Global Climate Change: US immigration and its environmental effect
Surya B. Prasai
January 28, 2008
Recently during the Bali Summit on Global Climate Change, America faced a lot of heat from the developing countries despite its open approach to realistic and measurable environmental legislation. The US has been the first country to propose nearly 10 years back that a climate summit be held to discuss frankly the world´s burgeoning environmental problems and how it might affect migration, development and industrial production. The US is a country where immigration makes an important contribution to its national economy, but whose environmental effects were less well known, until now a whole range of demographers, scientists and environmentalists have started working closely with the EPA, Homeland Security and the US Immigration and Naturalisations Services.
Under the UNFCC, the Bali Summit sought to unite rich and poor nations to fight global warming by trying to evolve a new joint consensus on climate change policy, taking into consideration the encroaching migration and population growth spread. One should not forget the main thrust of the conference which was to find a follow-on agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. An interesting aspect of the Kyoto Protocol´s successor agreement concerns the issue of its impact on immigration to the US. The Kyoto protocol clearly stated that countries overshooting their targets in 2012 will have to make both the promised cuts and 30 percent more in a second period from 2013. However, there has been an increased volume of immigration from other parts of the world to the US, which might affect the UNFCC's philosophical bearing on an important fact that so far neither developed nor developing nations have found legally binding as reduction targets for their greenhouse gasses during the 2008-12 commitment period.
The predictable outcome at Bali was a refusal to accept mandatory emissions targets. Countries were considered the new global power houses such as China and India, already have opposed measures that might impinge on their efforts to tackle poverty and this might have had a sweeping influence on the views of other industrialized counties as well. But then, immigration has a definite effect on binding emissions quotas. Both developed and developing countries are able to earn credits, known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CMD), to offset against their targets . It is thought by some scholars and immigration experts that the current high rate of immigration into the United States of America has had adverse environmental impacts upon America, and upon the world as a whole. This article is based on a research that documented immigration from ten countries that send the most immigrants to America. Some from Eurasia region include, Russiam China, India and the Philippines.
It started off with an assumption, for example, how to consider the impact of a typical family of seven, immigrating from a country where their owning a car was highly unlikely. When they come to America they are likely to acquire cars (0.76 cars per family member). For every mile they drive, they pollute and deplete resources that could have been relatively unaffected had they continued their prior lifestyle. The act of border crossing enables them to make lifestyle changes that adversely affect the environment; by becoming Americans they adopt the consumption and pollution patterns of the world's most environmentally destructive lifestyle. This in turn causes changes in certain key environmental indicators caused by immigration.
Although Americans have traditionally ignored many of the effects of immigration, America is a land of immigrants. In its past rich history, resources were abundant, pollution seemed insignificant, and it was easy to accommodate new Americans. In today's world, Americans are exceeding a long-term carrying capacity for more and more resources. "Carrying Capacity" refers to the number of individuals a region can support without degrading the natural, economic, cultural, and social environment over the long term. According to these group of experts, many biologists and ecologists believe that we are now living beyond the Earth's long-term carrying capacity. And so, it is becoming less and less reasonable to ignore the effects of our extremely rapid and unsustainable population growth. The United States is growing much faster than any other industrialized nation. It adds about 3 million people every year. At this rate, its population will double in about 60 years. California could double in 35 years and so too other states in the east coast.
American demographer and immigration scholar, Leon Bouvier, has done extensive study on this issue since the early 1970s, and believes fully half of America´s recent population growth has come from immigration. The United States admits more legal immigrants than the rest of the world combined. In 1990 and 1991 the US for instance admitted 4 million immigrants. This figure includes legalizations of people who entered illegally. But then, the United States Government Accountability Office estimates that "between 400,000 and 700,000 illegal immigrants entered the United States each year since 1992." A substantial portion did so by crossing the United States–Mexico border and to a lesser extent the United States-Canada border. Today, American immigration rate is about eight times its past emigration rate. America´s EPA has expressed recent concern that America´s fertility is now at replacement level. If Americans ignore carrying capacity constraints and project the current rates into the future, they will reach the mathematically unavoidable conclusion that its population would grow forever. But of course, no ecosystem can survive unending population growth from any species, and certainly not ours.
One should not forget that immigration has far-reaching effects on American society where the positives are stressed and the negativities only discussed. A strong taboo exists in not discussing openly the effects of illegal immigration, since everyone who came here was an immigrant in the start. But the simple fact is that immigration has important and frequently negative effects upon its schools and prisons, its national social security system ad and health care management, its job climate and burgeoning economy. But where the environment is concerned, America as an industrialized and globally responsive country has a unique set of problems as well. The one and most obvious reason people migrate to the U.S. is to improve their standard of living. This will change the impact they have on various natural resources. In other words, immigrants change their consumption and pollution patterns.
Often, it is easy to quantify these changes - just measure their resource impact both before and after migration, and then compute the percentage change: The percentage change in pollution or depletion rate for one resource = per capita rate - sending country's per capita rate) x 100 divided by sending country's per capita rate. For example. consider someone who migrates from a hypothetical country where the average ChloroFlouroCarbon (CFC) emission per capita is 0.02 metric tons. When that person comes to America emission increases to 0.52 metric tons. That person's resource impact has increased by 2500%. The calculation is simple: (.52 - .02) x 100 divided by .02
Current immigration trends to the US show that for ten of the world´s largest immigrant sending countries from where the immigrants are sourced, it enormously increases per capita pollution and depletion rates. Much more importantly though, the heaviest load most immigrants place on the environment is their high birth rate. Most come from countries with high, above replacement-level fertility (which caused many of the problems that made them emigrate in the first place). When they come to America they bring the large-family preference with them. The improved opportunities, and the social welfare net available in the United States allows them to more fully realize their family-size goals. Of course, adverse environmental impact is directly proportional to the number of people who pollute in a given environment.
Lately, the overall environmental consumption patterns of recent immigrants are very likely to soon resemble those of similar groups of previous immigrants and those of native-born Americans. There is also a need to focus on social or economic behavior and predict crime rates, tax payments, welfare costs, unemployment due to job displacement, incarceration rates, education and medical costs, and so forth. Past assessments of immigration impact have traditionally ignored many of the social and economic impacts. This is neither realistic nor acceptable for a country with serious social and economic problems. Newcomers from certain sending countries are likely to place much lighter or heavier loads on certain components of the U.S. infrastructure than are others. America is analyzing these loads clearly. Any rational immigration policy should consider factors such as skills, age, medical condition, income, criminal record, education level, and most importantly the sheer number of immigrants.
Recent U.S. immigration policies have been created with some consideration for their adverse impact upon America´s environment. US immigration policy still favors, in a world of increased competitiveness, cheap labor, expanded markets, and increased public-private sector industrial competitiveness. In the future, there is discussion within IANS and Homeland Security to also accommodate new immigrant standards of living and how they might impact on environmental use and global receptivity to protocols such as the Kyoto Protocol which Americans believe do not come as high as their own EPA standards. However, there is a lack of expertise in this field of research in the US and might have to draw upon foreign scholars and experts for more detailed analyses. American think tank authorities already accept the fact that the environmental community's admirable efforts to reduce its consumption and pollution must take stronger recognition of immigrant families consumption patters. As the US government expands its global immigration diversification campaign, there is also the need to broach issues such as enacting serious incentives to reduce environmental consumption, pollution, or population mobility, until the effects are fully known attuned to the global environmental green house gas reduction movement in place in North America.
(The writer is an independent global strategic communications, media and international development consultant with a cross-sectoral background in HIV/AIDS international impact mitigation, global environment protection, gender mainstreaming, and assessing international labor mobility. he is also a Global Discussant and Commentator for Google's Environment Professionals´ Group: Water, Climate Change and Biodiversity Information Network. He is located at Maryland, US and can be reached at just_1_idea@hotmail.com)
Under the UNFCC, the Bali Summit sought to unite rich and poor nations to fight global warming by trying to evolve a new joint consensus on climate change policy, taking into consideration the encroaching migration and population growth spread. One should not forget the main thrust of the conference which was to find a follow-on agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. An interesting aspect of the Kyoto Protocol´s successor agreement concerns the issue of its impact on immigration to the US. The Kyoto protocol clearly stated that countries overshooting their targets in 2012 will have to make both the promised cuts and 30 percent more in a second period from 2013. However, there has been an increased volume of immigration from other parts of the world to the US, which might affect the UNFCC's philosophical bearing on an important fact that so far neither developed nor developing nations have found legally binding as reduction targets for their greenhouse gasses during the 2008-12 commitment period.
The predictable outcome at Bali was a refusal to accept mandatory emissions targets. Countries were considered the new global power houses such as China and India, already have opposed measures that might impinge on their efforts to tackle poverty and this might have had a sweeping influence on the views of other industrialized counties as well. But then, immigration has a definite effect on binding emissions quotas. Both developed and developing countries are able to earn credits, known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CMD), to offset against their targets . It is thought by some scholars and immigration experts that the current high rate of immigration into the United States of America has had adverse environmental impacts upon America, and upon the world as a whole. This article is based on a research that documented immigration from ten countries that send the most immigrants to America. Some from Eurasia region include, Russiam China, India and the Philippines.
It started off with an assumption, for example, how to consider the impact of a typical family of seven, immigrating from a country where their owning a car was highly unlikely. When they come to America they are likely to acquire cars (0.76 cars per family member). For every mile they drive, they pollute and deplete resources that could have been relatively unaffected had they continued their prior lifestyle. The act of border crossing enables them to make lifestyle changes that adversely affect the environment; by becoming Americans they adopt the consumption and pollution patterns of the world's most environmentally destructive lifestyle. This in turn causes changes in certain key environmental indicators caused by immigration.
Although Americans have traditionally ignored many of the effects of immigration, America is a land of immigrants. In its past rich history, resources were abundant, pollution seemed insignificant, and it was easy to accommodate new Americans. In today's world, Americans are exceeding a long-term carrying capacity for more and more resources. "Carrying Capacity" refers to the number of individuals a region can support without degrading the natural, economic, cultural, and social environment over the long term. According to these group of experts, many biologists and ecologists believe that we are now living beyond the Earth's long-term carrying capacity. And so, it is becoming less and less reasonable to ignore the effects of our extremely rapid and unsustainable population growth. The United States is growing much faster than any other industrialized nation. It adds about 3 million people every year. At this rate, its population will double in about 60 years. California could double in 35 years and so too other states in the east coast.
American demographer and immigration scholar, Leon Bouvier, has done extensive study on this issue since the early 1970s, and believes fully half of America´s recent population growth has come from immigration. The United States admits more legal immigrants than the rest of the world combined. In 1990 and 1991 the US for instance admitted 4 million immigrants. This figure includes legalizations of people who entered illegally. But then, the United States Government Accountability Office estimates that "between 400,000 and 700,000 illegal immigrants entered the United States each year since 1992." A substantial portion did so by crossing the United States–Mexico border and to a lesser extent the United States-Canada border. Today, American immigration rate is about eight times its past emigration rate. America´s EPA has expressed recent concern that America´s fertility is now at replacement level. If Americans ignore carrying capacity constraints and project the current rates into the future, they will reach the mathematically unavoidable conclusion that its population would grow forever. But of course, no ecosystem can survive unending population growth from any species, and certainly not ours.
One should not forget that immigration has far-reaching effects on American society where the positives are stressed and the negativities only discussed. A strong taboo exists in not discussing openly the effects of illegal immigration, since everyone who came here was an immigrant in the start. But the simple fact is that immigration has important and frequently negative effects upon its schools and prisons, its national social security system ad and health care management, its job climate and burgeoning economy. But where the environment is concerned, America as an industrialized and globally responsive country has a unique set of problems as well. The one and most obvious reason people migrate to the U.S. is to improve their standard of living. This will change the impact they have on various natural resources. In other words, immigrants change their consumption and pollution patterns.
Often, it is easy to quantify these changes - just measure their resource impact both before and after migration, and then compute the percentage change: The percentage change in pollution or depletion rate for one resource = per capita rate - sending country's per capita rate) x 100 divided by sending country's per capita rate. For example. consider someone who migrates from a hypothetical country where the average ChloroFlouroCarbon (CFC) emission per capita is 0.02 metric tons. When that person comes to America emission increases to 0.52 metric tons. That person's resource impact has increased by 2500%. The calculation is simple: (.52 - .02) x 100 divided by .02
Current immigration trends to the US show that for ten of the world´s largest immigrant sending countries from where the immigrants are sourced, it enormously increases per capita pollution and depletion rates. Much more importantly though, the heaviest load most immigrants place on the environment is their high birth rate. Most come from countries with high, above replacement-level fertility (which caused many of the problems that made them emigrate in the first place). When they come to America they bring the large-family preference with them. The improved opportunities, and the social welfare net available in the United States allows them to more fully realize their family-size goals. Of course, adverse environmental impact is directly proportional to the number of people who pollute in a given environment.
Lately, the overall environmental consumption patterns of recent immigrants are very likely to soon resemble those of similar groups of previous immigrants and those of native-born Americans. There is also a need to focus on social or economic behavior and predict crime rates, tax payments, welfare costs, unemployment due to job displacement, incarceration rates, education and medical costs, and so forth. Past assessments of immigration impact have traditionally ignored many of the social and economic impacts. This is neither realistic nor acceptable for a country with serious social and economic problems. Newcomers from certain sending countries are likely to place much lighter or heavier loads on certain components of the U.S. infrastructure than are others. America is analyzing these loads clearly. Any rational immigration policy should consider factors such as skills, age, medical condition, income, criminal record, education level, and most importantly the sheer number of immigrants.
Recent U.S. immigration policies have been created with some consideration for their adverse impact upon America´s environment. US immigration policy still favors, in a world of increased competitiveness, cheap labor, expanded markets, and increased public-private sector industrial competitiveness. In the future, there is discussion within IANS and Homeland Security to also accommodate new immigrant standards of living and how they might impact on environmental use and global receptivity to protocols such as the Kyoto Protocol which Americans believe do not come as high as their own EPA standards. However, there is a lack of expertise in this field of research in the US and might have to draw upon foreign scholars and experts for more detailed analyses. American think tank authorities already accept the fact that the environmental community's admirable efforts to reduce its consumption and pollution must take stronger recognition of immigrant families consumption patters. As the US government expands its global immigration diversification campaign, there is also the need to broach issues such as enacting serious incentives to reduce environmental consumption, pollution, or population mobility, until the effects are fully known attuned to the global environmental green house gas reduction movement in place in North America.
(The writer is an independent global strategic communications, media and international development consultant with a cross-sectoral background in HIV/AIDS international impact mitigation, global environment protection, gender mainstreaming, and assessing international labor mobility. he is also a Global Discussant and Commentator for Google's Environment Professionals´ Group: Water, Climate Change and Biodiversity Information Network. He is located at Maryland, US and can be reached at just_1_idea@hotmail.com)
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