|
Letter to the editor responding to Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell on Colorado's immigration-driven population growth May 27, 2000 ______________________________________________________ Dear Editor: In response to Aspen City Councilman Terry Paulson's immigration concerns as they impact Colorado's rapid population growth, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, during his Aspen town meeting, glibly and correctly said it is not immigrants, per se, but interstate migration, especially from California, that is creating the Colorado's human numbers crunch. The senator is both right and wrong. Statewide-with glaring, localized exceptions-Californians do represent the greatest aggregated number of Colorado's more recent arrivals, but overpopulation driven by mass immigration is the primary cause of their coming. In 1965,California had a population of 18 million. It is now a huge 34 million-larger than most countries of the world-and it will be a gargantuan 52 million in 25 short years. Ninety-six percent of California's population explosion in the 1990s was a result of mass immigration. California's Central Valley, a breadbasket of the country and the world, is expected to be 50 percent bulldozed within 25 years to accommodate mass immigration. California will need to produce even more food to feed its exploding population, while it simultaneously squanders its depleting energy stores and destroys its agricultural resources. A threatened California farmer recently featured on the CBS Evening News looked into the camera and plaintively asked, "Don't folks realize we will need to feed people in 50, 75 and 100 years from now." Californians must now build an elementary school every day, 365 days a year, in perpetuity, just to keep up with immigration numbers creating China-like density. The Washington Post just reported on the "dysfunctional" Los Angeles Unified School District, saying that "[t]o accommodate a surging population, composed overwhelming of children of recent immigrants, the beleaguered school district is going to have to build a new school every two weeks just to keep up." (emphasis added) Californians are fleeing to Colorado in large because of the stressful social conditions, environmental degradation and craziness of overpopulation pressures brought by mass immigration. Seventy percent of a U.S. population growth of 72 million since 1970 was the result of mass immigration, with now approximately 1.1 million legal permanent additions per year and growing. We now have 420,000 permanent illegal entries a year and growing. Those numbers will rocket U.S. population from its current 275 million to more than half-a-billion within the near future. No amount of "smart growth" can defend Colorado from such incoming numbers. The four topics senator Campbell discussed at his town meeting were immigration, housing, transportation and concerns related to public access to federal lands. The latter three topics are directly related to overpopulation and overpopulation, by inference, to immigration. The senator seemed unable to connect those dots. It's often said-with little thought and no perspective-"America is a country of immigrants", implying any amount of immigration, regardless of the numbers, is traditional and proper. From 1776 to 1976 America averaged 236,000 immigrants, annually. That number included the great immigrating numbers during the turn of the century's Great Wave, when America was industrializing and still expanding west, requiring greater numbers. From 1925 to 1965 the U.S. averaged 178,000 a year. Contrasting those averages with today's non-traditional immigration engorgement should provide a perspective usually absent from a debate mired in platitudes and charged with acrimony. Incredibly, there are proposals now receiving serious consideration in Congress to push immigration numbers even higher. The U.S.Census Bureau tells us if today-right now-we were to adopt a sensible immigration policy consistent with the Bureau's definition of replacement numbers, a balance of in-migration with out-migration, we still would not stabilize our population until, at best, 327 million-52 million additions. Without such a population-stabilizing policy, a catastrophic, human pile-on of 571 million to 1.2 billion will be our century's end. It is acting on an illusion of a prosperous economy to foreclose our children's future through overpopulation created by mass immigration. America is full. Mass immigration is not Smart Growth. Mike McGarry Colorado Alliance for Immigration reform (CAIR) Cc: Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell Home |