Over the past five years there have been multiple bills in Congress calling for reductions in immigration we have one in Congress right now all we need to do is pass it or we can continue to move toward open borders, spiraling population growth, spiraling consumption, turning ourselves into a vast "economic region" of migrating multi-lingual economic units, as globalists are promoting, and thereby completely destroying our cohesion as a group and the capacity to determine our future.

If mankind is like the frogs in the boiling water who slowly boil to death because they don't recognize what is happening to themselves, and if nature is not going to give us a wake up call in the form of some electrifying event, then we must supply that event ourselves. A substantial reduction in immigration is the wisest decision for ourselves, and it will have an electrifying effect on the rest of the world. It won't be popular with many. But it will remind the world that we are only one country among many, that running from the problems in your native land is no longer a solution, that the world, and even America, has limits. We do not have a plan for saving the world, and it is time we told people the truth. That illusion must end. The behavior, the thinking patterns, and the expectations of 6 billion people must radically change, and they must change very very soon. The trimtab is here.

Jonette Christian is a practicing family therapist, founder of Mainers for Immigration Reform, Maine, and has been an advisor to CAIRCO.

Copyright 2002 Jonette Christian. Reprinted with permission.

by Jim Motavalli,
E/The Environmental Magazine,
January/February, 2004

There's a minefield in the American environmental movement, and its name is population. Because negotiating that minefield is so dangerous, many environmental groups and leaders have stopped trying to cross it. But to ignore population as a central issue while talking freely about sprawl, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, agricultural land and animal habitat, global warming and many other crucial environmental issues is to deny reality.

Population and - in particular - immigration are never easy topics. At least in the U.S., population growth is closely tied to immigration. If you subtracted post-1990 immigration, the U.S. would have a population around 310 million in 2050; with current immigration, the Census Bureau says it could be 438 million. The population could double by 2100, with two-thirds of that growth attributed to immigration.

Some of the consequences of our rapid growth: With U.S. population growing by three million a year, we lose two acres of farmland every minute, according to the American Farmland Trust. Traffic congestion costs drivers $78 billion a year, says the Road Information Project. A serious water shortage is developing nationwide, with aquifers once considered inexhaustible drying up. Syndicated columnist Lou Dobbs argues that immigration-fueled population growth is putting a "heavy burden" on our abundant natural resources, and that at the present rate the U.S. won't be exporting food at all by 2025.

Some of these problems feed on each other. Population growth increases U.S. greenhouse gas production, which in turn makes existing crises more acute. For instance, one study suggests that most of the entire western United States - already severely water-challenged - could experience a 40 to 76 percent drop in precipitation levels because of climate change.
The U.S. experience is reflected internationally. From 6.3 billion people on the planet today, the United Nations projects 8.9 billion in 2050. (And that's just the middle of three possibilities; on the high end, the population could grow to 10.6 billion, while 7.4 billion is on the low end.) If fertility were to remain constant - which is not likely - the UN projects that the population of the world could actually double by 2050, to 12.8 billion.

We need a new understanding of the effects of population growth, because much of what passes for accepted wisdom on the subject is either wrong or only partly right. In many cases these commonly held notions grew out of political expediency - they're what we want to believe - so it's all the more necessary to subject them to an objective review. So here's a look at some myths, half-truths and truths, with all the shading in between:

Myth:
"World population, far from being a problem, is actually shrinking because of the global ‘birth dearth.'"

There is indeed a population shortfall trend developing in Western Europe, Russia and Japan (see "The Birth Dearth," Currents, September/October 2003). In Ireland, for instance, families have an average of 1.8 children today, slightly below replacement level. Couples in Italy, Germany and Spain have just 1.2 to 1.3 children each. The average fertility rate in Europe is 1.45. Both Russia and Japan are at 1.3.

But it's simply not true, as the conservative Center for Bio-Ethical Reform writes, that "the problem today is not overpopulation; it's under-population." The reason that isolated "birth dearths" don't produce lower numbers is the very rapid population increase in the world's least-developed countries. The population of the most heavily industrialized regions of the world grows at an annual rate of just .25 percent, reports the UN, compared to a rate of 1.46 percent - six times faster - in the less-developed countries.

We are currently adding 77 million people to the globe annually, with 21 percent of that increase coming from India, 12 percent from China and five percent from Pakistan. Three countries, Bangladesh, Nigeria and - surprise! - the United States each contribute four percent of the world's annual growth. Half of the projected increase will occur in just eight countries, seven of them in Africa and Asia. Population grows rapidly in the U.S., despite a near zero-growth fertility rate of 2.05 in 2002, because of the impact of immigrants and their descendants (who tend to have large families, according to the Census Bureau). Because of this, American population is growing as fast as in some of the more populous Third World countries.

The bottom line is that population in 30 developed countries (excluding the U.S.) will likely not grow much at all through 2050, but in the U.S. and the Third World it will rise steadily, to 7.7 billion or more.

Half-Truth:
"Sprawl and the rapid decline in open space are caused by bad development policies and our love of the automobile."

Obviously, the car is a major culprit in the sprawl phenomenon. America now has more automobiles than it has drivers, and the auto industry (in close consultation with the highway lobby) has been influencing, if not controlling, development policy since the end of World War II. Cheap mortgages courtesy of the GI Bill made suburbia possible. Each new subdivision claims open space.

The rush to the suburbs was also spurred by the urban riots of the 1960s, which emptied out inner cities. But population growth, plain and simple, is the 900-pound gorilla that gets ignored when "sprawl" is discussed.

The U.S. had 150 million people in 1950, when the suburbs were new. By 2000, just 50 years later, we had 275 million. Each year, says the organization Population-Environment Balance (PEB), we convert to human use an area the size of Delaware, including 400,000 acres of arable land.

We can, and should, get serious about "smart growth," "greenbelts," "New Urbanism," redevelopment "infill" and "land-use planning." But we can't solve the sprawl problem by simply moving people to high-density cities, even smartly managed urban centers like Portland, Oregon. "Ecological footprint" studies show that cities use the resources and waste disposal capacity of an area many times their size in the surrounding countryside. That's why New York's "garbage barge" became famous.

Immigration exacerbates sprawl because it is a primary contributor to population growth: A study by Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) concluded that immigration was responsible directly and indirectly for 98 percent of California's soaring population. The common perception is that immigration does not exacerbate sprawl, because new immigrants move to urban areas. But half the country's immigrants now live in suburbs, and only 24 percent of immigrant homebuyers settle in central cities.

Although some formerly industrial "rust belt" cities spread out even as they are losing population, the general rule is that sprawl accompanies population growth. On average, according to the Center for Immigration Studies report "Outsmarting Smart Growth," states that grew in population by more than 30 percent between 1982 and 1997 sprawled 46 percent. States that grew by 10 percent or less sprawled only 26 percent. Add 10,000 people to a state's population and you'll lose, on average, 1,600 acres of land to development.

Both True and False:
"Population isn't the problem; it's high western consumption rates and waste."

There is certainly a very solid basis for this argument. According to the TV documentary Affluenza, "Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world's population, in 1996 we used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its hazardous waste. The average North American consumes five times as much as an average Mexican, 10 times as much as an average Chinese and 30 times as much as the average person in India." It's obvious that reducing our sky-high western consumption rates would be a big help.

Without a doubt, high consumption rates and rapid population growth work together to degrade the environment, and both need to be addressed globally. Unfortunately, however, reducing consumption is very difficult to achieve on a national basis, and international momentum is toward emulating high American levels of it, not modeling Third World frugality. As William Ryerson pointed out in his "16 Myths About Population Growth," published by the Carrying Capacity Network, developing countries want cars, televisions and other signs of western prosperity. China, which is rapidly expanding its highway network and encouraging private car ownership, will likely surpass the U.S. as a global warming gas emitter by 2015.

The overall news is not good. The UN's panel on climate change projects that by 2025 developing countries could be emitting four times as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as they do today. What's true of CO2 is also true of other measures of consumption. The rapid Third World switch to a meat-based diet is one measure of the trend.

Dogma:
"Efforts to reduce fertility and population size in the Third World are anti-woman."

The most prominent spokesperson for this viewpoint is probably Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and a co-founder of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (CWPE). Population stabilization (which she calls "neo-Malthusianism") "is powerful in the U.S. because it resonates so well with domestic racism and sexism," she wrote in 1999. "Images of over-breeding single women of color on welfare and bare-breasted, always pregnant Third World women are two sides of the same nasty coin. And both groups, it is believed, are excellent candidates for social engineering. Insert Norplant, tie their tubes, put them to work in fast-food chains or sweat shops, and give them a little micro-credit and education if you're feeling generous."

Hartmann says in a message to E that "it's virtually impossible to detach the immigration debate from race." Her group, CWPE, "rejects the notion that population size and growth are primarily responsible for environmental degradation. This notion is created and spread by an alliance between the mainstream media, environmental organizations and population control advocates, especially in the United States."

Asked by New Statesman how she reconciles her pro-choice, anti-population control views, Hartmann responded, "A lot of people find this hard to understand. But for me, family planning is about human rights and women's health - not population control. It is about freeing women to have the number of children they want, not blaming them for a whole host of social problems." She believes that "family planning should be detached from population control," and its primary goal should be to "meet women's needs first."

While China has a coercive policy that legally restricts births and presents human rights challenges, Hartmann goes further and concludes that even voluntary programs are oppressive to women. But there is considerable evidence that women (and their children) are primary victims of overpopulation and, when asked, seek out family planning aid. According to the National Audubon Society's Patrick Burns, "Women started the family planning movement, lead the family planning movement, and buy almost all the contraception in the entire world. Why? Women want to have control over their lives and determine the number, timing and spacing of their children." William Ryerson of the Population Media Center adds, "Women who live in societies where they have power over their own lives tend to use family planning much more frequently than in countries where they are relatively powerless."

Although Hartmann and CWPE support "women's right to safe, voluntary birth control and abortion," they strongly oppose "demographically driven population policies." In other words, they're in favor of making contraception widely available, but against tying it to any national plan to address population growth. They decry not only China's coercive program, but also, because its stated aim is reducing population size, Iran's commendable grassroots effort to make birth control widely available, which has cut the growth rate in half. (The policy encourages women to wait three to four years between pregnancies, discourages childbearing for women younger than 18 or older than 35, and encourages three-child limits, which would certainly appear to be "demographically driven.")

Hartmann has energetically attacked what she sees as a nefarious cabal promoting anti-immigrant and anti-population growth attitudes in the U.S. ("the greening of hate," she calls it), but in fact the media treats the subject gingerly, if at all. Population activist Virginia Abernethy, a PEB board member and Vanderbilt University professor, offers this rejoinder, "In an interview with New Scientist [Feb. 2003], Betsy Hartmann attacks so many eminent scientists without good reason... that perhaps we should feel honored by all the attention."

Half-Truth:
"Education will greatly contribute to the reduction of fertility rates."

Education usually does produce smaller families, but there are exceptions. Tanzania had achieved 90 percent female literacy by the early 1990s, but parents in 2002 had an average of 5.3 children, more than double the replacement rate. A study by Charles Westoff of Princeton University's Office of Population Research found a strong relationship between education and family size in some countries, and a "weak or non-existent" connection in others.

Studies done for the Demographic and Health Surveys in the 1990s indicated that half of the women identified as having an "unmet need" for contraception would not use it even if it were available. Specific education about family planning could make a difference in this number, since "lack of knowledge" was the most frequently cited reason for not using birth control in a Kenyan survey. It's interesting to note that soap operas presenting birth control in a positive light led to increased contraceptive use and changed attitudes in India, Kenya and Mexico.

Obviously, cultural beliefs are not necessarily altered by educational attainment, and they play a big part in attitudes toward birth control. Religion might also be expected to play a large part, but it's plain that family planning is firmly embraced in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in the Catholic countries of Europe, which have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. But no matter how their congregants actually behave, some religious denominations, including Catholicism, some Islamic orders and the Southern Baptist Convention, continue to be strident voices against family planning. "The ban on artificial birth control is total and absolute," wrote the popular magazine The Catholic Answer.

Half-Truth:
"Population growth does not lead to hunger and starvation; it's an equitable distribution problem."

While it is undeniably true that the world currently produces enough food for our burgeoning population, and that it is uneven distribution that produces hunger, the long-term production outlook is ominous. Worldwatch reports that the growth in agricultural production has slowed steadily since the 1960s as populations soar, crops approach their biological maximum yield, arable land is lost and global fisheries crash. Genetic engineering, seen by some as a panacea for increasing yields, could actually backfire and make the situation even more desperate, reports Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.

While the raw numbers on global malnutrition are declining, in countries such as Haiti rapid population growth has led to an ongoing human rights crisis. Nearly 70 percent of all Haitians depend on subsistence agriculture in one of the most devastated environments on Earth, where only 30 percent of the land is suitable for cultivation. "In Haiti (fertility rate 4.3 in 2002), a substantial share of poverty is also traceable to rapid population growth pressing upon limited endowments of soils and clean water," says an American University report entitled "Deforestation in Haiti." It adds, "Deforestation and population growth, coupled with years of repression and colonial intervention has caused the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Haitians."

Haiti has the fourth most undernourished people on Earth, says the World Bank, and only 40 percent of its eight million people have access to fresh water. Haiti, then, has a population problem coupled with a political problem. International aid plus the dedicated work of foreign support groups such as Partners in Health are not able to compensate for a devastated environment supporting too many people.

Arguments that equitable distribution would feed the world, while possibly true, would have more weight if the world was actually moving in that direction. In fact, Tracy Kidder reports in The Nation that development aid to Haiti has actually declined by two-thirds since 1995.

Mia MacDonald of Worldwatch notes that a billion people are likely to be added to the Indian subcontinent in the next 50 years, at the same time the region faces a huge freshwater crisis. "One has to wonder whether it makes sense to spend scores of billions of dollars to revamp irrigation systems and build new dams, when so little money is invested in tackling the root of the problem - human population growth," she writes. Pakistan is likely to double its population, to 332 million, by 2050. The $11 billion it is spending on the Kalabagh Dam could double Pakistan's investment in family planning for the next 50 years.

Myth:
Contraceptive use is widely accepted, and U.S. aid is increasing availability.

As the Population Resource Center notes, "The amount of [population] growth in the developing world will depend largely on women's access to education and health care, especially family planning services." Since most population growth is in these countries, this is where the world's attention should be focused.

Family planning aid can lead to dramatic reductions in population growth, but unforeseen obstacles can also prevent that from happening. In Kenya, where the Catholic Church has led public condom burnings, there is 90 percent access to contraceptives but only a third of the population is using them, according to Kenya's own figures. A 1991 study indicated that only half the women characterized as having an "unmet need" would use condoms if they were available.

The 1994 UN conference on population and development defined access to reproductive and sexual health services as a human right. Unfortunately, that right is not being met. Although 60 percent of married women worldwide use contraception, only 10 percent of married women in sub-Saharan Africa do. The current "unmet need" for contraception averages 70 percent in Asia and Latin America. Around the world, 123 million women do not have adequate access to family planning.

The country most able to help is AWOL. The U.S. has traditionally been the largest source of family planning assistance, but under President Bush it has drastically changed course for political reasons. In the face of unprecedented demand, the Bush administration (which continues to simplistically link birth control with abortion) has cut funding dramatically for international family planning aid, and consistently attempts to eliminate all aid for the agency best able to guide global population policy, the United Nations Population Fund.

The Bush administration's policy will undoubtedly mean more abortions, not fewer. "Widespread family planning availability tends to reduce abortion rates, as has been well-documented in several recent studies," says Robert Engelman, vice president for research at Population Action International (PAI). "Family planning - and good reproductive health - can only contribute to making all pregnancies wanted pregnancies and reducing abortion rates," adds MacDonald.

According to the coalition Saving Women's Lives, the consensus reached during the 1990s at various UN conferences was that global spending for family planning should total $17 billion by 2000, and $18.5 billion by 2005. That's the goal. In reality, in 2000 donor countries actually provided only half of the $5.7 billion they pledged.

Quandary:

"Population growth can only be addressed globally. It's selfish to worry about immigration levels in the U.S."

It's unambiguously true that population growth is a global problem needing global solutions, but these are in woefully short supply. Groups such as Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) speak vaguely about solving global poverty to ease emigration pressures but are short on specifics. Although we definitely do need global solutions, the late Garrett Hardin pointed out that population policy is actually set on the national level, and it is therefore at the whim of localized cultural and religious norms.

Americans must address the full consequences of high immigration numbers in the U.S. As Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute has argued, high emigration may offer countries a "safety valve," allowing them to continue with high fertility rates. This situation can reverse itself, as in Ireland, where historically high fertility and record high emigration have been replaced with below-replacement level fertility and immigration surpassing emigration.

Another important fact is that immigrants quickly adopt the high consumption patterns of their host country, putting larger strains on natural resources. As the Journal of Housing Research notes, "The aggregate housing consumption of immigrants will rise substantially in the next 15 years as past waves of immigrants move up the housing consumption ladder." Energy use provides another dramatic example. Negative Population Growth reports that per-capita energy consumption barely rose between 1970 and 1990 because of energy-efficiency gains and conservation, but total U.S. energy use rose 36 percent - because of the larger, immigration-driven U.S. population.

False:
"Calls to reduce immigration are inherently racist."

Immigration is never an easy topic. Strictly speaking, immigration by itself may not lead to higher world population - it just moves people around. Immigrants have always been among the most scapegoated people in America. In 1855, the Chicago Tribune thundered, "Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?" Such sentiments were common even in the shadow of Ellis Island, as Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York makes clear.

The fear of alien hordes is still used to stir people up today. Alabama's Auburn Plainsman recently opined, "It is time to close the borders, because continued mass immigration will only persist to erode what is left of the West in America. If it continues, logically it follows that in a few generations Western civilization will be extirpated from America."

The key to this kind of demonizing is creating a dividing line between immigrants and "real" Americans. According to "nativist" writer Sam Francis, immigrants "just work here, or hang out, on welfare, dealing drugs, or doing whatever they do. But their real loyalties lie elsewhere, namely in the countries they came from." Americans for Immigration Control further warns, "Fewer than 15 percent of our immigrants come from Europe and share the heritage that made America strong." Groups like the American Patrol offer convenient one-click service for reporting illegal aliens.

Chris Simcox and his so-called Civil Homeland Defense Corps have actually patrolled the Mexican border looking for illegal immigrants to "humanely" repatriate. "We cannot let [the Mexicans] export their failures," Glenn Spencer of the Arizona-based American Border Patrol told the Los Angeles Times. "They are a threat to our entire culture." Commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan pronounced, "The Third Worldization of California is now far advanced."

Fear of being lumped in with groups like this has led many mainstream environmental organizations to avoid the population issue, and particularly immigration. But the fact remains that human population growth is a root cause of environmental degradation, and the U.S. population (fertility rate 2.05) would hardly be growing at all were it not for immigration. But the ethnicity and race of these immigrants doesn't matter at all - it's the numbers, plain and simple.

The loss of "immigrants of European origin" is used as a code phrase to avoid saying the obvious: that the new immigrants are primarily people of color. Writer Peter Brimelow, author of Alien Nation, says, "The U.S. population is going to be vastly larger, much more non-white and much less skilled than would otherwise be the case." It's not clear why the "non-white" part is important.

But it's absurd to postulate some kind of non-white conspiracy to take over America, as the alarmists do. It can't even be extrapolated that current black and Hispanic-American populations automatically support high immigration numbers. A commission created in 1990 by the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-TX), a celebrated civil rights activist, recommended that immigration be capped at 550,000, half its current amount. A Gallup poll in June of 2003 found that 44 percent of African-Americans think immigration should be decreased. A Wall Street Journal poll in 2000 discovered that 42 percent of Hispanics consider U.S. immigration "too open." The Hispanic USA Research Group found in 1993 that 89 percent of Hispanics strongly support an immediate moratorium on immigration.

Some of these attitudes stem from minority-based racism. Asian Week, a newsletter published by a Chinese-American organization, editorialized that even illegal Chinese immigration is good for society, while Latino immigrants are a burden even if they come here legally.

The major worry among all these respondents is job displacement. Barbara Jordan, in congressional testimony, said a major commission goal was "to reduce the magnet that jobs currently present for illegal immigration." A case in point is the hotel industry. In Los Angeles, for instance, a study shows that unionized native-born black janitors in the hotel industry have overwhelmingly been replaced by non-union laborers from Mexico and El Salvador, while pay dropped from $12 an hour to $3.35 an hour. According to the study, "Immigrants and Labor Standards: The Case of California Janitors," published in Labor Market Interdependence, most of the displaced workers failed to find new employment.

During the recent Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, union leader John Wilhelm thundered, "No human being is 'illegal.'" But does the presence of seven million illegal immigrants in the U.S. really support the poor and minority communities that are the top priority of the progressive coalition? "Immigration hurts first and worst our own poor, many of whom are minorities and established immigrants," says Michelle A. Fehler, coordinator of Population-Environment Balance. Interestingly, some of immigration's biggest supporters are business leaders who want to keep wages low.

Immigration supporters have been very successful in closing off discussion by playing the race card. Theresa Hayter, the British author of the book Open Borders, has stated, "Immigration controls are explicable only by racism," but the reality is far more complex than that blanket assertion.

Patrick Burns, director of the population and habitat program at the National Audubon Society, points out that "a tight American labor market would probably benefit everyone all over the world," because wages would rise in the U.S. and jobs now here would be exported to countries, including India, Mexico and Vietnam, that desperately need to put people to work.

It's one of the most polarizing issues of our time, so it's not surprising that population discussions usually end in shouting matches. But if we don't soon get a handle on this critical issue it may be too late, for the planet and for ourselves.

JIM MOTAVALLI is editor of E. CHRISTINA ZARRELLA provided invaluable research assistance for this article.

By Herschel Elliott and Richard D. Lamm

Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2002.

What if global warming is a reality, and expanding human activity is causing irreparable harm to the ecosystem? What if the demands of a growing human population and an expanding global economy are causing our oceans to warm up, our ice caps to melt, our supply of edible fish to decrease, our rain forests to disappear, our coral reefs to die, our soils to be eroded, our air and water to be polluted, and our weather to include a growing number of floods and droughts? What if it is sheer hubris to believe that our species can grow without limits? What if the finite nature of the earth's resources imposes limits on what human beings can morally do? What if our present moral code is ecologically unsustainable?

A widely cited article from the journal Science gives us one answer. Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) demonstrated that when natural resources are held in common -- freely available to everyone for the taking -- the incentives that normally direct human activity lead people to steadily increase their exploitation of the resources until they are inadequate to meet human needs. The exploiters generally do not intend to cause any harm; they are merely taking care of their own needs, or those of others in want. Nevertheless, the entire system moves inexorably to disaster. Everyone in the world shares in the resulting tragedy of the commons.

Today, our standard of living, our economic system, and the political stability of our planet all require the increasing use of energy and natural resources. In addition, much of our political, economic, and social thinking assumes a continuous expansion of economic activity, with little or no restraint on our use of resources. We all feel entitled to grow richer every year. Social justice requires an expanding pie to share with those who are less fortunate. Progress is growth; the economies of developed nations require steady increases in consumption.

What if such a scenario is unsustainable? What if we need an ethics for a finite world, an ethics of the commons?

It is not important that you agree with the premise. What is important is that you help debate the alternatives. An ethics of the commons would require a change in the criteria by which moral claims are justified.

You may believe that current rates of population growth and economic expansion can go on forever -- but debate with us what alternative ethical theories would arise if they cannot. Our thesis is that any ethical system is mistaken and immoral if its practice would cause an environmental collapse.

Many people assume that moral laws and principles are absolutely certain, that we can know the final moral truth. If moral knowledge is certain, then factual evidence is irrelevant, for it cannot limit or refute what is morally certain.

Our ethics and concepts of human rights have been formulated for a world of a priori reasoning and unchanging conclusions. Kant spoke for that absolutist ethical tradition when he argued that only knowledge that is absolutely certain can justify the slavish obedience that moral law demands. He thought he had found rational grounds to justify the universal and unchanging character of moral law. Moral knowledge, he concluded, is a priori and certain. It tells us, for example, that murder, lying, and stealing are wrong. The fact that those acts may sometimes seem to benefit someone cannot diminish the absolute certainty that they are wrong. Thus, for example, it is a contradiction to state that murder can sometimes be right, for, by its very nature, murder is wrong.

Many human rights are positive rights that involve the exploitation of resources. (Negative rights restrain governments and don't require resources. For example, governments shouldn't restrict our freedom of speech or tell us how to pray.) Wherever in the world a child is born, that child has all the inherent human rights -- including the right to have food, housing, and medical care, which others must provide. When positive rights are accorded equally to everyone, they first allow and then support constant growth, of both population and the exploitation of natural resources.

That leads to a pragmatic refutation of the belief that moral knowledge is certain and infallible. If a growing population faces a scarcity of resources, then an ethics of universal human rights with equality and justice for all will fail. Those who survive will inevitably live by a different ethics.

Once the resources necessary to satisfy all human needs become insufficient, our options will be bracketed by two extremes. One is to ration resources so that everyone may share the inadequate supplies equally and justly.

The other is to have people act like players in a game of musical chairs. In conditions of scarcity, there will be more people than chairs, so some people will be left standing when the music stops. Some -- the self-sacrificing altruists -- will refuse to take the food that others need, and so will perish. Others, however, will not play by the rules. Rejecting the ethics of a universal and unconditional moral law, they will fight to get the resources they and their children need to live.

Under neither extreme, nor all the options in between, does it make sense to analyze the problem through the lens of human rights. The flaw in an ethical system of universal human rights, unqualified moral obligations, and equal justice for all can be stated in its logically simplest form: If to try to live by those principles under conditions of scarcity causes it to be impossible to live at all, then the practice of that ethics will cease. Scarcity renders such formulations useless and ultimately causes such an ethics to become extinct.

We have described not a world that we want to see, but one that we fear might come to be. Humans cannot have a moral duty to deliver the impossible, or to supply something if the act of supplying it harms the ecosystem to the point where life on earth becomes unsustainable. Moral codes, no matter how logical and well reasoned, and human rights, no matter how compassionate, must make sense within the limitations of the ecosystem; we cannot disregard the factual consequences of our ethics. If acting morally compromises the ecosystem, then moral behavior must be rethought. Ethics cannot demand a level of resource use that the ecosystem cannot tolerate.

The consequences of human behavior change as the population grows. Most human activities have a point of moral reversal, before which they may cause great benefit and little harm, but after which they may cause so much harm as to overwhelm their benefits. Here are a few representative examples, the first of which is often cited when considering Garrett Hardin's writings:

• In a nearly empty lifeboat, rescuing a drowning shipwreck victim causes benefit: It saves the life of the victim, and it adds another person to help manage the boat. But in a lifeboat loaded to the gunwales, rescuing another victim makes the boat sink and causes only harm: Everyone drowns.
• When the number of cars on a road is small, traveling by private car is a great convenience to all. But as the cars multiply, a point of reversal occurs: The road now contains so many cars that such travel is inconvenient. The number of private cars may increase to the point where everyone comes to a halt. Thus, in some conditions, car travel benefits all. In other conditions, car travel makes it impossible for anyone to move. It can also pump so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that it alters the world's climate.
• Economic growth can be beneficial when land, fuel, water, and other needed resources are abundant. But it becomes harmful when those resources become scarce, or when exploitation causes ecological collapse. Every finite environment has a turning point, at which further economic growth would produce so much trash and pollution that it would change from producing benefit to causing harm. After that point is reached, additional growth only increases scarcity and decreases overall productivity. In conditions of scarcity, economic growth has a negative impact.
• Every environment is finite. Technology can extend but not eliminate limits. An acre of land can support only a few mature sugar maples; only so many radishes can grow in a five-foot row of dirt. Similar constraints operate in human affairs. When the population in any environment is small and natural resources plentiful, every additional person increases the welfare of all. As more and more people are added, they need increasingly to exploit the finite resources of the environment. At a certain point, the members of an increasing population become so crowded that they stop benefiting each other; by damaging the environment that supports everyone, by limiting the space available to each person, and by increasing the amount of waste and pollution, their activity begins to cause harm. That is, population growth changes from good to bad. And if the population continues to expand, its material demands may so severely damage the environment as to cause a tragedy of the commons -- the collapse of both environment and society.

Those cases illustrate the fact that many activities are right -- morally justified -- when only a limited number of people do them. The same activities become wrong -- immoral -- when populations increase, and more and more resources are exploited.

Few people seem to understand the nature of steady growth. Any rate of growth has a doubling time: the period of time it takes for a given quantity to double. It is a logical inevitability -- not a matter subject to debate -- that it takes only a relatively few doublings for even a small number to equal or exceed any finite quantity, even a large one.

One way to look at the impact of growth is to think of a resource that would last 100 years if people consumed it at a constant rate. If the rate of consumption increased 5 percent each year, the resource would last only 36 years. A supply adequate for 1,000 years at a constant rate would last 79 years at a 5-percent rate of growth; a 10,000-year supply would last only 125 years at the same rate. Just as no trees grow to the sky, no growth rate is ultimately sustainable.

Because the natural resources available for human use are finite, exponential growth will use them up in a relatively small number of doublings. The only possible questions are those of timing: When will the resources be too depleted to support the population? When will human society, which is now built on perpetual growth, fail?

The mathematics makes it clear: Any human activity that uses matter or energy must reach a steady state (or a periodic cycle of boom and bust, which over the long run is the same thing). If not, it inevitably will cease to exist. The moral of the story is obvious: Any system of economics or ethics that requires or even allows steady growth in the exploitation of resources is designed to collapse. It is a recipe for disaster.

It is self-deception for anyone to believe that historical evidence contradicts mathematical necessity. The fact that the food supply since the time of Malthus has increased faster than the human population does not refute Malthus's general thesis: that an increasing population must, at some time, need more food, water, and other vital resources than the finite earth or creative technology can supply in perpetuity. In other words, the finitude of the earth makes it inevitable that any behavior causing growth in population or in the use of resources -- including human moral, political, and economic behavior -- will sooner or later be constrained by scarcity.

Unlike current ethics, the ethics of the commons builds on the assumption of impending scarcity. Scarcity requires double-entry bookkeeping: Whenever someone gains goods or services that use matter or energy, someone else must lose matter or energy. If the starving people of a distant nation get food aid from the United States, then the United States loses that amount of food; it also loses the fertility of the soil that produced the food. To a point, that arrangement is appropriate and workable. Soon, however, helping one group of starving people may well mean that we cannot help others. Everything that a government does prevents it from doing something else. When you have to balance a budget, you can say yes to some important services only by saying no to others. Similarly, the ethics of the commons must rely on trade-offs, not rights. It must specify who or what gains, and who or what loses.

Indeed, in a finite world full of mutually dependent beings, you never can do just one thing. Every human activity that uses matter or energy pulls with it a tangled skein of unexpected consequences. Conditions of crowding and scarcity can cause moral acts to change from beneficial to harmful, or even disastrous; acts that once were moral can become immoral. We must constantly assess the complex of consequences, intended or not, to see if the overall benefit of seemingly moral acts outweighs their overall harm.

As Hardin suggested, the collapse of any common resource can be avoided only by limiting its use. The ethics of the commons builds on his idea that the best and most humane way of avoiding the tragedy of the commons is mutual constraint, mutually agreed on and mutually enforced.

Most important, the ethics of the commons must prevent a downward spiral to scarcity. One of its first principles is that the human population must reach and maintain a stable state -- a state in which population growth does not slowly but inexorably diminish the quality of, and even the prospect for, human life. Another principle is that human exploitation of natural resources must remain safely below the maximum levels that a healthy and resilient ecosystem can sustain. A third is the provision of a margin of safety that prevents natural disasters like storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions from causing unsupportable scarcity.

Not to limit human behavior in accordance with those principles would be not only myopic, but also ultimately a moral failure. To let excess human fertility or excess demand for material goods and services cause a shortage of natural resources is as immoral as theft and murder, and for the same reasons: They deprive others of their property, the fruits of their labors, their quality of life, or even their lives.

The ethics of the commons is a pragmatic ethics. It denies the illusion that human moral behavior occurs in a never-never land, where human rights and duties remain unchanging, and scarcity can never cancel moral duties. It does not allow a priori moral arguments to dictate behavior that must inevitably become extinct. It accepts the necessity of constraints on both production and reproduction. As we learn how best to protect the current and future health of the earth's ecosystems, the ethics of the commons can steadily make human life more worth living.

As populations increase and environments deteriorate, the moral laws that humans have relied on for so long can no longer solve the most pressing problems of the modern world. Human rights are an inadequate and inappropriate basis on which to distribute scarce resources, and we must propose and debate new ethical principles.

Herschel Elliott is an emeritus associate professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. Richard D. Lamm, a former governor of Colorado, is a university professor at the University of Denver and executive director of its Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues.

Reprinted with permission of the authors.

Population, immigration, and global ethics

A talk by Jonette Christian

This is the text of a speech given by Jonette Christian on October 9, 1999 at the Aspen Institute, Aspen Colorado, at the Myth of Sustainable Growth conference.

The United States was founded by a group of English colonists who thought long and deeply about the choices before them in the l8th century and how those choices would impact the lives of their descendants. George Washington used the word "posterity" nine times in one speech. Two centuries later, we are the very fortunate beneficiaries of their exceptional wisdom. Like our forefathers, we are gathered together today for posterity. The work we do... is mostly for future generations. In the midst of our enormous wealth many of us are troubled about the future and we have doubts about whether the direction we are headed will leave a nation to our descendants as beautiful as the one which was left to us.

Nations are like families. We need to have conversations about our affairs which are not altogether comfortable. For a "nation of immigrants" - and everyone of us is either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant - immigration policy has become a very touchy subject. We want everyone in the world to have the opportunity to live as well as we do. We are sensitive to the disparity in wealth between ourselves and others, and we are afraid that the racism which has plagued our history might be masquerading as immigration reform. And for all these reasons and others we avoid this discussion.

800 million people in our world do not have enough food to eat. Hundreds of millions would move here if they could but we are not an open house. The vast majority who deserve a better life will never be able to come here. The immigration debate, which we are not having, is about what level of immigration best serves the long term interests of this nation and the rest of the world. But even before we commence this conversation, we must decide - are we a family of people with an obligation to ourselves and our descendants to plan for the long term well being of our nation - thereby setting an example for the rest of the world, or are we simply a rapidly expanding international mass? A mass is not a family. Where are we going? And how will the way we think about ourselves impact our descendants and the rest of the world?

Last year, in a speech on immigration, President Clinton stated, "No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude over so short a time" . . . he went on to say, "Mark my words: Unless we handle this well, immigration of this sweep and scope can threaten the bonds of our union." - threaten the bonds of our union - a remarkable statement from our president, greeted by the press with virtual silence.

Post l970 immigrants and their descendants have added between 35 and 45 million people to America's population. (1) This is the equivalent of absorbing all of Central America in less than 30 years. If current immigration levels are not changed, then we will double our population in less than 70 years - and 90% of this growth will be due to recent immigrants and their descendants. These are the numbers from the US Census Bureau which account for Clinton' s sobering words. Can any of us imagine living in America when every city has double its present population, and is still growing? Double the traffic, double the number of houses, schools, prisons, etc? Is this the future we want to leave to our children? The America people were never asked if we wanted to bring this enormous growth upon ourselves and our families. We were never consulted.

Immigration levels are determined solely by Congress, and Congress is free at any moment to alter the number of immigrants. For example, the current level of immigration is about four times greater than we averaged through out most of this century. Immigration laws have usually been written in response to the demands of special interests who profit in some way from this policy. Their profit is extremely expensive for the rest of us. Many immigrants and recently naturalized citizens are using: Medicaid, SSI, Social Security, subsidized housing, fuel assistance, food stamps, TANF, bilingual education, subsidized legal aid, and earned income tax credits. The disparity between what immigrants pay into these programs and what they use in services runs into billions of dollars every year.

As a family therapist I work with that class of Americans who clean their own houses, who mow their own lawns, and who wash their own clothes - I see an overworked, overstressed sector of our society - in which two people must work long hours in order to provide a modest living for only two children. Adjusted for inflation, real average weekly earnings of working class Americans have dropped 20% since l973, as a function of the law of supply and demand in the labor market. The enormous costs of mass immigration is falling upon their shoulders. We should not be surprised if they become irritable and unsympathetic to the cause of bringing in millions and millions of outsiders. Advocates for illegal immigrants and mass immigration often use stirring words like "social justice" and "resisting oppression" and "building community" to justify their views. But building community begins with respect for your fellow citizens. They deserve to be consulted. Enthusiasm for embracing outsiders has made advocates for immigrants oblivious to the burdens they place upon their fellow countrymen - and this is no way to build community.

Discussion about where immigration policy is leading us is often dismissed with the remark, "Oh, but we're a nation of immigrants" - Human beings have been migrating for l0,000 years and every nation in the world was formed by migrants. We are a nation of immigrants and so is everyone else. But lets take a brief look at our history of immigration and the unadorned truth about what happened during this period.

In l870 American wages were 136% the wages of Europeans, and from this position of strength labor unions began to organize. (2) In response to the labor union movement, capitalists and factory owners decided to import European workers in order to expand the labor pool and flatten American wages. They began by advertising American jobs in Europe and paying steerage for those workers to come to America. What began as a trickle rapidly became a deluge when the disparity of wages was fully appreciated in Europe.

By the early l900's after decades of massive numbers of new workers, American wages had lost half the pay advantage relative to European wages. This period was known as The Great Wave, and many of us have ancestors who came during this period. Our cities were crowded with slum tenements; the middle class was shrinking; we had glaring disparities of poverty and wealth, and anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments were heard from many sectors of our population., including Black leadership. Blacks could see that immigration was destroying their chance at the good entry level jobs. Legislation to limit immigration was introduced yearly - and three times during this period, legislation controlling immigration was passed but vetoed by presidents whose sympathies lay with the wealthy who profited from cheap abundant labor. With the arrival of World War I, the flood was naturally stemmed and by this time the public demand to shut the door had reached such intensity that a series of laws were passed to restrict immigration. It was during this period from about l925 to l965 when we averaged no more than l78,000 immigrants a year that our newest citizens, who had arrived during the Great Wave, finally got their chance to enter the main stream. The labor shortage which resulted in higher wages for everyone, allowed unions to grow, and promoted a solid middle class. By l960 our feelings toward immigrants had completely changed - we elected the grandson of an Irish immigrant to the White House and for the first time, we began to describe ourselves as a "nation of immigrants". It was during this period of low immigration that American blacks got their first chance at middle class wages. Northern factory owners were now forced to recruit black workers from the South. In l940 22% of blacks had middle class incomes and by l970, 71% of blacks had incomes in the middle class. (3) These tremendous gains were mostly accomplished before the Civil Rights movement or affirmative action, and in the face of Jim Crow laws, and institutional racism.

Since l970 due to changes in our immigration laws we have received millions of new workers, and that number 71% has just slightly improved; 30% of Hispanics live below the poverty line, and on some Indian reservations, the unemployment rate is above 70%. These are stunning numbers when you consider the enormous wealth this country has created since l970 and the determined efforts we have made to rid ourselves of racism. Even so, nearly one third of our black population continues to struggle to get into the middle class, forced to compete with a flood of foreign workers. The unemployment rate for blacks and other minorities continues to be much higher than it is for whites today, and the absolute number of people living in poverty continues to grow.

According to Dr. George Borjas, Cuban immigrant and Harvard economist, our nation's leading scholar on the labor impact of immigration, (one of the authors of the National Academy of Sciences study on the economic impact of immigration) our current immigration policy results in a $160 billion dollar yearly transfer of wealth from unskilled workers into the hands of their employers due to the availability of immigrant labor. (4) In other words, our current immigration policy is making it increasing difficult for our most vulnerable populations - blacks, minorities, recent immigrants, and the poor to earn a living wage. Immigration on our current scale has been hugely profitable to certain sectors of our population, but never have we seen such disparity between rich and poor as we see in America today.

The benefits which massive immigration brings to immigrants and to their employers has been the exclusive focus of our media. We are presented with numerous human interest stories about the success of individual immigrant families who left dreadful circumstances, and we are often told, in glowing terms, about the booming prosperity and growth of diversity in our communities. We are told that more and more diversity is always good for us, and it has been virtually impossible to discuss any negative impacts. For instance, our media rarely mentions the enormous fiscal costs which immigration on this scale places upon receiving communities and the middle class who must fund the social services of rapidly growing immigrant colonies, predominately poor and with many children who require special education and bi lingual classes, nor the long term environmental impact of such massive population growth, nor the negative impact on jobs and wages for the working poor, nor the ethnic conflict which such rapid demographic change causes. We have characterized thoughtful discussion about the negative impacts of massive immigration as racist or xenophobic.

Many Americans feel that bringing in millions of mostly impoverished people from third world nations is a generous and ethical thing to do, a way to share the wealth. But this generosity is having unintended consequences which are very destructive to this country and to the rest of the world, and it does nothing to empower third world people to solve the problems in their native land. Saving people is not the same thing as empowering people to save themselves.

If we are motivated by true compassion for mankind, then it is time to step up to the plate - forego the empty humanitarian gesture of "saving" a handful of outsiders - and commit ourselves to a world in which all people are empowered to provide for their families. This is the future we want - so where do we begin to focus our attention?

Today there are 6 billion people on the planet and we are adding a billion more every 12 years. According to UN projections, world population will grow at least another 3 billion in the next century. We will leave to our descendants the awesome task of feeding, housing, educating, and employing at least 9 billion people and with far less farm land and less ground water than we have today. As this future descends upon our children, public silence about these numbers is deafening. We are responding like deer with headlights in our eyes-paralyzed, or else indifferent - and we would rather talk about almost anything else: urban sprawl, pollution, global warming, declining fish stocks, falling water tables, increasing energy consumption, over crowded schools, and ethnic cleansing, - anything to avoid blunt speech about population numbers. Speaking as a family therapist, this is the behavior of dysfunctional groups - they avoid conversation about the pink elephant in their living room at all costs, and they exhaust themselves in a flurry of helpful activity around peripheral matters. We have agitated, confused and deluded ourselves with the illusion that we are being overwhelmed by many, many problems - when in fact, we have primarily only one. But it is the one that terrifies us the most - and we handle that terror by chattering endlessly about everything else. Denying, obfuscating, and minimizing population growth in l999 is a hate crime against future generations - and it must end.

Polls show that Americans were better informed and more worried about population in l970 during Earth Day, than we are today. For 30 years the impact of population has been minimized and all but ignored.

Population is glibly dismissed today as a "global problem" requiring a "global solution.". It makes a good sound bite, but it is simply not true. According to the Population Institute, better than 95% of the world's growth comes from just 20 third world nations. (5) Population growth is driven by specific groups; it is not global. Regarding those mythical "global" solutions, they do not exist. Human beings live in groups. We define ourselves by our group, and we solve our problems in groups. We do not solve our problems in a mass. In a mass, we are too many and too diverse to have meaningful conversation with each other - and the problems are more complex than simply "respecting diversity" or "learning to share". Each country must put its own house in order. The kind of public debate that people need to have to stabilize their growth in a country like Pakistan will not be the same as the conversation in a country like Guatemala or the United States. But we cannot stabilize world population when cultures with astronomical growth are permitted. to send their citizens into countries with stable fertility rates.

We often hear that population is just a "symptom" and that the real problems are poverty and economic injustice. This is the reasoning that caused us to minimize the importance of population growth over the past 30 years and to focus our efforts instead on correcting the disparity between haves and have-nots. But our results are not encouraging. For example, western nations have poured massive aid into Africa over the previous 3 decades, and today the per capita protein consumption is less than it was in l970 and the population doubling rate is 28 years. By contrast, China, during the same period and with virtually no Western aid at all, dramatically ended hunger, lowered infant mortality rates, increased life expectancy and delivered basic education and health care to 1.2 billion people. China - in contrast to most third world countries - isolated herself from the West, confronted her situation, and forged solutions which were acceptable within her culture.

Western involvement in other people's problems has not been notoriously successful, even when we meant to be generous. Many experts are now conceding that we gravely misunderstood the fundamental cause of third world poverty.

Poverty, overpopulation, slavery and high infant mortality rates pervade societies in which women and children have few rights. These societies are patriarchal, rigid, organized around tribal and ethnic loyalties, and lacking democratic values. How you treat women and children is not a minor consideration - it affects every aspect of a society . According to the Christian Science Monitor, l00 million children have been sold into slavery or prostitution mostly by their own relatives and many have been maimed in order to make them more pitiful when they beg. We are often told that people have large families in order to solve the problem of poverty in their old age simply because they are poor. There is another possibility. When selling your children or maiming them is never an acceptable option to begin with, then you are forced to arrive at other solutions long before you come to the point of desperation - you must think differently and every choice that society makes all along the way for generations will be affected by this fundamental value. Not all poor people choose to solve their poverty by having many children. Overpopulation is a sorry excuse for the collective failure to plan for the well being of ones descendants - having children is not the same thing as valuing children.

In l945 Japan was a basket case - a third world economy by any definition of poverty - bankrupt, humiliated, suffering a famine. Yet this tiny densely populated island, with few natural resources and no oil, stunned the world in just 25 years with an economic miracle which left us breathless and which seemed to defy reason. Today Japan is the second largest economy in the world. What many people do no realize is that this miracle began in part with a mutual decision by the Japanese people to have smaller families. In the late 40's the Japanese realized that in order to compete with the West they would need to produce a generation of Japanese with superior health and a superior education. In order to maximize their limited post war resources, they would need to have a much smaller number of children. The media openly discussed this matter and Japanese fertility rates took a dramatic decline. Today, Japanese children are the healthiest and best educated children in the world, and the Japanese population is expected to shrink dramatically in the next century, which is a great gift to the world from a nation of high consuming people.

In Japan we see the difference between a society which confronts poverty by seeking to improve conditions for their children, as opposed to a society that uses their children to solve their poverty. The difference is in the value placed on children - and that is the difference that makes all the difference in the world.

When I was growing up back in the l960's, a paper mill near our town was polluting our air. A group of concerned women in our community organized themselves and began to demand that the company put scrubbers on those smoke stacks. Some people were annoyed by these uppity women who went house to house stirring up public debate. But they kept at it, and the scrubbers were eventually installed. We know that if you let things slide, the problems just accumulate - and there's no one to save us, but ourselves. And we raise our children with this conviction. In nations with predominately western cultures this is a common story. Our country was founded by people who took action to solve their problems, who questioned the prevailing beliefs, - as we are today in this conference - activism runs in our blood and in our history, and even in our marriages, men and women are having conversations with each other which would not be tolerated in other cultures. We have endless petition drives, referendums, concerned citizen groups, talk shows, and neighborhood coalitions. We don't expect government - even when freely elected - to solve our problems without our continual involvement. And we know that all of us are responsible for the common welfare. Largely due to this work , these traditions and these attitudes which distinguish our unique cultural heritage, we have the prosperity, the social justice, and the democracy which accounts for our amazing success.

I never really appreciated this remarkable quality about us until I experienced a Latin culture. For three generations, my family have been friends with a middle class family of well educated Mexicans - and we have exchanged children over the summers. On a recent visit I noticed that the river which used to run through their city with many bridges over it had completely disappeared. No one seemed to know or to care what had happened to their river. They simply weren't interested. I was astonished. Can you imagine that any American community would allow a whole river to simply disappear - with so little interest from the people? Are we surprised that Mexicans are now sending their people to find employment throughout America? A culture which allows a river to disappear might just as easily find itself without jobs for their children. The wealthy and the educated who might have been organizing an environmental movement in Mexico , who might have been organizing a war on poverty or political corruption, or a conference like this one which challenges the prevailing doctrines on growth have instead decided to promote the migration of their many poor and uneducated citizens into American communities. And are we truly a good neighbor by collaborating with this solution? In l940 Mexico had a population of only 19 million. Today her population is l00 million, not including the millions which have already immigrated to America. The population doubling rate is just 32 years. The poverty, environmental degradation, and human suffering which this astronomical growth produces was not caused by American racism, social injustice, capitalism, or even corporate greed - but far more common human failings: procrastination, denial, and the failure of an entire culture to examine itself and make changes.

Culture is fundamental in understanding poverty and high growth. Authoritarian cultures, not surprisingly produce authoritarian governments, and these nations are especially vulnerable to economic domination from outsiders. For instance, multinational corporations can obtain unfair advantages in a country like Guatemala, which would never be tolerated in a country like Denmark. The ruling elites of Latin America have had little interest in protecting the welfare of their own people. But the problem lies within the culture. In Latin societies there is no code of conduct that calls for social responsibility or citizen activism outside of the family. Consequently, very few political leaders in Latin America leave office without amassing tremendous wealth for themselves and their relatives. Latin presidents do not turn to their people and say, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Patriotism of this order is sadly missing. Political corruption, nepotism and petty thievery pervade these nations, and there is barely a whisper of protest from the people. The awesome price for generations and generations of citizen passivity and neglect for the common welfare is painful indeed.

It is not an accident that America has given the world the game plan for modern democracy and the example of a culture which continually works to improve itself: a labor movement, a woman's movement, a civil rights movement, an environmental movement, a war on poverty, an anti - war movement, a human rights movement, and a men's movement - where else would you find Promise Keepers and a Million Man March - even the clean clothes campaign and the movement to end world hunger did not begin with the educated elites in poor nations, who currently flock to America for high paying jobs, but with middle class western people who were moved by the plight of desperate suffering in third world nations and who funded the many organizations working on these causes. We are a culture that is continually examining ourselves and making changes, setting new standards for human rights for the whole world, and inviting everyone to participate in this work.

In my state of Maine we have teenagers who go house to house with the Maine People's Alliance, lobbying for health care, environmental protection, and campaign finance reform. My daughter worked for the Alliance when she was l8 years old, canvassing the state of Maine with a group of youth all of whom were under the age of 25. The result is that Maine has one of the best campaign finance laws in the country. She discussed these issues with the heads of the households, many of whom were men 2 and 3 times her age. Can you imagine that an 18 year old girl in El Salvador or Pakistan would be given the right to do this work? And what difference does it make to a nation when the intelligence of a young woman is treated with respect? These differences in the way we treat each other - the way we treat women and children, have enormous bearing on the outcome of a society.

From that remarkable group of English colonists who founded this nation, we inherited a tradition of citizen activism and social responsibility that has formed one of the most creative and tolerant societies in the world - and it is not surprising that we have also produced phenomenal wealth. Immigrants from many cultures have come here and been able to create wealth which they could not create in their native land. Our culture has produced one of the most successful systems in the world for generating economic and social opportunity. But our capacity to create wealth is not our most significant gift to the world, and it is not the most important statement about who we are as a people. Without discounting the greed of multinational companies and the past errors of our foreign policy, third world poverty is not caused by Western success. Rather it is culture - the way people treat each other in a group that determines stability and well being above all other factors.

Despite falling birth rates, the current population doubling rate in El Salvador is 30 years, the Philippines is 31 years, India is 37 years., and Pakistan is 25 years. (6) For 4 decades America has been lecturing other countries about stabilizing their population, but we have never been willing to do so ourselves. We are long overdue. We consume more natural resources and produce more pollution on a per capita basis than any nation in the world, and the failure to stabilize our population is unethical and hugely destructive to this planet. In order to stabilize our population we must lower immigration because immigration is the predominant cause of our growth today. Talking about restricting immigration in America is about as controversial as talking about women's rights in Pakistan. But America and Pakistan need to have these uncomfortable political debates if either country is ever going to stabilize its growth.

Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans across all class and ethnic lines want immigration drastically reduced. 73% of blacks want it brought below 300,000 a year , according to the latest Roper Poll and according to the Hispanic USA Research Survey Group - 89% of Hispanic Americans strongly support an immediate moratorium on immigration. But Congress remains indifferent to these sentiments - and our government continues to force us to accept millions and millions of new citizens. Our media colludes with this policy by minimizing impartial debate and withholding an enormous amount of information about what is happening to this nation due to our immigration laws. Let us ask some questions about the ethics of what we do.

What are the ethical implications of forcing a nation to tolerate immigration on a scale that is not wanted by the overwhelming majority? Will this policy promote civic cohesion or tolerance for our ethnic differences? Are we confident that we can overcome negative feelings by simply introducing more programs which "teach tolerance" or more conversations about racism? And how long do we plan for this massive immigration to continue?

America exports $40 billion dollars in grain to countries who cannot feed themselves. If our growth continues at the current rate, then we will require every bit of grain produced in this country for our own people within 20 years. (7) What are the ethical implications of allowing our population to grow beyond the point that we can share food with others?

America is 4.7% of the worlds population, but we consume 23% of the natural resources and produce 23% of the pollution that is destroying the biosphere. (8) In l950 our entire economy might have run on domestic supplies of oil. By allowing our population to expand, we are now required to import 60% of our petroleum and we must invest billions in defense - largely to protect our access to foreign resources. As we grow more populous - we grow more aggressive and more vulnerable - and we consume a much bigger share of the world's wealth.

Even at our present population , we are using our ground water for irrigating our crop lands faster than the rate of repletion in 21 % of our aquifers. (8) What are the ethical implications of pursuing growth policies now which leave our grandchildren with insufficient ground water?

What are the implications of allowing countries with authoritarian governments, dominated by wealthy elites, like the Philippines and Mexico, to send their poor into American labor markets? Would Americans tolerate the idea of sending our welfare recipients into Canada as a way of unburdening ourselves of responsibility for our poorest citizens?

Increasing numbers of well educated immigrants are forsaking the problems in their native land in order to earn American wages. What are the ethical implications when we rob poor countries of their most talented citizens? These are the people most capable of solving the problems in their native land. Where would South Africa be if Nelson Mandela had decided to cut and run ?

For the first time in this century we are seeing increasing disparity between rich and poor, and massive immigration is largely responsible. Do we have an obligation to protect the living standard of unskilled workers in this country, or are we going to require them to compete with third world wages? And if we decide not to protect our workers, then who are we as a nation and what are the values we stand for?.

The world grew by 78 million people last year, most of it coming from impoverished and overpopulated countries. We took in l.4 million immigrants - legal and illegal. In terms of saving people, it was a trifle - a little something to alleviate our western guilt which accomplished nothing for most of the world. The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a very dangerous piece of folly. Ultimately the world must save itself, and it is a cruel hoax to promote the fantasy that we will take in the world's huddled masses, because we won't and we can't.

We all long for a world in which every child born has the chance to flourish. What are the choices we need to make which will move the world in that direction? We must consider those choices very carefully. Saving people is not the same thing as empowering people to save themselves. If we fail to see this distinction, then we may cause enormous chaos. There is nothing more powerful than putting our own house in order, stabilizing our population, lowering our consumption, planning for the welfare of our descendants, and setting an example of enlightened self government for the world.

References

(1) Beck, Roy; The Case Against Immigration
(2) Beck, Roy; page 44 - Hatton, Timothy Migration and the International Labor Market (3) 1850-1939.
(3) Beck, Roy; page 157.
(4) Borjas, Georg; Heaven's Door; l999.
(5) The Population Institute.
(6) "World Population Data Sheet", published by the Population Reference Bureau.
(7) Pimentel David; Cornell University, Food, Energy, and Society,
How Many Americans Can the Earth Support?,
Impact of Population Growth on Food Supplies and the Environment,
U.S. Food Production Threatened by Rapid Population Growth by David and Marcia Pimentel, 1997, Cornell University.
(8) Imperiled Waters, Impoverished Future: The Decline of Freshwater Ecosystems, Abramovitz, Janet; World Watch papers; March, l996.

Jonette Christian is a practicing family therapist, founder of Mainers for Immigration Reform, Maine, and has been an advisor to CAIRCO.

Copyright 1999 Jonette Christian. Reprinted with permission.

By Donella H. Meadows

"We need to bring in business to bring down taxes. This development will give us jobs. Environmental protection will hurt the economy. Growth is good for us."

If we've heard those arguments once, we've heard them a thousand times, stated with utmost certainty and without slightest evidence. That's because there is no evidence. Or rather, there is plenty of evidence, most of which disproves deeply held pro-growth beliefs.

Here is a short summary of some of the evidence. For more, see Eben Fodor's new book Better, Not Bigger which lists and debunks the following Twelve Big Myths of Growth.

Myth 1: Growth provides needed tax revenues. Check out the tax rates of cities larger than yours. There are a few exceptions but the general rule is: the larger the city, the higher the taxes. That's because development requires water, sewage treatment, road maintenance, police and fire protection, garbage pickup-a host of public services. Almost never do the new taxes cover the new costs. Fodor says: "The bottom line on urban growth is that it rarely pays its own way."

Myth 2: We have to grow to provide jobs. But there's no guarantee that new jobs will go to local folks. In fact they rarely do. If you compare the 25 fastest growing cities in the U.S. to the 25 slowest growing, you find no significant difference in unemployment rates. Says Fodor: "Creating more local jobs ends up attracting more people, who require more jobs." And services.

Myth 3: We must stimulate and subsidize business growth to have good jobs. A "good business climate" is one with little regulation, low business taxes, and various public subsidies to business. A study of areas with good and bad business climates (as ranked by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the business press) showed that states with the best business ratings actually have lower growth in per capita incomes than those with the worst. Fodor: "This surprising outcome may be due to the emphasis placed by good-business-climate states on investing resources in businesses rather than directly in people."

Myth 4: If we try to limit growth, housing prices will shoot up. Sounds logical, but it isn't so. A 1992 study of 14 California cities, half with strong growth controls, half with none, showed no difference in average housing prices. Some of the cities with strong growth controls had the most affordable housing, because they had active low-cost housing programs. Fodor says the important factor in housing affordability is not so much house cost as income level, so development that provides mainly low-paying retail jobs makes housing unaffordable.

Myth 5: Environmental protection hurts the economy. According to a Bank of America study the economies of states with high environmental standards grew consistently faster than those with weak regulations. The Institute of Southern Studies ranked all states according to 20 indicators of economic prosperity (gold) and environmental health (green) and found that they rise and fall together. Vermont ranked 3rd on the gold scale and first on the green; Louisiana ranked 50th on both.

Myth 6: Growth is inevitable. There are constitutional limits to the ability of any community to put walls around itself. But dozens of municipalities have capped their population size or rate of growth by legal regulations based on real environmental limits and the real costs of growth to the community.

Myth 7: If you don't like growth, you're a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) or an ANTI (against everything) or a gangplank-puller (right after you get aboard). These accusations are meant more to shut people up than to examine their real motives. Says Fodor: "A NIMBY is more likely to be someone who cares enough about the future of his or her community to get out and protect it."

Myth 8: Most people don't support environmental protection. Polls and surveys have disproved this belief for decades; Fodor cites examples from Oregon, Los Angeles, Colorado, and the U.S. as a whole. The fraction of respondents who say environmental quality is more important than further economic growth almost always tops 70 percent.

Myth 9: We have to grow or die. This statement is tossed around lightly and often, but if you hold it still and look at it, you wonder what it means. Fodor points out, quoting several economic studies, that many kinds of growth cost more than the benefits they bring. So the more growth, the poorer we get. That kind of growth will kill us.

Myth 10: Vacant land is just going to waste. Studies from all over show that open land pays far more - often twice as much - in property taxes than it costs in services. Cows don't put their kids in school; trees don't put potholes in the roads. Open land absorbs floods, recharges aquifers, cleans the air, harbors wildlife, and measurably increases the value of property nearby. We should value and pay for it to be there.

Myth 11: Beauty is no basis for policy. One of the saddest things about municipal meetings is their tendency to trivialize people who complain that a proposed development will be ugly. Dollars are not necessarily more real or important than beauty. In fact beauty can translate directly into dollars. For starters, undeveloped surroundings can add $100,000 to the price of a home.

Myth 12: Environmentalists are just another special interest. A developer who will directly profit from a project is a special interest. A citizen with no financial stake is fighting for the public interest, the long term, the good of the whole community.

Maybe one reason these myths are proclaimed so often and loudly is that they are so obviously doubtful. The only reason to keep repeating something over and over is to keep others from thinking about it. You don't have to keep telling people that the sun rises in the east.

Donella H. Meadows was Director of the Sustainability Institute and Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College.

From Population Press, March/April 1999, pp. 12-13.

By George Putnam, Newsmax.com, July 8, 2005

It is this reporter's opinion that to be eligible for naturalization, an applicant must be required to read, write and speak basic English. This requirement has more or less fallen by the wayside, yet every poll I have seen reveals that between 80 percent and 90 percent of those polled vote for that requirement.

And why not? When people move to America from other parts of the world, they adopt America's culture and heritage. Why not the language also? Experts on the subject agree. S.I. Hayakawa has said, "A common language is the glue that holds a people and a nation together."

Michael Savage, when asked what keeps us united, answered, "Our common English language." And he emphasizes on every program: "Borders, Language, Culture."

Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm has said: "A nation is much more. It is a state of mind, a shared vision, a recognition that we are all in this together. A nation needs a common language as it needs a common currency."

The scholar Seymour Lipset has said, "The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate point to histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy." As example: Canada, Belgium, Malaysia and Lebanon.

And here in America, California witnesses daily the cracks breaking apart, with 33 million Mexicans imposing their culture and their need to speak Spanish.

Is it any wonder that people like Terry Graham, an American citizen brutally assaulted last year by a Mexican national at an immigration forum held in Denver, shouts, "BANISH SPANISH!" Terry, like many Americans, says she is sick and tired of being force-fed in Spanish – being 'Hispanified' and 'Latinized.' In short, she is tired of pressing '1' for English.

As Gov. Lamm puts it, "The invaders are attempting to turn America into a bilingual, multilingual and bicultural country. We are adding a second underclass – unassimilated, undereducated and antagonistic – to our population."

Lamm cites the ancient Greeks, who believed they belonged to the same race, possessed a common language and literature, worshipped the same gods, yet these bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions. Greece fell because it put the emphasis on the "PLURIBUS" instead of the "UNUM."...

Learning the English language is, without a doubt, the first step in assimilation into our American culture. If we lose our single language, it is sure to create confusion, conflict, separation and, God forbid, violence. We must force our school system to teach English as the national language. We cannot continue to permit schools to teach bilingual courses.

President Teddy Roosevelt, in 1915, said it best: "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."

And again in 1918, he said: "There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing more." Teddy had it right.

In order to be eligible for citizenship, you've got to read, write and speak English.

Read the complete article.

In early October of 2002, Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, without debate and public comment, ordered various City and County departments to accept the Mexican matricula consular ID card as valid identification. The Denver-based Mexican consulate had already issued 8,000 of the $29 cards between June and October, amounting to one every five minutes during normal office hours.

U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, said, "The only people who benefit from having such an ID are those who have come illegally and have broken our laws. It is ludicrous to believe that this method is a legitimate way of proving identity. Frankly, it's a complete farce, and it's far too risky for our city government to be accepting such flimsy identification cards during a time when our nation is vulnerable to future terrorist attacks."

Mayor Webb asserted the Mexican consulate imposes a "high degree of proof of identification" to issue the card. Mayor Webb also said, "The nice thing about having the card that's given out by the Mexican consulate is you have a way to determine which ones (Mexicans) are here legally, because they're the ones who get the card, the others do not." Nothing could be more deceiving. (See the guest opinion Lo, the emperor's Mexican ID card).

CAIR's Mike McGarry remarked in a November 22, 2002 Denver Post story: "Who would have a Matricula card? By definition, they are almost all going to be illegal aliens. The mayor is asking us to give full faith and credit to an amazingly corrupt government. It's absurd that we would put our security and our document integrity in their hands. These are phony, sham cards."

Colorado activity against the Matricula Consular ID card

1. CAIR (CAIRCO) took the following actions:
   • On October 31, 2002, CAIR hand-delivered a letter of intent to Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. For more information, see:
      
     Press release, October 31, 2002.
      
     Open records request to the City and County of Denver.
      
     CAIR Letter to U.S. Attorney.
      
     Notification of INS regarding enforcement of clear violations of U.S. immigration law in a Denver-based hiring hall.
   • An independent group of citizens in Boulder took action against that city's possible action to accept matricula consular ID cards.
      
     A letter of objection was filed with the Mayor and City Council of Boulder, Colorado at the November 19, 2002 City Council meeting, stating "Your actions may possibly put you, and elected and appointed officials, and public servants, in legal jeopardy both personally and professionally."
      
     A substantial letter of objection was filed with the Denver INS Director and Denver U.S. Attorney asking for an investigation of the City and County of Boulder's acceptance of the Mexican ID card and other activities.
      
     In addition, the letter was filed with the city's liability insurance company, since it is likely that the city's policy does not cover personal liability arising from accepting the matricula consular ID card.
      
     An open records request was filed on January 16, 2003.
2. Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement (FILE), based in Washington, DC, wrote letters to numerous City and County and other municipalities throughout Colorado, insisting that they stop accepting the matricula consular card.
    
   Increasing use of the card amounts to a "stealth amnesty" for illegal aliens, and that local governments are essentially determining immigration policy, which is in fact under constitutional jurisdiction of the federal government.
    
   FILE was instrumental the effort to initiate Colorado HB-1224, which was signed into law in May, 2003 - see below.
    
3. Colorado Representative Don Lee and Senator John Andrews announced their sponsorship of a bill (The Colorado Secure and Verifiable Identity Document Act) that would make illegal the accepting of the Mexican matricula consular ID card and other "unsecured" IDs. See CAIR's press release.
    
   The bill was amended by the Senate and iterated through a House-Senate Conference Committee to develop final wording. See CAIR's letter to Senator Andrews and Representative Lee, co-sponsors of the bill, regarding the amendment.
    
   This bill was signed into law on May 22, 2003. To view the history of the bill, go to the Colorado Government legislative information site and enter "1224" as the bill number. (A new browser window will open).
    
   See testimony by CAIR co-director Fred Elbel and testimony by CAIR spokesperson Marlene Guerrero. Also see former Governor Dick Lamm's letter of support for HB-1224.
4. On January 30, 2003, Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) introduced H.R. 502 - legislation requiring that identification used to obtain federal public benefits or services, including law enforcement services, meet restrictions ensuring that it is secure and verifiable. This bill would prohibit any federal agency, commission, or other entity within any branch of the federal government from accepting, recognizing, or relying on any identification document not issued by a federal or state authority or issued without verification by a federal law enforcement, intelligence, or homeland security agency. (See this article for more information).
5. The General Services Administration has suspended recognition of identification cards issued by the Mexican government to its nationals in this country. (See this article for more information).

Video of matricula ID card debate

On January 8 & 9, 2003, CAIR proudly cosponsored syndicated columnist and investigative journalist, Michelle Malkin in various appearances including a public debate and discussion: The Mexican "matricula consular" ID card: Safe or Sorry?.
CAIR produced a video tape of this lively, informative and very timely debate. We encourage you to order the debate video and get it as much exposure as possible, including showing it to elected officials!

We distributed the video to public access television stations throughout Colorado. If you would like a professional quality format of this video for broadcast, please contact us.

Excerpt of testimony given by CAIR co-director Fred Elbel

Talking points from testimony given to Colorado House IT Committee on HB 1224 on February 10, 2003

• The Mexican matricula consular ID card is a complete farce. It's issued by a corrupt government sneaking around behind closed doors to get our cities to accept the card - without citizen input.
• It's a back door attempt at a stealth amnesty. Roberto Rodriguez Hernandez, director of the Mexican card program was quoted as saying "It's necessary to push the need for an amnesty at all levels."
• This card is not a secure document. The Denver Mexican consulate has issued cards at the rate of one every five minutes. The documents upon which the card depends - including a Mexican birth certificate - are about as easy to forge as homework.
• Only illegals need this card. Nearly one million cards were issued last year and more than 42,000 Mexicans in Colorado now have cards.
• Mexican President Fox couldn't get new amnesties after September 11, so he began lobbying U.S. cities and banks to accept the cards.
• No major bank in Mexico accepts the card to open an account. And the cards are recognized as IDs in only 10 of Mexico's 32 states and districts.
• Now, Guatemala, Honduras, Poland, Peru and El Salvador, aware of Mexico's success, have begun or are considering issuing cards of their own.
• Insurance companies probably won't cover liability associated with the card. So if a city accepts the card and a citizen is injured by an illegal alien, the citizen could likely sue individual city council members.
• The author of a new Center for Immigration Studies report IDs for Illegals stated: "Mexico's marketing of its consular cards is a direct challenge to U.S. sovereignty."
• "The matricula card is making the Mexican consular office one of the largest vendors of fraudulent document documents in the country. No politician or professional law enforcement officer faithful to his or her oath of office would promote or condone acceptance of the matricula as a form of officially sanctioned identification." - Federation for American Immigration Reform's Law Enforcement Advisory Council Jim Dorcy, a 30-year veteran of the Border Patrol, INS, Department of Justice Inspector General's Office, and expert in fraudulent documents and government ethics.
• It's absurd that we would put our security and our document integrity in the hands of a foreign government.
• The FBI and the Justice Department testified in the U.S. Congress that accepting the matricula card and similar IDs posed a dangerous threat because they are issued on the strength of unsecured documents and because of the absence of verifiability.
• Jorge Castaneda, the former Foreign Minister of Mexico, testified before a Senate Committee on July 13, 2005 that Mexico cannot verify the true identities of people to whom it has issued Matricula consular ID documents.

Additional Matricular Consular ID information

See CAIRCO's catalog of articles on the matricula card - these contain useful background information.

Also see these two articles border security issues: Afghanistan Illegal Surfaces Locally and 'Arab terrorists' crossing border.

See the new Center for Immigration Studies report IDs for Illegals - Mexico's Matricula Consular Facilitates Illegal Immigration.

A December, 2002 Denver Channel 7 poll shows that out of 3271 voters, 87% think the city of Denver should not recognize Mexican ID cards for legal, and illegal, aliens as legitimate identification.

Article: Abolishing America (contd.): Mexico Ceded Right To Say Whom U.S. Can Deport, By Allan Wall, on the very informative VDARE website.

Issue brief: The Mexican Matricula Consular Should Not Be Accepted for Official Purposes, by FAIR.

Mexi-Sham ID FAQ from American Patrol website.

Good background information on Immigration and the Law.

Consular ID Cards in a Post-9/11 World - Testimony of Steve McCraw, Assistant Director of The Office of Intelligence, FBI Before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims on Consular ID Cards, June 26, 2003

Matricula toolkit for activists in other states

We have been quite successful in opposing the efforts of the Mexican government to influence Colorado cities and municipalities. We have put together an activist toolkit for you to use. This toolkit explains what we have done and offers tips and techniques to achieve success. More information.

CAIRCO's three main arguments against accepting the matricula consular card

1. It is a sham card, issued on the strength of unverified, dubious documents by agents of a corrupt foreign government. The U.S. Government has done an extensive amount of research on the Mexican Matricula Consular card to assess its viability as a reliable means of identification. The ID card does not reliably identify its holder. The Mexican government makes no attempt, nor does it have the capacity, to verify the documents required to issue the card, thus rendering the card worthless. The Department of Justice and the FBI have concluded that the matricula card is not a reliable, and is therefore a dangerous, form of identification, due to the non-existence of any means of verifying the true identity of the card holder.
    
   However, that hasn't stopped Mexican officials from continuing to misrepresent the value of the card. In an Associated Press story, Mexico's Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez was reported to have said said, "The new IDs have all the safety elements of the most secure documents in the United States and Mexico," adding that Mexico conducts thorough background checks to verify that none of the migrants has a criminal record or represents a security threat.
    
   Hoping to convince California to officially adopt the matricula card, Derbez said, "I'm convinced that once we have demonstrated this (to California), the concerns will be resolved" and it could lead to legislation requiring acceptance of the IDs statewide."
2. Handing over the integrity of our ID-issuing responsibilities to foreign countries sets a dangerous precedent, especially since the Mexican government is one of the most corrupt in Latin America. Just recently, a former Mexican consul was arrested for helping a smuggling ring move Arab illegals into the US. In Denver, INS officials arrested one man who was in possession of three matricula cards, each with a different name but with his picture on each. The same consulate issued all three. Other countries (Honduras, Peru, Poland etc.) are now demanding the same privileges for their illegals residing in the US.
3. Polls show Americans in huge percentages and across racial, class and ethnic lines do not want accommodations, including the ID card, made to the presence of illegals; they want illegals repatriated. In addition, there is a body of legal opinion that convincingly argues that accepting the card violates several federal statutes, including those statues that define immigration-related matters as the exclusive prerogative of the federal government.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Matricula Consular

Below are CAIR'S responses to the some of the typical questions and claims made on behalf of accepting the card.

Prepared by Mike McGarry

Toolkit for activists in other states

We have been quite successful in opposing the efforts of the Mexican government to influence Colorado cities and municipalities. We have put together an activist toolkit for you to use. This toolkit explains what we have done and offers tips and techniques to achieve success. See Matricula ID activist toolkit.

This activist toolkit is designed to help you expose and halt the Mexican government's meddling in the political affairs of U.S. cities and municipalities.

The Mexican consulate operates by quietly lobbying cities to adopt the matricula consular ID card without public discussion and citizen input.

We have had great successes in Colorado opposing the Mexican government's attempts to have the matricula counsular ID card accepted as legitimate ID. This activist toolkit is an outline of our efforts in Colorado. We encourage you to adapt our approach to your circumstances, where applicable.

Please let us know what you have found to work in your own states.

In a nutshell:

Here are detailed action items:

1. Speak to your local governmental entities
    
   Call your city and county to find out if the matricula card is a pending issue. If it is, speak to your council members, supervisors and commissioner at their regularly scheduled meetings. Council meetings typically occur every two weeks. Citizens generally are allowed three to five minutes each to speak to the council, and often the proceedings are televised. It is helpful have 2 to 4 speakers, each presenting a slightly different aspect of the topic.
    
   Respectfully demand the city or county not accept this and other non-secure ID cards. (See our talking points). Point out that there are serious legal consequences to accepting this card, including the fact that they can be individually sued for personal assets. Give them each a handout stating:
   • Colorado passed a state law HB03-1224 against accepting the cards.
   • A summary of our talking points.
   • Public opinion polls show that a majority of Americans are against giving accommodations to illegals.
   • The Center for Immigration Studies backgrounder IDs for Illegals - The 'Matricula Consular' Advances Mexico's Immigration Agenda.
   • Very important: copy and edit the substantial letter, listed in the next section, that explains how accepting the matricula card has serious legal consequences.

   You can also mail your city and county public officials a letter explaining possible violations of the law if they were to officially accept the ID card. Below, in the next section, is a substantial letter that explains how accepting the card has significant legal consequences.
    
   Also check surrounding cities to see if the card is pending and if so, speak to their city councils. Contact your local politicians, including the Mayor, Chief of Police, Governor, and District Attorney. Tell them about the Matricula section of the CAIRCO website and that Colorado has set a precedent making accepting the cards illegal.
    
   Most Chiefs of Police belong to a Police Association. Tell your Chief of Police about the website and what Colorado has done. That will help spread information through the association network.

2. File legal documents
    
   "Nothing succeeds like success!" Please copy our letters, substitute the names of recipients and mail them out on your own letterhead to your own city. You can do this in 10 minutes.
    
   U.S. Code Title 8, says that it is clearly a felony and illegal in every state to hire, harbor, or transport illegal aliens.
    
3. A substantial and very powerful letter of objection was filed with the Denver INS Director and Denver U.S. Attorney asking for an investigation of the City and County of Boulder's acceptance of the Mexican ID card and other activities.
    
   This letter documents the legal consequences of accepting non-secure ID cards for illegal aliens, including Federal statutory violation, constitutional grounds, and civil liability exposure.
    
   Copy and edit this letter and send it to your local officials who are considering accepting the bogus, non-secure matricula consular ID card.
    
   See our legal section for a full listing of letters and legal documents.
4. File an open records request for information
    
   Many states have open records laws patterned after the federal Freedom of Information Act. (In Colorado it is known as the Open Records Act, Colorado Revised Statute 24-72-201) Generally, the law will require production of all information from a governmental entity that is not privileged information. Here is an example of one of the open records request submitted by CAIRCO, in this case to the City and County of Denver.
    
   The value of open record requests is manifold. It puts officials on notice that you know your rights and you are watching the actions of public officials. All too often they have been getting away with doing anything they please, behind closed doors and out of citizen earshot. You might find documents showing your local politicians are acting illegally or unethically. Results from our open record requests have produced embarrassing emails between public officials that make for interesting letters to the editor. You never know what you will turn up. File a request every month if necessary.
5. Hold a press conference
    
   Let the press know what is going on and that you represent the majority opinion on the issue as shown in numerous polls. Schedule a press conference on the steps of your city hall. Send a press release to your newspapers, TV and radio stations a day before your conference and then ask if they received the release and if they will be sending someone to cover the event.
    
   Very important: give them something to "sound bite" and photograph. We got broad TV and print coverage when we held our press conference on the steps of the City and Country Building of Denver. We told the press we would be reading our letter to the Mayor of Denver citing criminal and civil violations of U.S. Code for the Mayor's action of officially ordering city departments to accept the matricula card. We also told the press that we would be handing the Mayor our letter as part of the press conference.
6. Call in to talk radio shows
    
   Contact your local talk radio hosts. Ask them to do a segment on the matricula consular ID card. Ask if you may be an in-studio guest. When you talk, mention www.CAIRCO.org (several times) and tell people to see the "matricula toolkit" section of the website.
    
   If you can't get a dedicated time segment, organize call-ins at opportune times to raise the issue and alert listeners to what is happening in your area and state.
7. Arrange a public debate
    
   If you are willing to put in some hard work, you can organize a public debate on the card. We were particularly successful with our debate: The Mexican "matricula consular" ID card: Safe or Sorry?. Be sure that you contact the media and issue press releases well in advance of the debate.
    
   Send the press release to all your key cities and counties, inviting their council and board members along with their police chiefs and sheriffs. Send notices to all your state representatives. (We were lucky to have had in attendance at our debate the assistant to the president of the Colorado Senate along with a Representative of the Colorado House. Those elected officials are now sponsoring a bill, HB-1224, the Secure and Verifiable Identity Document Act, in the Colorado legislature to make it illegal to accept the matricula. We are very optimistic it will become law.) Feel free to contact CAIRCO for more information on how to organize a public debate.
8. Use our video
    
   CAIRCO edited and produced a 57 minute video of our important, timely and provocative debate on the matricula consular ID card with guest columnist Michelle Malkin. We distributed the video to public access and government access television stations across Colorado. In doing so, we gained much more exposure to the issue than the debate alone could have obtained.
    
   This video is applicable to all cities and states, not just Colorado. Show the video to others in your area, including elected officials, and to distribute it to your public access TV stations. (If you would like a professional quality format of this video for broadcast, please contact us).
9. Take aggressive action
   • An independent group of citizens in Boulder, Colorado has taken strong action against that city's possible action to accept matricula consular ID cards.
      
   • A substantial letter of objection was filed with the Denver INS Director and Denver U.S. Attorney asking for an investigation of the City and County of Boulder's acceptance of the Mexican ID card and other activities.
      
   • A letter of objection was filed with the Mayor and City Council of Boulder, Colorado at the November 19, 2002 City Council meeting, stating "Your actions may possibly put you, and elected and appointed officials, and public servants, in legal jeopardy both personally and professionally."
      
   • A substantial letter of objection was filed with the Denver INS Director and Denver U.S. Attorney asking for an investigation of the City and County of Boulder's acceptance of the Mexican ID card and other activities.
      
   • And most interesting, a letter was filed with the city's liability insurance company, since it is likely that the city's policy does not cover liability arising from accepting the matricula consular ID card. In other words, if the city accepts the matricula consular card and a citizen is injured by an illegal alien, the citizen can sue the city and individual city council members. This is because the city's liability policy specifically excludes protection from illegal actions on the part of insured parties.
10. Coordinate with other organizations
     
    Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) can also offer advice on how to deal with the card.
     
    NumbersUSA.com has periodic faxes that you can send to elected officials on the card and is also a resource on the issue.
11. Work to get a state law passed

    We did it in Colorado! Colorado Representative Don Lee and Senator John Andrews sponsored a bill (the Colorado Secure and Verifiable Identity Document Act) that made illegal the accepting of the Mexican matricula consular ID card and other "unsecured" IDs.  
    Call your state senators and representatives to discuss the issue and encourage them to initiate legislation to halt acceptance of the matricula consular ID card.
     
    When the bill enters committee, appear before the committee and give public testimony.

March 26, 2003
 
Senator John Andrews
Colorado Senate
 
Sir:
 
We at Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform (CAIR) wish to express our appreciation of your dedicated efforts on the Colorado Secure and Verifiable Identity Document Act, HB-1224. We are deeply concerned about Colorado's and our nation's future and it is evident that you clearly share this concern with your efforts to pass this bill. We respect and appreciate your wisdom and vision in promoting this bill.
 
We understand that the machinations of politics are never simple, and that it is often difficult to enact legislation that is effective while addressing the concerns of all constituents and interested parties. As such, we understand the reasons the bill was amended by the Senate.
 
Nevertheless, we respectfully disagree with the Senate version of the amendment for a number of reasons. The amendment allows police officers to accept non-secure foreign ID cards. In addition, it allows for pregnant mothers and presumably those who simply claim they are pregnant to obtain a full range of services over and above free medical services with non-secure foreign ID cards. The Senate amendment in our opinion, presents a gaping hole in the bill that virtually nullifies the original intent of the bill.
 
Because of our concern about the efficacy of the Senate amendment, several of us with CAIR have called House and Senate members to respectfully express our concern. We are also aware that news of the bill and amendment has spread across the internet. We understand that others, including individuals from outside of Colorado, have contacted members of the House and Senate, issuing out of frustration harsh diatribes against those allowing the bill to be amended. We apologize for any such calls, although we must clarify that those making such calls are not at all affiliated with CAIR.
 
The vast majority of Americans and Coloradans are very concerned about the consequences of high levels of legal and illegal immigration. (One such consequence is that U.S. population will double this century, practically within the lifetimes of children born today. Colorado will double even sooner). We at CAIR share this concern and believe our effectiveness is in educating others about the consequences of inordinately high levels of legal and illegal immigration, and in working with elected officials to enact legislation to address this pressing issue.
 
We applaud your concern about this issue and your leadership efforts to enact legislation as embodied in HB-1224. We encourage you to strive to make this bill as effective as possible in its final form. Again, we sincerely thank you for your efforts and for listening to our concerns.
 
Sincerely,
 
Fred Elbel
co-Director, CAIR - Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform
 
copy: Representative Don Lee

This letter (prepared prior to enactment of HB-1224 - the Colorado Secure and Verifiable Identity Document Act of 2003) documents the legal consequences of accepting non-secure Matricula Consular and other ID cards for illegal aliens, including Federal statutory violation, constitutional grounds, and civil liability exposure. The letter emphasises the following points and references existing case law:

• Immigration and Nationality Act

  Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides criminal penalties for any act that "encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law."[2]

  "Encourage" and "induce" include actions that permit illegal aliens to be more confident that they could continue to reside with impunity in the United States, or actions that offer illegal aliens "a chance to stand equally with all other American citizens."[3]

  To prove that a state or local government agency "encouraged or induced" illegal Mexican aliens, all the government needs to establish is that the agency knowingly helped or advised the aliens, or emboldened them, or made them more confident in their continued illegal residence in the United States.[4]

  The courts have held that INA §274 is to be broadly construed both as to those persons subject to criminal liability under the statute,[5] and as to the types of activities covered therein. [6]

   

• Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

  Furthermore, Section 401 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996[7] (as amended by the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996)[8] prohibits non-qualified (illegal) aliens from receiving most "Federal public benefits." Any policy that accepts the matricula consular for the purpose of providing city and County services explicitly violates this provision of federal law insofar as the services to illegal aliens are paid for with federal and public funds.

   

• Constitutional Grounds

  The courts have long recognized that by Article I, Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution (the Commerce Clause), Congress has "plenary power" over all aspects of immigration law, including "the right to provide a system of registration and identification" for aliens, because "the entire control of international relations" is invested in the national government.[9]

  Courts have repeatedly held that no governmental authority may establish any policy that relates to immigration other than Congress and authorized federal agencies, and that the "(p)ower to regulate immigration is unquestionably exclusively a federal power."[10]

  Thus, a local governmental public policy to accept an official foreign national identification document issued to aliens present in the United States in violation of Federal law improperly annexes powers to any public entity that are rightfully those of Congress and the policy is therefore unconstitutional.

  In a Supreme Court decision striking down a Pennsylvania alien registration statute, it was held that the "Federal Government...is entrusted with full and exclusive responsibility for the conduct of affairs with foreign sovereignties [, and that o]ur system of government is such that the interest of the cities, counties and states, no less than the interest of the people of the whole nation, imperatively requires that federal power in the field affecting foreign relations be left entirely free from local interference."

  The Court ruled that "where the federal government, in the exercise of its superior authority in this field, has enacted a complete scheme of regulation ... states cannot, inconsistently with the purpose of Congress, conflict or interfere with, curtail or complement, the federal law, or enforce additional or auxiliary regulations."[11]

  Therefore, no public entity, specifically a City and County, as defined above, may make any rule, regulation or policy that speaks to the presence in the community of foreign nationals, and, thus, a "matricula consular policy" is preempted on constitutional grounds.

  A "matricula consular" policy adopted by local governmental authorities has also been determined unconstitutional specifically in relation to public benefits because it violates "the exclusive federal power over the entrance and residence of aliens."[12]

   

• Civil Liability Exposure

  Entering the United States without inspection (illegal entry) is a criminal offense under 8 U.S.C. 1325. Providing public services to such an alien in "knowing and reckless disregard" of the alien's illegal status amounts to aiding and abetting a crime, and is a criminal violation in and of itself. By the INA §274(a) aiding and abetting statute,[13] the distinction is eliminated between principles and accessories in alien smuggling crimes. And courts have held that aiding and abetting also relates to conduct while the illegal alien is in the United States.[14]

  Aiding and abetting an illegal entrant in his continued illegal residence in the United States constitutes a dangerous and unreasonable risk to the health and safety of the public, since, among other reasons, unlike legal entrants, an illegal entrant is not subject to a criminal background or health check before entering the United States.

  When such aid is administered via official acceptance by any public entity of the matricula consular, by which possession any public entity, or any person acting under the authority of any public entity, would or should have known in the exercise of reasonable care that the person holding the card is an illegal alien, the public entity, or its officers, can be said to be negligent.

  For these reasons, official acceptance of the matricula consular by any city or county, and any of its elected or appointed officials (e.g., Mayor, Police Chief, Sheriff, etc.) can be said to be dangerous and negligent, and, therefore, the public entity, and its officers or representatives, may not enjoy sovereign immunity under the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act-especially since the grant of governmental immunity in Colorado is to be strictly construed and its waiver is to be liberally or deferentially construed.[15]

References:

[2] 8 U.S.C. §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)
[3] U.S. v. Oloyede, 982 F.2d 133 (4th Cir. 1992)
[4] U.S. v. He, No. 00-2574 (7th Cir. Apr. 2, 2001)
[5] U.S. v Zheng, No. 01-15551 (11th Cir. Sept, 2002)
[6] Patel v Ashcroft, No. 01-3365 (3rd Cir. June, 2002)
[7] Public Law 104-193
[8] Public Law 104-208
[9] Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893)
[10] De Canas v. Bica, 424 U.S. 351 (1976)
[11] Hines v. Davidowitz, 312 U.S., at 66 -67
[12] Graham v. Department of Pub. Welfare, 403 U.S. 365 (1971) (USSC+)
[13] 8 U.S.C. 1324(a)(1)(A)(v)(II)
[14] U.S. v. Mussaleen, 35 F.3d 692 (Cir. 2nd (N.Y.),1994.
[15]Springer v. City and County of Denver, 990 P.2d 1092 (Colo. App. 1999), rev'd on other grounds, 13 P.3d 794 (Colo. 2000).

June 12, 2003

Secretary Colin L. Powell
United States Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Secretary Powell:

The attached document indicates that our U.S. Embassy in Managua is requesting direction from you as to how they should proceed in the effort to aid the government of Nicaragua in the development of ID cards modeled on the matricula consular issued by the Mexican government. Mexican officials have publicly stated that this endeavor is part of a strategy to obtain a de facto amnesty for people living here illegally.

I realize that any foreign government has a right to issue identification cards to its citizens. That is not in dispute. However using their consular offices here as lobbying agents to help undermine our immigration laws is an outrage and the State Department's apparent acquiescence in this endeavor is even more incredible.

We anticipated and cautioned you in a letter on January 10 that unless you acted to discourage the acceptance of Mexican government's ID cards, other governments would follow suit. That is now happening. If you do not take steps to halt our cooperation and support of this practice, our country will see a virtual tidal wave of such cards issued to illegal alien by their embassies and consulates in the U.S.

There are several aspects of the matricular consular cards now issued by foreign governments that are extremely troubling. I have two questions:

1. What guidelines will you offer to our Embassy staff in other nations when those governments request our assistance in developing similar cards for their nationals living in the United States? Will our embassy staff be offering advice and assistance to the governments in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Iran if they seek to give documents to their nationals living in this country "regardless of the individual's legal status"?

2. How can this memo from Managua (attached) be interpreted as anything but aiding and abetting attempts by foreign governments to provide their nationals living illegally in the U.S. with documentation that would ease their entrance into American society?

In my previous communication of January 10, I asked if you have approved of this activity on the part of State Department staff. If you do not, what do you intend to do to stop it?

Mr. Secretary, this is an issue of enormous significance that has massive implications for our nation. In mid-May the Department of Homeland Security sent to the White House a Draft Policy Statement on the matricula consular cards. That Draft Policy Statement, which was the product of an interagency working group that included the State Department, expressly prohibits all federal agencies from accepting the cards or cooperating in their use by foreign nationals.

There are two very good reasons for opposing the use and proliferation of these identification cards. First, our acceptance of the cards, or our cooperation in their manufacture or distribution, provides tacit approval and encouragement for increased illegal immigration into the United States. This is true because no one needs these cards except persons residing here illegally. The second reason for rejecting these documents is that the process for verification of identify of the individual obtaining the card is very questionable. The only identification document issued by a foreign government our government should accept is a valid passport.

The State Department's current policy of ambiguity on this matter is interpreted as tacit approval by foreign governments. This will very likely have disastrous consequences for our nation. If the Administration has agreed to cooperate with this activity, the American people have a right to know. If it has not, please advise us of the steps being taken to halt it.

Thank you for your timely response.

Sincerely,

Tom Tancredo

Member of Congress

herry L. Jackson
Clerk and Recorder
Denver City and County Building
1437 Bannock Street, Room 281
Denver, CO 80202
 
November 12, 2002
 
Dear Sherry Jackson:
 
Please consider this to be a written request for records pursuant to the Colorado Open Records Act, Colorado Revised Statutes 24-72-201. I make this request on behalf of the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform, a Colorado nonprofit corporation.
 
I am respectfully requesting records relating to:
 
1. The decision by Mayor Webb to officially accept the "matricula consular" ID card and the Mayor's order that various City departments accept the card as valid identification, and
 
2. The decision by Mayor Webb to designate $15,000 from a federal grant, as reported to us in August by Andy Hernandez, to help fund a job center, a "hiring hall", which we believe provides jobs for illegal aliens.
 
The two above enumerated actions on the part of Mayor Webb were the subject of a letter we hand delivered to the Mayor's office on October 31, 2002. An unsigned copy of that letter is herewith attached.
 
Accordingly, I ask that you produce the following documents:
 
Copies or originals of all writings made, maintained or kept by the City and County of Denver and/or the Mayor's office relating directly or indirectly to the above enumerated actions. The Colorado Open Records Act defines "writings" to include "photographs, tapes, recordings, digitally-stored data, including electronic mail and other documentary materials, in addition to books, papers and maps...." (Emphasis added)
 
Please include copies or originals of any and all writing specific to the above enumerated actions involving the Mexican government and/or that government's agents or representatives. Please include copies or originals of any and all writings involving nonprofit organizations and/or charities and their agents or representatives specific to the above enumerated actions. Please include in our requests copies or originals of any and all writings not specifically detailed herein relating to the above enumerated actions but which a reasonable person would include. Please do not include redundancies.
 
Thank you for your cooperation. We look forward to receiving the requested records within the 10-day statutory time limit.
 
Sincerely,
 
Mike McGarry
 
Spokesperson, Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform

This section contains legal information pertaining to use of bogus Matricula Consular ID cards (which are now illegal in Colorado). We are not attorneys and this should not be construed as legal advice. However, it is pertinent to states that still allow the Matricula cards to be used for identification.

Immigration and Nationality Act

Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides criminal penalties for any act that "encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law."²

"Encourage" and "induce" include actions that permit illegal aliens to be more confident that they could continue to reside with impunity in the United States, or actions that offer illegal aliens "a chance to stand equally with all other American citizens."³

To prove that a state or local government agency "encouraged or induced" illegal Mexican aliens, all the government needs to establish is that the agency knowingly helped or advised the aliens, or emboldened them, or made them more confident in their continued illegal residence in the United States.⁴

The courts have held that INA §274 is to be broadly construed both as to those persons subject to criminal liability under the statute,⁵ and as to the types of activities covered therein.⁶

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

Furthermore, Section 401 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996⁷ (as amended by the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996)⁸ prohibits non-qualified (illegal) aliens from receiving most "Federal public benefits." Any policy that accepts the matricula consular for the purpose of providing city and County services explicitly violates this provision of federal law insofar as the services to illegal aliens are paid for with federal and public funds.

Constitutional Grounds

The courts have long recognized that by Article I, Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution (the Commerce Clause), Congress has "plenary power" over all aspects of immigration law, including "the right to provide a system of registration and identification" for aliens, because "the entire control of international relations" is invested in the national government.⁹

Courts have repeatedly held that no governmental authority may establish any policy that relates to immigration other than Congress and authorized federal agencies, and that the "(p)ower to regulate immigration is unquestionably exclusively a federal power."¹⁰

Thus, a local governmental public policy to accept an official foreign national identification document issued to aliens present in the United States in violation of Federal law improperly annexes powers to any public entity that are rightfully those of Congress and the policy is therefore unconstitutional.

In a Supreme Court decision striking down a Pennsylvania alien registration statute, it was held that the "Federal Government...is entrusted with full and exclusive responsibility for the conduct of affairs with foreign sovereignties [, and that o]ur system of government is such that the interest of the cities, counties and states, no less than the interest of the people of the whole nation, imperatively requires that federal power in the field affecting foreign relations be left entirely free from local interference."

The Court ruled that "where the federal government, in the exercise of its superior authority in this field, has enacted a complete scheme of regulation ... states cannot, inconsistently with the purpose of Congress, conflict or interfere with, curtail or complement, the federal law, or enforce additional or auxiliary regulations."¹¹

Therefore, no public entity, specifically Boulder City and County, as defined above, may make any rule, regulation or policy that speaks to the presence in the community of foreign nationals, and, thus, a "matricula consular policy" is preempted on constitutional grounds.

A "matricula consular" policy adopted by local governmental authorities has also been determined unconstitutional specifically in relation to public benefits because it violates "the exclusive federal power over the entrance and residence of aliens."¹²

Civil Liability Exposure

Entering the United States without inspection (illegal entry) is a criminal offense under 8 U.S.C. 1325. Providing public services to such an alien in "knowing and reckless disregard" of the alien's illegal status amounts to aiding and abetting a crime, and is a criminal violation in and of itself. By the INA §274(a) aiding and abetting statute,¹³ the distinction is eliminated between principles and accessories in alien smuggling crimes. And courts have held that aiding and abetting also relates to conduct while the illegal alien is in the United States.¹⁴

Aiding and abetting an illegal entrant in his continued illegal residence in the United States constitutes a dangerous and unreasonable risk to the health and safety of the public, since, among other reasons, unlike legal entrants, an illegal entrant is not subject to a criminal background or health check before entering the United States.

When such aid is administered via official acceptance by any public entity of the matricula consular, by which possession any public entity, or any person acting under the authority of any public entity, would or should have known in the exercise of reasonable care that the person holding the card is an illegal alien, the public entity, or its officers, can be said to be negligent.

For these reasons, official acceptance of the matricula consular by any city or county, and any of its elected or appointed officials (e.g., Mayor, Police Chief, Sheriff, etc.) can be said to be dangerous and negligent, and, therefore, the public entity, and its officers or representatives, may not enjoy sovereign immunity under the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act-especially since the grant of governmental immunity in Colorado is to be strictly construed and its waiver is to be liberally or deferentially construed.¹⁵

References

2. 8 U.S.C. §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)
3. U.S. v. Oloyede, 982 F.2d 133 (4th Cir. 1992)
4. U.S. v. He, No. 00-2574 (7th Cir. Apr. 2, 2001)
5. U.S. v Zheng, No. 01-15551 (11th Cir. Sept, 2002)
6. Patel v Ashcroft, No. 01-3365 (3rd Cir. June, 2002)
7. Public Law 104-193
8. Public Law 104-208
9. Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893)
10. De Canas v. Bica, 424 U.S. 351 (1976)
11. Hines v. Davidowitz, 312 U.S., at 66 -67
12. Graham v. Department of Pub. Welfare, 403 U.S. 365 (1971) (USSC+)
13. 8 U.S.C. 1324(a)(1)(A)(v)(II)
14. U.S. v. Mussaleen, 35 F.3d 692 (Cir. 2nd (N.Y.),1994.
15. Springer v. City and County of Denver, 990 P.2d 1092 (Colo. App. 1999), rev'd on other grounds, 13 P.3d 794 (Colo. 2000).

Even though sanctuary cities have been made illegal in Colorado, it appears that Denver is in fact still a sanctuary city.

September 13, 2010 - Senator Ted Harvey, coauthor of SB 06-090, asks: "Denver is not a sanctuary city," says a Denver Post editorial. Is that a fact or is it fiction?

Fact or Fiction? Denver has been certified by a state audit report as being in compliance with SB 06-090.

FACT: The 2009 state audit was an audit of the reporting process, not an audit of the numbers submitted by cities and counties. It did not certify Denver or any city as being in compliance. For example, in 2007, 181 Colorado cities and counties reported zero contacts with ICE, yet none were audited for compliance.

Fact or Fiction? Mayor Hickenlooper claims that Denver "made over 7,000 calls to ICE since 2006."

FACT: Denver police officers made less than 500 calls to ICE since 2006 out of over 250,000 total arrests, over 15,000 DUI arrests and over 500,000 traffic stops. Over 7,000 referrals were made to ICE by the Denver county jail for individuals already in custody. Hickenlooper consistently lumps the two numbers together - Denver police referrals and jail referrals – thereby misrepresenting the extent of Denver police contacts with ICE.

Fact or Fiction? Denver operates much the same way all other Colorado cities and counties do.

FACT: The El Paso County jail operates cooperatively with ICE through a 287g agreement, which trains and deputizes jail personnel to use the ICE database to identify illegal aliens. At least five other counties including Arapahoe and Jefferson are on the waiting list for that program, but Denver city officials have steadfastly opposed joining. As far as "street arrests" are concerned, the Denver Police Department's 105 referrals to ICE in 2009 represent 4% of the 2,720 reported to ICE by its neighbor Aurora, a city half its size with only 46% as many police officers. That's a 50-to-1 ratio per capita.

Fact or Fiction? There is no official policy in Denver that obstructs police cooperation with ICE.

FACT: There are two official Police Department documents that violate SB 06-090. Denver Police Operations Manual section 104.52 requires a police officer to get a supervisor's approval prior to calling ICE. Also, a Denver PD "Training Bulletin" distributed in September 2006 says police officers need not change their procedures because of SB 06-090. As a result, in 2009, Denver police officers made only 105 "Refer to Immigration" notes on arrest reports for 63,803 individuals arrested. That is less than .002% of arrests.

Fact or Fiction? Fact or Fiction? ICE has increased its deportations from Colorado dramatically since SB 06-090 was passed, which shows Denver and other cities are now cooperating with ICE.

FACT: Although ICE contacts have undoubtedly increased since 2006, a large percentage of the individuals deported by ICE come from its expanded efforts under the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), not from local law enforcement referrals. Four years after SB 06-090 was passed, it remains true that a majority of illegal aliens arrested by local police are NOT referred to ICE under the probable cause standard of SB 06-090, are not identified as illegal aliens, and thus, are not deported.

Fact or Fiction? Fact or Fiction? According to Mayor Hickenlooper, Denver wants to participate in ICE's "Secure Communities Program," which now awaits only Gov. Ritter's approval.

FACT: Ritter and Hickenlooper have stalled a decision on the adoption of the SCP for 18 months since discussions with ICE began in April 2009. Over that period, hundreds of criminal aliens arrested for minor crimes in Denver have been released back into the community instead of being identified by ICE and evaluated for possible deportation. If Hickenlooper had endorsed the program in 2009 and publicly supported it, it would be in place today.

Fact or Fiction? Fact or Fiction? Denver city council has adopted a requirement that companies doing business with the city must use the federal E-verify program.

FACT: The new policy comes four years after the state mandated the E-verify program for all companies doing business with state agencies, but Denver's policy applies only to construction contractors, not to scores of other employers with hundreds of employees. Thus, Denver taxpayers are still underwriting the employment of countless illegal aliens.

Update: Wiens measure becomes law, bans sanctuary cities

May 2, 2006
Kelley Harp, Senate Republican Communications

DENVER - Senate Bill 90, by state Sen. Tom Wiens, R-Castle Rock, was signed into law Monday by Colorado Gov. Bill Owens. The measure prevents cities and local governments from implementing sanctuary policies allowing illegal aliens to live within their borders without any fear of punishment.

The new law accomplishes this by prohibiting the administration of grants by the Department of Local Affairs to any local government that declares itself a sanctuary city.

"Illegal immigration is clearly a major problem in this country," Wiens said. "All levels of government must work together if we want to find practical and effective solutions to this problem. This bill provides the necessary consequences currently missing in state law to punish local governments who instruct their officers to blatantly ignore federal law."

Senate Bill 90, would require all local law enforcement officers to report to federal immigration officials any person arrested in their jurisdiction who they reasonably believe to be an illegal alien. The bill would also require each city and county in Colorado to report to the General Assembly whether or not it has instructed their peace officers to cooperate with state and federal officials in the enforcement of immigration laws.

"This bill received strong bipartisan support throughout the process," Wiens said. "With this in mind, my hope is this bill will encourage important debate on the subject at the municipal and county levels as well as greater enforcement of our current immigration laws."

Senate Bill 90 became law immediately upon the governor's signature.

The key provisions of the statute are as follows:

• Local governments cannot create a policy that bars police from cooperating with federal officials concerning the status of any person in Colorado.
• Police must notify the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency if a person arrested for a crime is a suspected illegal immigrant.
• The law does not apply to those arrested for minor traffic infractions or suspicion of domestic violence. However, immigration officials must be told if a person is convicted of domestic violence.
• Cities and counties must notify local law enforcement officers in writing of their obligation to comply with the law.
• Cities and counties must file an annual report to the state regarding how many illegal immigrants they reported to immigration officials.
• Local governments that fail to report suspected illegal immigrants will not be eligible for state grants.

See CAIRCO's summary of SB 90.

by Bruce Finley
Denver Post
March 8, 1998

On December 2, 2005, concerned sovereign Coloradans surprised Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper at a burrito breakfast fundraiser at El Centro - Denver's Illegal Alien Hiring Hall. Citizens questioned him on Denver's sanctuary city policy and demanded the Denver Police Manual be changed to require full cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

See pictures and video of the confrontation and of Denver's illegal alien hiring hall.

On May 8, 2005, Denver Police officer Don Young was assassinated in cold blood by an illegal alien employed at Denver Mayor Hickenlooper's restaurant. The horror is that Denver has an illegal alien sanctuary policy (Executive Order 116), implemented by former Mayor Webb in 1998, which:

• Declares Denver's strong opposition to federal distinctions between legal immigrants and commits city officials "to the delivery of services to all of its residents."
• Asserts that federal policy "unfairly impacts many of Denver's children, senior citizens and disabled residents."
• Vows that the city will back legal rights of all residents in Denver, adding that Webb will urge businesses, schools, hospitals and universities to do the same.

Recently, City Attorney Finegan issued an opinion that Denver does not have a sanctuary policy and that Congressman Tancredo is wrong in saying that it does. Yet this opinion flies in the face of a 1999 City Attorney opinion on 116 that states the following:

• Executive Order No. 116 is a limited cooperation ordinance. A limited cooperation ordinance recognizes that illegal or undocumented aliens are present in the United States in great numbers. Such limited cooperation ordinances recognize the immigration problem and offer a solution by making adjustments for the benefit of public safety.
• Executive Order No. 116 discourages reporting of undocumented aliens who seek essential services.
• ... illegal entry is a criminal offense which can be enforced by both state and federal officials, whereas illegal presence is a civil offense enforceable only by the INS.
• Since the courts have strictly limited the enforcement of immigration laws by state and local law enforcement to the criminal provisions, it is clear that state and local law enforcement are under no affirmative duty to gather information on an individual's immigration status or to report a violation. Therefore, limited cooperation ordinances, like Executive Order No. 116, merely codify what the courts have already decided and that is, state and local officials have no jurisdiction to enforce civil provisions of federal immigration laws.
• Moreover, both the present [police] departmental policy 104.5 and the interim policy, § 103.52(3) go further and restrict officers from enforcing even the criminal portions of the INA, without prior approval from a supervisor or commander.

Another order, Executive Order 119, authorized Denver to accept bogus Mexican Matricula Consular IDs, until prohibited by state law. Denver's police department operations manual states, "Generally, officers will not detain, arrest, or take enforcement action against a person solely because he/she is suspected of being an undocumented immigrant." It is not just Executive Orders 116 and 119, but rather these orders in conjunction with Denver's Police operations manual and city and police practices that embody Denver's sanctuary policy.

Denver's sanctuary policy is nothing more than a de facto amnesty for illegal aliens, including known felons. Denver's police officers are handcuffed by Denver's sanctuary policy. They are effectively prevented from notifying immigration authorities about the presence in Denver of illegal aliens. This virtual amnesty for foreign criminals places the safety and welfare of citizens at risk, and must stop.

See CAIRCO's May, 2005 Press conference and protest of Denver sanctuary policy.

104.52 Arrest/Detention of Foreign Nationals

(1) Whenever any foreign national is arrested or detained, the arresting officer will determine the arrestee's country of citizenship and whether the arrestee wants his embassy to be notified.

(2) The arresting officer will then contact the Identification Section and provide that information plus the arrestee's full name and date of birth.

a. Identification Section personnel will consult the embassy notification list provided by the U.S. State Department. If the arrestee is a citizen of a country requiring mandatory notification, Identification Section personnel will make the notification.

b. If the foreign national requests the notification, it will be made.

c. If the arrestee's country of citizenship does not require mandatory notification and if the arrestee does not want notice given, no further information is necessary except that the arresting officer will note this information on the arrest documents.

d. The Identification Section will keep a record of all such foreign embassy notifications.

(3) Undocumented immigrants (includes illegal and “undocumented aliens” as referred to in the Federal Immigration and Naturalization act)

a. The responsibility for enforcement of immigration laws rests with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (I.N.S.). Denver Police officers shall not initiate police actions with the primary objective of discovering the immigration status of a person.

b. Generally, officers will not detain, arrest, or take enforcement action against a person solely because he/she is suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. If enforcement action is deemed necessary under these circumstances, the approval of an on duty supervisor or commander is required. In addition, as soon as is practical the commander of the involved officer shall be notified.

c. However, when a suspect believed to be an undocumented immigrant is arrested for other charges, a "Refer to Immigration" charge will be added to the original charges. Sheriff's Department Personnel will then notify the I.N.S. authorities according to their procedures.

d. The charge "Hold For Immigration" will be lodged against a prisoner only when a warrant has been issued by the U.S. Department of Justice, or an agency thereof, and then only when the warrant is on an immigration matter.

e. Physical evidence pertaining to immigration violations shall be placed in the Property Bureau as evidence when there is no arrest made. A letter detailing the circumstances of the recovery of the property and the property invoice number shall be sent to the commander of the Crimes Against Persons Bureau for disposition.

f. All questions pertaining to the handling of immigration related cases shall be directed to the officer’s supervisor and/or commanding officer. In addition, the commander of the Civil Liability Bureau is available for guidance regarding enforcement and non-enforcement immigration matters.

Thanks to the efforts of concerned sovereign Coloradans, on October 4, 2005, the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, voted down a proposed ordinance that effectively would have made the city a sanctuary for illegal aliens. The resolution, two years in the making and written under the guise of protecting "immigrant rights", was in effect a sanctuary city policy.

The city of Fort Collins, Colorado, had considered an ordinance that effectively would have made the city a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. The proposed ordinance was soundly defeated at the Fort Collins City Council meeting on October 4, 2005,

The proponents of the so-called Human Rights Protection Ordinance (HRPO) have done this community a service by focusing a bright light on the issue of mass immigration in general and illegal immigration in particular. However, their proposed "solution" to the problem of illegal immigration was the exact opposite of what is needed.

The HRPO spoke to "respect the rights of, and provide equal services" to people who are here illegally - illegal aliens. It would have done so by severely limiting the ability of city employees to check the immigration status of people who are seeking city services or have been picked up for infractions such as traffic violations. It also would have required officials to recognize I.D.'s from other countries (including bogus matricula consular ID cards issued by foreign embassies) as valid identification in place of a U.S. drivers license.

Legitimatizing law breaking through the passage of the HRPO would have been bad public policy. It would have created an atmosphere of disrespect for our nations' laws and reduce the safety of Fort Collins residents by unnecessarily handcuffing law enforcement officials. The only ones who might have felt safer under the HRPO would be have been illegal aliens.

Numerous polls show that vast majorities of Americans are very concerned about illegal immigration. What Fort Collins citizens want and the nation's citizens are demanding is increased enforcement of our nation's immigration laws; not the lower levels of enforcement that sanctuary policies promote. Citizens want employers of illegal aliens punished, they are against drivers licenses for illegal aliens, they oppose sanctuary policies, are against amnesties and massive guest worker programs, and want our borders secured.

The Fort Collins City Council meeting

It was a long City Council meeting in Fort Collins, an hour and a half north of Denver. After more than an hour dealing with zoning issues, the so-called "Human Rights Ordinance" was addressed. Three advocates for the Human Rights Committee presented their case for the ordinance. Then individuals in the audience were allowed to speak. Over 50 people spoke on both sides of the issue. Many people gave rock-solid testimony why the ordinance was wrong. Testimony in favor of the ordinance relied upon emotionalism and tired platitudes, continually emphasizing that the ordinance had nothing to do with immigration.

This process took several hours. Then the Council members spoke. One particularly memorable council member comment went something like this: "I can not support deceptive legislation like the Healthy Forests or Clear Skies initiatives that are the opposite of their titles. Similarly, immigration is mentioned something like 20 times in the ordinance. This ordinance has nothing to do with human rights - it is an immigration ordinance." Another member stated approximately: "I have been dealing with this for two years, now. There are better ways to deal with suspected human rights issues other than by passing more legislation." A vote was taken and the proposed Fort Collins Sanctuary City ordinance was killed in a 5 to 2 vote!

This was the culmination of two years of effort by the Human Rights Committee and open borders proponents. CAIR only found out about the effort about three months before the deciding City Council meeting, but nevertheless rallied supporters throughout the area against the misguided ordinance. Never underestimate the power of concerned individuals. You made a difference! This defeat sends a clear message to other City Councils who may be considering similar ordinances.

Thanks to the dozens of folks who showed up to testify against the proposed ordinance. Immigration sanity would not have persevered without your presence. The sovereign people of the United States, Colorado, and Fort Collins persevered and won out against the forces of illegal invasion, neo-Marxism, and open borders!

The defeated sanctuary city ordinance

The HRPO ordinance was titled "Ordinance of the Council of the City of Fort Collins, amending Chapter 13 of the City Code to add a new Article III concerning discrimination based on immigration status." Excerpts from the defeated ordinance follow, with comments:

"WHEREAS, Fort Collins is a city striving to respect the rights of, and provide equal services to, all individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, or immigration status; and"

Comments: the citizens of Fort Collins never voted on whether to strive to provide equal services regardless of illegal immigration status. Indeed, had activists not recently exposed the issue, citizens would not have heard about this ordinance at all.

"WHEREAS, Fort Collins is a city striving to promote community safety, protect witnesses and victims, prevent racial profiling and profiling based upon immigration status, prevent pretextual arrests, promote tolerance, and allow people to do their jobs; and"

Comments: the citizens of Fort Collins never voted on whether to strive to prevent profiling based on illegal immigration status, nor to tolerate illegal aliens in their city, nor to allow illegal aliens to do their jobs."

"WHEREAS, recent terrorist attacks and the resultant tightening of security may have left immigrant communities afraid to access benefits to which they are entitled, for fear of being reported to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly, INS);"...

Comments: legal immigrant communities are not afraid to access benefits to which they are entitled, as they are in no fear of being deported. Illegal aliens have no benefits to which they are entitled, and their only right under our laws is to a swift and humane deportation.

"No city employee shall inquire into the immigration status of any person."...

"No city employee shall use city resources or personnel for the purpose of detecting or apprehending persons whose only violation of law is or may be being an undocumented alien, being our of immigration status, or illegally residing in the United States."

"Where presentation of a state driver's license is customarily accepted as adequate evidence of identity, a city employee shall, to the extent permitted by state and federal law, accept identification in the form of a photo identity document issued by the person's nation of origin, such as a driver's license, passport, or matricula consular, and shall not subject the person to a higher level of scrutiny or different treatment than if the person had provided a Colorado driver's license."

"It is illegal in Colorado to accept the bogus matricula consular ID card."

Letter

The following September 15, 2005 letter to the Fort Collins Weekly, by Steven Shulman, sheds light on the defeated ordinance:

Related articles

Articles on Fort Collins' proposed sanctuary policy for illegal aliens

Fort Collins, Colorado, was considering implementing a sanctuary policy for illegal aliens. Below are selected articles:

Read more about the Fort Collins proposed sanctuary policy for illegal aliens.

Articles on Denver's sanctuary policy for illegal aliens

Here are some references articles on Sanctuary Cities:

• Federal law requires full cooperation between localities and the INS (ICE).
• Immigration Law Enforcement by Local Agencies
• Sanctuary Cities and States -- Undermining the American Republic
• Supreme Court Ruling Razes Artificial Fire Wall Between Local Law Enforcement and Immigration Enforcement
• Role of State and Local Police In Immigration Law Enforcement
• Non-Cooperation Policies