immigration

The Shunning of Immigration Critics by the BBC, ABC and CBC. See also CBC Townhall meeting to be stacked with immigration advocates The Shunning of Immigration Critics by the BBC, ABC and CBC By Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada Thursday, 28 February 2008 Originally published by Canada Free Press (canadafreepress.com) Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes the population question taboo and the pro-immigration stance the default position? Is there an intrinsic bias, and if so, where is it coming from? The journalists, the presenters, the researchers, the producers or the higher-ups? Is state media more captive of political correctness than the private media? In attempting to answer some of these questions it is thought useful to first review two fascinating accounts, one about the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC), another about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) and finally a short summary of the disgraceful record of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In "The Treason of the BBC" the late Jack Parsons argued that "The BBC has been systematically excluding virtually all material on the question of basic population policy." This while "our present government has adopted a policy (without discussion or mandate) of deliberately increasing our numbers by about one million every five years," making Britain the fastest growing country in Europe with a population density almost twice that of China. Yet the BBC allowed Beverly Hughes, Minister of Immigration, to "blandly repeat, unchallenged, the government's mindless policy of continued mass immigration to meet the alleged needs of the economy." Much in the same way that Home Secretary Charles Clark was granted a free pass to say that there were 'no obvious limits' to net migration and rapid growth. Parsons asks, "How can BBC claims about the carrying capacity of the prison system and its "overpopulation" be made so openly, so effortlessly, so devoid of fear and moral opprobrium, while not the slightest hint can ever be allowed to slip out vis a vis the vastly more important case of the carrying capacity and numbers of the nation as a whole?" He is not accusing those who run the BBC of criminal activity but "colluding in a very Great Betrayal, fostering the myth that human numbers have so little consequence that there is no need to take them seriously." "The charge I am leveling at all executive levels of the BBC as a corporate body concerns what I am convinced is coercive, institutionalized bias which for years has prevented virtually all BBC news of, and discussion about, a literally vital object, the long-term balance between human numbers, resources and the quality of life.this was not always so, but has been the case for at least 15 years. The signs of population myopia were apparent to Parsons in 1967 when he asked the BBC why it was so concerned about the Tory Canyon oil-tanker spill disaster but so unconcerned about the doubling of the world's population in 30 years. Since the early seventies "a steady and insidious process among governing circles, opinion-formers, the greater bulk of the media, including the BBC, has built a powerful and near universal censorship, by consent that the absolutely fundamental ecology question, the need for a sustainable balance between numbers and resources---is almost totally ignored. The sad corollary of this is that mass migration---since it has a major and obvious impact on the overall population situation---cannot be rationally discussed either." Parsons, in a letter to a BBC Complaints Unit, asks, "Dare one hope that, one of these days, someone in the higher echelons of the BBC will screw his/her courage to the sticking point and actually issue and follow through on a set of instructions that free the BBC---and hence the nation-from this appalling and near-totally disabling taboo." He is given to wonder "Why does this large, wealthy, powerful, highly prestigious institution cringe so abjectly at the very idea of free speech in the realm of discourse?" And why the taboo? "Has there been an explicit but secret directive to all producers to steer clear of the subject? Has this policy been built up by means of nods, winks and frowns on high; or does it stem from tacit acceptance by all concerned at the prevailing orthodoxy in the wider society?" Four things are needed to reform the BBC according to Parsons' prescription. Firstly, there needs to be major change in 'media Zeitgeist' that will permit a Population Glasnost. Secondly, the BBC needs to "stop cowering beneath its cloak of political correctness" and by honest analysis foster the emergence of a mature, ecologically informed electorate. Thirdly, the BBC needs to hire population experts. "Some BBC presenters who have an overweening confidence in their qualifications start laying down the law on those population topics which are allowed a mention, and in the process frequently display their ignorance. They pick up and mindlessly repeat half-baked notions about alleged labour shortages and pension problems, and swallow hook, line and sinker any free-floating opinions about how much better things will continue to become as numbers inexorably swell." Fourthly, it would be nice if the BBC followed its own Producer Guidelines. "Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All BBC programmes and services should be open-minded, fair and show a respect for truth. No significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented at the BBC." Until then, however, its Motto will remain that of the Three allegedly Wise Monkeys: See no population problem! Hear no population problem! Speak no population problem! Mark O'Connor, poet and one-time National Vice President of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP, renamed Sustainable Population Australia - SPA), has made a similar assessment of the ABC. In his upcoming book, "Overloading Australia", O'Connor concedes that the ABC is critical to Australian democracy and is able to speak to the people---"and often does". "But the ABC has in some parts of its news and current affairs sections failed to provide objectivity or fairness to portray debates or news coverage relating to population, immigration or economics." It is living the Comfortable Lie-that growth is good and sustainable, and the mass immigration that fuels it must continue. "The fact must be faced. There is something deeply wrong in some parts of it." O'Connor asserts that "issues and news items that require at least occasional coverage have been ignored. These issues certainly have reached the initial attention of those researchers who filter stories up the chain. Thus we are forced to speak of a given ABC program 'suppressing' stories even if many or most of those in a given unit were unaware this was going on. But there certainly is bias." Even if outside observers will never be able to locate its precise source. He offers some examples of this bias. The ABC collaborated with the bipartisan support of high immigration by suppressing most of the debate and repeatedly gave airtime to propagandists who claimed that our 'shamefully low immigration quotas' were 'proof of racism'. The inconvenient fact that Australia had the highest per capita intake of immigrants in the world when these brazen assertions were made was never raised by the corporation to challenge them. And "among its many acts of censorship, ABC TV News suppressed the fact that the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Democrats had long been calling for zero net migration. Yet as soon as the One Nation party announce a zero net migration policy, the ABC cited it as "racism". O'Connor speculates as to why the ABC behaves in this manner. "The ABC's failure through nearly three decades to deal with population issues-the most important matter facing Australia today--- may have less to do with individuals than with a pervasive institutional culture." Nevertheless, "if there are such persons blocking the debate, then it is assuredly time they were persuaded to move on to other areas where their biases will do less harm." He concludes, "The ABC has a problem with its news service and current affairs programs. It may not be able to rectify past unfairness, but it needs urgently to offer guarantees that the censorship will cease, and that at least in future those who disagree with high immigration or with 'birth-bribes' will receive equal time on its programs." New 'balance and accountability' guidelines announced by management in October of 2006 "will not address ABC News' pro-growth, pro-natalist, pro-conventional economic views." Can what has so far been said of the BBC and the ABC be said of the CBC as well? In one word, yes, and more. While some regional centres have attempted to bring more balance to immigration issues, CBC Radio, the National centre in Toronto and the Vancouver centre have emphatically not. The corporation has refused to engage the public on the two questions that they keep asking: Why is the government importing more people per capita than any other country than the world and what effect is this infux, which gives us the highest growth rate of any G8 nation, having on our economic, cultural and environmental health? Timidity and cowardice are not the exclusive province of CBC journalists, but only private media outlets have on occasion exposed abuses of the immigration system and questioned the country's high immigration intake. The CBC, on the other hand, has done what it can to promote mass immigration on the basis of its misinterpretation of its 1991 legislated mandate to promote "multiculturalism". Somehow there is an equation in corporate logic of the stated "CBC Vision" to reflect "the cultural diversity of our people" with support for mass immigration. But apparently the promotion of a diversity of cultures is quite different than the promotion of a diversity of opinions. Those very many Canadians who voice negative concerns about immigration are simply denied airtime by the people they subsidize. It is indeed an impertinent supplicant who holds out one hand to ask for public funding while clenching the other in a fist to drive into the mouth of the taxpayer who dares to challenge the corporate line on immigration. And yet, the CBC allows generous airtime and interviews with pro-immigration groups, so that they may in turn, as a quid pro quo, advertise for the non-commercial CBC. So to partiality and deceit one can therefore add corruption to the list of CBC immigration vices. So what then is the remedy? Suffice it to say that the CBC's commitment to mass immigration and multiculturalism comes at the cost of balanced, honest journalism. Immigration Watch Canada demands that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage should order the CBC executive to answer for this conflict of interest and to terminate the corporation's corrupt arrangements with the immigration industry, its blatant pro-immigration advocacy and the employment of people who engage in it. Such measures would seek not to curb journalistic freedom, but journalistic abuse. And return public broadcasting to the public. Then once again, the National Broadcaster would offer a forum where indeed "no significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented" and the exclusion of topics or the shunning of voices would be thought foreign to its corporate culture and democratic mission. It's time to end the conspiracy of silence against critiques of immigration and population growth.

Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada, follows the money trail in the US Presidential primaries.
Note: all dollar figures given in following article are in US dollars.

Also published in Canada Free Press on 11 Mar 08.

Popular opposition to immigration ignored by U. S. legislators

The numbers are unequivocal. For a decade polls have consistently recorded a wide discrepancy between the attitude of ordinary Americans toward immigration and the attitude of those who govern them. And the gap has been growing. In 2002 a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 60% of the public thought current immigration levels to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," as compared to only 14% of the country's leadership. This 46% gap compared to a 37% gap revealed by a 1998 poll. 70% felt that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign policy goal compared to only 22% of the political elite_{#moneytrail-fn1">1}.

Polling done by TM, inc. in October 2006 confirmed these results. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill (S2611) supporting a large increase in legal immigration, 68% of voters thought the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, was too high, 34 times the number who said it was too "low". 71% said that low paying jobs could easily be filled if employers paid American workers decent wages rather than import low-skill labour. And 62% agreed with a statement that Canadian viewers of CBC immigration sob stories have frequently observed, "The media coverage of illegal immigrants is mostly devoted to human interest stories like how illegals risk their lives (to get here), rather than the costs they create and the Americans, particularly low-wage American workers, who may be harmed by their being here."

The polling company Inc./Woman Trend in October of 2006 found 66% in agreement that the population increase caused by the present level of immigration would negatively impact the environment. A Zogbylcis poll of April 2006 revealed that 67% of Americans wanted less immigration to promote the assimilation of those who were already here. A poll conducted a month earlier by the same company found that 60% wanted their congressional representative to support more restrictive immigration policies.

What is interesting about sampling public opinion about immigration is that no apparent or substantial fault lines appear between ethnic groupings. Now it is understandable that African-Americans, given their socio-economic standing, feel the direct brunt of illegal Hispanic labour competition , and would therefore take a severe position on the issue. In fact, 59% of black Californian voters favour imposing stiff penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens, (Field Poll, April 2006), and 66% of them favour building a border wall along major sections of the U.S./Mexico line.

Opposition to immigration embraced by non-European communities

But it would surprise some to learn, especially those like most American liberals, who are ignorant of Caesar Chavez's long standing fight against immigration, that 76% of Hispanics said in a December 2007 poll done by Arizona State University-Southwest that illegal immigration is a serious problem. Or that 53% of Latinos would change the 14th amendment so a child born to an illegal immigrant in America could not automatically become an American unless the other parent was a citizen. Or that 56% of Latinos favour increasing the number of border patrol agents by a third. Unfortunately, as former Mexican government advisor Fredo Arras-King observed, "American Latinos who criticize mass immigration tend not to organize, as they are especially targeted by pro-immigration Latino leaders."

Causes of disparity between attitudes of US citizens and their political leadership

The question that these poll results beg is why? Why the cleavage between leaders and led? The anti-immigration sentiment of America's middle and working class is easily accounted for. According to Centre for Immigration Studies data, in the decade preceding 2003, immigration increased the supply of people without a high school education by 21% and the supply of other workers by 4%. Rudimentary economic theory suggests that the more poorly skilled workers there are, the less money they'll make---a fact confirmed by the National Research Council in their findings that about half the drop in real wages for high school drop-outs from 1980 to 1994 was due to immigration. A report by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop when they work alongside new Hispanic immigrants. Harvard Professor Dr. George Borgias has accumulated similar data and has made the shocking assertion that American workers lose an incredible $152 billion per year in wages from immigration.

Immigration provides a ready-made source of cheap labour, by growing the labour pool it weakens the bargaining power of American-born workers and reduces the clout of their unions, if they still have them_{#moneytrail-fn2">2}. Medical benefits not borne by the employer are subsidized by the taxpayers who also pick up the educational costs of their children. Writer Rich Lowry made the best assessment: "No wonder corporate America loves our open borders: they serve as a kind of rolling reverse minimum wage law." And no wonder the late African-American liberal Congressman Barbara Jordan called for cutting back immigration in the 1990s. She was defending her constituency of low-income black workers, the first casualty of the corporate welfare program of high-level immigration, marketed by the left as "multicultural enrichment". Cultural diversity is the fig leaf of naked corporate exploitation.

So blue-collar attitudes to immigration are easily explained, ordinary people are simply following their class interests. And class interests can explain the open borders position taken up by America's opinion leaders and decision makers too. They are much more affluent and educated than the people they lead and attempt to influence, and feel no threat from the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies and gardeners or tip at fine restaurants. One thing is central to the understanding of the immigration divide in the United States, and that is to divest oneself of the almost universal and persistent belief that somehow the Democrats are white knights who represent the working class, the poor and the environment, while the Republicans are the incarnation of power, privilege and plutocracy. To assist you in this task you should be apprised of the following.

A TM Inc poll of 2006 disclosed that those most apt to be satisfied with the current level of immigration which is killing American working class living standards were 25-34 year old liberal college graduates and professionals who identified with the Democratic Party. The same poll found though that it was 35-44 year old conservative Republicans who favoured large-scale round-ups of illegal immigrants. That profiles the supporters of the pro and anti-immigration positions, but the current party leadership positions could best be ascertained by the fact that as of the end of January 2008, all Republican contenders rejected the legalization of "undocumented" immigrants now in the U. S., while the Democrats continue to support it.

Corporate donations flow toward pro-immigration candidates ...

The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by a look at campaign financing. McCain, Clinton and Obama are, to put it bluntly, Wall Street candidates. The big banks, the financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity firms pay the pipers. But, according the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) (www.opensecrets.org), the Democrats are the clear favourite. Hillary Clinton took in $106.1 million and Barack Obama $102.1 million for all of 2007. McCain received susbstantially less at $41,102,178. Hillary Clinton received $1.3 million from private equity firms, while Obama received $1 million. McCain finished a distant fourth at $ 395,000. Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory.

Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal tax rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Clinton and Obama have also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests. Corporate law firms gave Clinton over $11 million and Obama over $ 9 million. McCain only got just over two and a half million dollars, the most for Republican candidates. As of February 22, 2008, bagmen have raised over $138 million for Obama, over $134 million for Clinton, and over $53 million for McCain.

Most interesting is the disposition of "Silicon" money. Between 1998 and 2006 almost $83 million in political contributions in the form of individuals donations, PAC contributions, and soft money were made by 40 technology companies. Amounting on average to just $295,708 per company per year of lobbying, it was money well spent. The concession Bill Gates wanted, the H-1B Visa program that allows cheap technology workers into the country, reaped profits a hundred times that investment. But Microsoft wanted to be more certain the fix was in. Over that that seven year period they gave $5,7888,286, with half of Congress on its payroll it would seem. AT+T donated $3,504,773, Apple $3,620,823, and Vericon $4,237,884_{#moneytrail-fn3">3}. Data for the 2008 campaign showed Obama at $981,459 and Clinton $954,325 as the leading recipients of "computer-internet" donations, with McCain getting a third of their take. To put all of this in perspective, Hillary Clinton, the great white hope of progressive liberalism, received only 11% of her PAC money from labour, but 56% from business. It would be difficult to imagine that the AFL-CIO could match the donation dollars put up by Wall bankers and law firms.

The most revealing fact to be gleaned from presidential campaign donation statistics is one found when donation records are subjected to sector analysis. If one studies 12 business or professional sectors of American society from Agribusiness to Construction to Health to Labour etc., there is one sector that is clearly salient---the "financial-real estate" sector. It has contributed over $73 million to various campaigns, $25 million more than any other sector.

Real estate interests (including mortgage brokers, homebuilders and property developers) gave $4.8 million to Clinton, $2.7 million to Obama and $1.9 million to McCain. The conventional interpretation of their motive is that they want access to the winner when an expected crackdown over predatory lending and a troubled housing finance system reaches the top of the legislative agenda. But there is an alternative, or at least supplementary explanation. One that has been advanced by Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman. The land tenure system that characterizes Anglo-American societies encourages speculation, and much money is to be made simply by population growth. Newman has written extensively to demonstrate that real estate developers are key players in lobbying for mass immigration. US campaign donation records seem to vindicate her hypothesis, as does the fact that a nation like France is close to achieving population stability because the real estate development industry cannot exist as an agent for growth, given that land cannot consistently be reduced to a speculative commodity largely because of the way tenure is arranged_{#moneytrail-fn4">4}.

... whilst anti-immigration contenders miss out

What then became of the candidates who challenged the corporate open borders agenda? Their campaigns died from lack of funds. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado is a case in point. Wall Street likes pro-immigration candidates for obvious reasons and so they will reward those who sing their tune. Tancredo insisted on singing an objectionable note, like a three year moratorium on immigration. So he paid the price and collected just $6 million dollars or less than 6% of what Clinton received by year's end and was forced to end his campaign. Clinton at that time was Wall Street's anointed one, someone who, in the words of Numbers USA, "consistently pressed for U. S. population growth, immigration and foreign labour importation." But of course such an agenda of unabashed greed needs always to be camoflauged with a politician's candy floss, the spin is what they are purchased for. So Clinton obliged her corporate donors by saying that "we should always be open to legal immigration-it reforms, it makes us better." Well, it certainly makes a few of us richer Hillary, doesn't it, like your donors and supporters, the most well-heeled of either party!

Corporate America gets what it has paid for from open-border legislators

An examination of Clinton's voting record should confirm that big business is getting what it paid for. Clinton was co-sponsor of Bill S-2109 to help employees import cheap high tech workers while the big law firms who give to her campaign are counseling them how to use the legal system to avoid hiring qualified U.S. workers. Her support of Senate bill 2109 helped expedite the processing of the infamous H-1B visas that depress wages and displace workers. She supported an amnesty of illegal agricultural workers (S bill 1340) and another one of a similar nature (S. bill 2137) that would have brought an amnesty to another 860,000 workers not counting family. Clinton's support of Kennedy's bill S 2381 would have meant amnesty to almost all illegal aliens. Her numerous attempts to sponsor "shamnesty" bills is reflective of a comment she made to a man who said that his wife was an illegal immigrant. "No woman is illegal", Clinton replied.

If Hillary's record is atrocious, it is doubtful if Obama's is any better. His positions seem almost indistinguishable from Clinton's, the difference being more one of emphasis than policy. He supports employer verification of employee identity to deter the hiring of illegals, she doesn't. She favours lower legal immigration intakes, he doesn't. Obama's main focus is the human rights and economic needs---of those knocking at America's door wanting to come in and those already in, legally or illegally. On the Senate floor he stated on May 23, 2007 that "Where we can re-unite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with skills our economy needs, we should." This was an ominous declaration. Since the law was changed in 1965 to create the so-called family re-unification system, "chain migration"---where an immigrant sponsors several others who in turn sponsors several more---has caused the numbers under this category to spiral out of control. In 36 years the number of immediate relatives admitted was over 13 times higher than it was when the law was first enacted to almost one-half million per year.

An Obama policy statement maintains support for "improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America." But H-1B visa holders are not paid as much as Americans, and even Microsoft admits that salaries have not kept pace with inflation. That would do much to explain a so-called labour shortage in the field. As for Obama's goal of attracting the best and the brightest, the vast majority of H-1B holders make in the $60,000 range (Intel's median salary is $65,000), but top talents in the industry capture more than $100,000. And ironically the great majority of awards for innovation have fallen to Americans, indicating that the industry is not shackled by a domestic cognitive deficit that needs relief by a massive injection of foreign Einsteins. The quest for the best and brightest of overseas talent is a smokescreen for the tech corporations' prime motive, the hunt not for the brightest minds but those that come at the cheapest price. And the H-1B program doesn't even require employers to give hiring priority to qualified American citizens, and they have an arsenal of legal measures to reject those who apply. If one is given to wonder why a U.S. Congress would expand the H-1B program in 2000 when their employers, the American taxpayers, most of whom are workers, were not its obvious beneficiaries, Utah Senator Bob Bennett's comment would be informational: "There were, in fact, a whole lot (of Congressmen) against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public."

John McCain, the only Republican contender left standing, were it not for his title as waterboy for Iraq, could run for the Democrats. He got the ball rolling in 1986 when he signed the 1986 amnesty for illegals and thereby gave the green light for aspiring border-crossers who knew that American law could be violated with impunity and trespass retroactively forgiven. He ran his nomination race on a full-throttle amnesty platform until he found religion earlier this year and back-pedaled. He has voted for S-1639 to double legal immigration, to continue chain migration and the ridiculous annual jackpot lottery of 50,000 applicants from third world nations called "Diversity Immigration". McCain's problem is that he is a dark horse and Wall Street, while hedging its bets, likes to back winners. So his take of their money is but one-third of Obama's and Clinton's.

Ron Paul is a footnote, like Tancredo. His $32 million was not enough and he is the only one who doesn't know its all over, apparently. Paul's anti-immigration stance has not been as comprehensive or as strident as Tancredo's, but firm nonetheless, as reflected in his statement that a nation without secure borders is no nation at all. But Paul is a walking/talking contradiction. While he favours the the usual gamut of measures to protect American workers from the competition of the illegal invasion---border security, employee verification, no amnesty, no welfare for illegals, no alien birthright citizenship etc.---he is also a libertarian in the Friedman tradition. Leaving the working class alone to fend for itself against an unregulated free market is like trusting a ravenous beast to mind your children. With closed borders and free markets Ron Paul offers American workers a goblet of hemlock mixed with green tea for good health. Paul thus falls between two stools. He's no good for Wall Street and he's no good for Main Street either. A curious fellow.

Failure of immigration opponents to address its causes

The most disappointing feature of the American immigration dialogue is its one-dimensional nature. Two critical elements are virtually absent from the arguments presented by both open and closed borders advocates. One is that both sides talk about what attracts Mexican labour to America, and therefore the measures for turning them away. But no one talks about the conditions in Mexico that drove people to take desperate risks to get to the United States and who is responsible for those conditions. When is America going to look in the mirror and admit that the larcenous NAFTA agreement and rapacious rampage of multinational corporations undercut a viable Mexican economy and the basis for a decent life for so many Mexicans? When are American politicians and opinion-makers going to acknowledge that much of American prosperity is built on the backs of those people and others like them in the hemisphere and the world? All the measures proposed by the anti-immigrationist forces are necessary, but by no means sufficient to defend the borders. America cannot play King Canute and hold back a tide of billions. It must reduce the tide by ensuring that the billions do not want to leave home. Scrap the trade agreements, the IMF, SAPs (Structural Adjustment Policies) and offer restitution to rebuild economies that have been pillaged_{#moneytrail-fn5">5}.

Carrying capacity of U. S. overlooked in debate

Aside from NAFTA, there is another crucial phrase missing from US immigration discussions. Carrying capacity. Each year the United States adds the equivalent of another Chicago. During the Bush administration it has grown by 21 million people. Immigrants, their children and grandchildren will account for 82% of all population growth in the years leading up to 2050, when the country will reach a staggering 438 million if this growth rate is not slowed. Some worry about assimilation, since the share of non-Hispanic whites will fall from 67 to 47%. Obviously the labour market is the focus of most, who would share Samuel Gompers's conviction that "immigration is fundamentally a labour issue." But full employment and economic prosperity in a culturally or linguistically cohesive America would be a pyrrhic accomplishment if such a nation were to rest on a collapsing ecosystem. Can America sustain half its current population when critical resource shortages appear or biodiversity services are compromised ? The works of analysts like David Pimental, Dale Pfeiffer and Richard Heinberg do not inform any Congressional debate about how many people the country should admit. Clearly a Population Plan is overdue.

The American people have spoken on immigration but the political elite will not listen because they are paid by their corporate benefactors not to listen. It is sad to see the world's greatest democratic experiment come to such grief. The Founding Fathers devised a system that they embedded in a constitution with mechanisms to counter-act the natural instinct of the political class to usurp power and exercise it as a permanent elite dominating pauperized subjects on the old European model. They counted on a "vigilant and manly spirit" that animates the American people to breath life and vigour into the constitution. But alas, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly foresee the power and the scale of Wall Street money.

In America today, anything's for sale, even democracy. I hear a Senator earmarked for the White House can be had, for, oh around 134-138 million. Sound right?

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
February 23/08

Footnotes

#moneytrail-fn1" id="moneytrail-fn1">1. See www.worldviews.org/detailreports/usreport/html/ch535.html, www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1402.html.

#moneytrail-fn2" id="moneytrail-fn2">2. See Tim Murray's article "Is it reactionary to oppose Immigration?" of 16 Dec 2007 at webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2240, candobetter.org/node/284l.

#moneytrail-fn3" id="moneytrail-fn3">3. See chart of political contributions from hi-tech companies at www.news.com/2009-1028-6050978.html.

#moneytrail-fn4" id="moneytrail-fn4">4. Refer to Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's year thesis "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France (PDF - 2.6MB) downloadable from candobetter.org/sheila.

#moneytrail-fn5" id="moneytrail-fn5">5. Refer, also to Tim Murray's article "Closing our borders can't mean turning our backs" of 25 October 2007 at candobetter.org/node/228.

Poet and author Mark O’Connor has written another important analysis of Australia’s ecological eclipse at the hands of the growth cult. While the continent is obviously unique in its botanical character with problems that don’t challenge Canadians, the similarities with Canada that O’Connor reveals in his description of the evolution of the growth ethic are simply astounding.

Like Canada, “Australia was, and still is, even though much trashed and abused, a treasure house of biodiversity,” toward which the people have a somewhat schizophrenic attitude. On the one hand, “Australians are genuinely proud of their wildlife…many people assign a very high, almost religious value to conserving nature”, as evidenced by their tolerance of crocodiles which make it impossible to swim in their waters. 10.7% of Australia is incorporated in a strategic network of parks.

Yet, O’Connor writes, “Attitudes to Australia’s biodiversity remain mixed.” It may be inspirational to watch them in flight but “people don’t appreciate kangaroos eating their crops.” Sadly Australian experience shows that democracy is not good at preserving other species---they don’t vote.  "(There is) a theme that runs through Australia’s ecological history: the clash between the desire to protect biodiversity versus the need of an ever-growing human population to make a quid from it.”

O’Connor reminds readers that Australia’s ecology was dynamic. While “we might prefer to praise the Aborigines’ achievement in living sustainably with the land for millennia, and contrast this with the damage eight generations of  European lifestyle have wrought,” Aboriginal hunters had already modified ecology by the fire regime they imposed before Europeans arrived. Paul Watson, it should be pointed out here, asserts that Aborigines killed off 85% of the continent’s megafauna before the British hit Botany Bay, an assertion that has been contested. Nevertherless, Watson is one of the very few Canadians not given to romantic illusions about indigenous stewardship of precious resources.

The foundation of Australia’s current ecological crisis, and that of Canada, is their false self-perception as vast empty lands desperately in need of more people: two bloated bulimics who look in the mirror and see themselves as Twiggy with lots of room to grow. The myth is best captured by Australia’s national anthem “Advance Australia Fair” when it says “For those who’ve come across the seas. We’ve boundless plains to share.”

But as O’Connor notes, Australia has only 6% of its land mass proven
as arable. For Canada it is 7% with soils marginal by European standards. As for wheat, because Australia provides 20% of the world’s wheat imports, feeding 40 million people, “boomers” argue that Australia could feed a far higher resident population than its current 21 million. But they forget that much of that foreign exchange is needed to pay for the fuel and nitrate fertilizer used for production, and soil loss, acidification and climate change will diminish yields. “Every tonne of wheat still costs some tones of eroded soil”, O’Connor observes.

Even so, with the drought tolerant wheat grown in fertile soils in a good year Australia produces less wheat than France, and in a bad year sometimes less than Britain. And all at the cost of ‘fascinating’ bio-regions cleared and species eliminated.

So if the big empty land in fact suffers from a limited carrying capacity, if food self-sufficiency is a myth, if biodiversity is taking a beating, why then does Australia seem in a frenzy to add to its numbers? (Canada could be asked the same question). Who drives growth? Qui Bono? Who Benefits?

The answer might be found in research done by the Australian Green Party that revealed that the governing Labor Party of New South Wales received $8.78 million in 1998-99 from property developers, while the opposition Coalition Parties received $6.35 million. Not surprisingly then, Sydney’s councils have been instructed to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people (24%) in 25 years so that Australia offers the paradox of a huge country with urban housing prices comparable to New York or London, where land prices double in a decade and its 1.5% population growth is higher than Indonesia’s and indeed many Third World countries.

“Local and even national newspapers run a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers---alternately with pieces about how we are desperately short of projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like.”

O’Connor cites Australia’s Anglo-Celtic property system for fuelling the drive to “fill the country with people” by rewarding private speculation in land. “By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.”

To footnote this observation, it should be noted that Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman has ably documented the relationship between the British property system and the population growth lobby on the one hand, and the French property system and the absence of anymeaningful lobby for growth in France on the other hand. Students of Canadian civic politics know that developers virtually own city councils. What sinister role do they play behind the scenes in framing federal immigration policy or influencing it? The Urban Futures Institute, a high profile Vancouver-based think tank, is a consistent cheerleader for massive immigration. Its former mouthpiece was “demographer” David Baxter who couched his arguments in demographic statistics to prove that he was in possession of a crystal ball. In fact, he had no credentials as a demographer. He was merely a front man for the real estate industry which fully funds the institute. He was guaranteed an interview by every media outlet when occasion demanded it.

Has any voice of caution or restraint been raised against this mad rush to ecological oblivion? Well there was the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-75 which reacted to the first Global Oil shock by limiting immigration and population growth. Then the Australian Academy of Science made a major public statement in 1994 that advised that Australia’s population not exceed 23 million and that immigration be half of what it was during the Hawke-Keating era. The Science Council of Canada issued a similar report in 1975 when it warned that Canada’s population should not go beyond 30 million. The government responded by abolishing the Science Council and then proceeding along a path that saw the land of frozen tundra, lakes and mountains fill up one-fifth of its Class 1 farmland with subdivisions and become a nation of 33 million with the fastest growth rate in the G8 group.

The Australian Democrats came out in favour of zero-net-migration, but the political culture was poisoned. Under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996, Australia was essentially a “plutocratic democracy” where voters were presented with a Hobson’s choice between parties who were “servants of business-growth lobbies”. While cognizant of conservationist sensibilities, “Hawke dared not offend the growth lobby.” But even the large immigrant communities were among the 73% of voters who in 1991 said immigration levels were too high, or the 71% in 1996 who held to this opinion. Again, Canadians have affected consistent opposition to immigration in the same proportions, but like Australians, have been presented with a solid parliamentary front in favour of a policy they detest.

But nevertheless, given the scale and persistence of this discontent, Labor’s spin-doctors needed to give the old myth of Australia, as an empty land, a make-over. There was no farmland available and urban land prices were beyond reach, so alright then, it would no longer be Australia’s manifest destiny to build a “great” nation but rather a “diverse” one. It would become a United Nations of ethnicities and races, sustained by permanent immigration, long after the pioneering period had passed. But the obsession with cultural diversity would trump concern for preserving biological diversity.

“Thus instead of being ashamed that we have lost so many of our marsupial species, many Australians on the left seem more ashamed that we do not have a flourishing Inuit or Bantu community in their particular city. Quite why it should be Australia’s duty to turn itself into a representative sample of the cultures of the earth is never explained. Instead, there are constant shouts that any reduction of immigration will lead us tumbling back into an abyss of ‘racism’ and ‘boring monoculturalsim’.”

“Hawke’s and Keating’s spin doctors even took advantage of the Anglo-Celtic guilt over having immigrated upon the Aboriginal tribes without their permission and violently displaced them. Somehow this became a further reason why high immigration, so long as it was no longer Anglo-Celtic, was essential­--as if inviting in the rest of the world would legitimize it.”

O’Connor forecasts that the incoming Labor government of Kevin Rudd will continue the traditional quest for economic growth, only addressing GHG issues if they do not compromise this goal. He compares Australia to “a cruise liner whose captain is required to sail in the direction chosen by a deck-steward whose priority is to keep the sun shining on the deckchairs in the saloon section, so that their occupants will order more drinks.”

The metaphor is an interesting one, for Canada too could be compared to a cruise liner: The HMS Ecological Titanic still robotically stopping to pick up more passengers as it ploughs forward toward the iceberg of over-population.

We may, albeit in diminished numbers, adapt to climate change, but we will not adapt to biodiversity collapse. O’Connor spoke of Australia’s botanical and ecological fragility, but this is what environmentalist Brishen Hoff said of Canada: “Our boreal forest continues to experience wholesale clearcutting and relentless road expansion. More water is being diverted from the Great Lakes watershed than what is being replenished, causing the highest lakes (Nipigon, Superior, etc.) to dramatically drop their water levels. I could go on with thousands of examples of species extinctions and worsening environmental quality right here in Ontario and Algoma-Manitoulin all because of human population growth.”

In fact most of the more than 500 threatened species dwell within the range of Canada’s major urban centres where they are imperiled by sprawling subdivisions, roughly 70% of which are occupied by immigrants. But remember, mass immigration is to be celebrated in Canada as, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “our great multicultural project.” Like Sydney, Vancouverites are told that they must move over and accommodate another 800,000 migrants in the coming 23 years (24% growth) and appreciate the newcomers for the “diversity” they bring. But at what cost this “cultural diversity”? An infinitely richer, more vital heritage. The biological diversity of the species that this growth will extinguish.

What’s the answer? O’Connor quotes Gordon Hocking of NSW: “As long as we stick with an economic system that needs to perpetually grow we will remain trapped on the road to ecological and climate disaster.” Brishen Hoff would add “None of these symptoms can be reversed without shrinking the size of our economy and then moving to a steady state economy.”

Bulimics gorge, then purge. Let’s hope our national binging ends soon and our demographic weight loss is progressive and incremental rather than dramatic and deadly.

Watch for Mark O’Connor’s upcoming book, “Overloading Australia”.

Tim Murray
Director of Immigration Watch Canada
8 January 2008

The deadline is fast approaching. Send in your submissions now. The first annual contest to establish who indeed is the most idiotic of the world's Green Parties is upon us. Many candidates were surveyed. The Swedes, the nutty Germans and Brits, the hypocritical Canadians and Australians and even the Green Party of the United States along with some of its discordant constituent parts. The competition for lunacy is fierce. Here are but a few of the contestants. First, let me present as my personal favourites, Canada's Greens. Their leader, Elizabeth May, argues that we should reduce our individual ecological footprint but at the same time import 300,000 more "footprints" each year just to strengthen our "cultural diversity". This "Great Multicultural Project" as she calls it, of course takes precedence over any project to protect biological diversity or constrain GHG emissions, which her 300,000 incoming footprints will increase. The Canadian Greens are a masterpiece of contradictions and confusion. Ontario leader Frank de Jong told us privately that Canada is overpopulated by factor of "four to ten". Yet he told others, including an Australia audience, that "population is a red herring". Now recently, on January 30th of 2008, he made the incredible assertion that "a higher population means a higher quality of life." Economic growth is no problem either. The size of the economy can increase ten fold, he maintains, only "through-put" matters. The party stands for Green taxes. Down with those antiquated fair and progressive income and capital gains taxes. But some officials like Frank Walton are waking up to the fact that low income Canadians aren't buying it. He now favours a hybrid mix of progressive and green taxes so that the poor don't pay the shot for punishing polluters and shifting to renewable technologies. That's the Canadians. Let's take a quick peek at other Green hypocrites. The British Green Party, at first blush, offers a radical departure in consciousness from its Canadian counterparts with this promise: "To promote debate on sustainable population levels for the UK, to include consideration of consumption and material comfort." (P-120) But then they say that "Richer regions and communities do not have the right to use migration controls to protect their privileges from others in the long term." Note that P-120 calls only for a debate, as the population skyrockets, because "the aim is to increase awareness of the issues-not to set specific population targets." In policy MG 101 the UK Greens acknowledge an impending human tsunami by saying that "there is likely to be mass migration of people escaping from the consequences of global warming, environmental degradation, resource shortage and population increase." So how do they propose to respond to this, besides of course to work for a fairer world that would lessen the urge to migrate? "We will progressively reduce UK immigration controls." They will do that in a multitude of ways. MG 402: " Families will not be divided by deportation." MG 403 "We will abolish the 'primary purpose' rule under which partners are refused entry if it is thought that the primary purpose of the relationship is for them to gain entry to the UK." MG 405 "Migrants illegally in the UK for over 5 years will be allowed to remain unless they pose a serious danger to public safety." MG 420 "We will resist all attempts to introduce a barrier around Europe shutting out non-Europeans or giving them more restricted rights of movement within Europe than European nationals." And in MG 454 the British Green Party has this to say about human trafficking: "The Government should grant a temporary right to stay in the country to anyone who has been trafficked or appears to have been trafficked. It should also recognize the right of those who have been trafficked to apply for a longer term or permanent immigrant status." With shameless invective, it labels as "racists of the far right" all those persons in the United Kingdom and Europe who favour increased immigration controls. The population of the United Kingdom, an island nation of 60 million acres, is currently 61 million and rising rapidly. It is obvious that under a Green Party administration, it would soon be 71 or 81 million barring an international resource or environmental crisis, in which event it would be even higher. What consumption levels would Britons have to tumble down to then to achieve sustainability? But let us save the best to last. After spending much time talking about the need for family planning, (P123, P124, P125, P126, P128), they declare in P106 that "The Green Party holds that the number of children people have should be a matter of free choice." That is brilliant. You need a licence to catch a certain number of fish and a drivers licence to operate a car within a certain speed limit but you can go ahead and have five kids on the dole and have them dump 100 metric tonnes of GHG into atmosphere because its your free choice. Yet polluters would no doubt face tough restrictions under a Green regime. The Irish Greens similarly project an image not of an environmental party but a party obsessed with human rights. Not once in their dense 13 page document on Immigration Policy do they mention carrying capacity or the ecological impact of all the asylum-seekers and immigrants that they want Ireland to embrace. They state that "The Green Party opposes any common asylum policy for the Union which results in more restrictions on asylum-seeking or in reducing rights for refugees (and) we strongly condemn the trend whereby the European Union is becoming a fortress on whose borders there are people dying in the hands of traffickers." The Greens denounced the Immigration Bill of 2004 as "flawed on account of the negative tone of the language used in it and the basic lack of provisions for family re-unification for non-nationals." And for the party effective integration of immigrants and their families is best promoted by granting them citizenship. But why does Ireland need immigrants? Economic orthodoxy provides the standard answer. In the words of an Irish Green Party policy statement: "The Central Statistics Office, in their report for 2006-36, suggests the State will continue to rely on strong inward migration to maintain economic growth. It forecasts that the economy will need 45,000 immigrant workers every year for the next 12 years to sustain economic growth." And then the Irish Greens pull out the old Chestnut that since those over 65 will in 2036 "comprise one fifth of the population rather than one tenth", it is important that " a progressive (sic) immigration policy will be in this country to ensure that the economy will be able to fund the necessary pension schemes, health and educational facilities into the future." The Irish Green Party, then, fully buys into the gospel of economic growth and the myth of immigration as a cure for an ageing population. Without debating the profound vacuity of their ideology, it is best simply to refer them to authors Richard Douthwaite, Herman Daly and Phil Mullan. Case closed. In declaring that "as a rapidly developing economy, Ireland needs migrant workers to provide essential skills and services", the Greens concede the game before it begins. They accept the necessity of a "rapidly developing economy", not thinking that on going economic growth will create labour shortages that once filled, will generate the growth that demands more immigrant labour. And this mad spiral will degrade the quality of life and despoil the environment---which is what a Green Party is supposed to be about, isn't it? That is, when it isn't defending gay rights, migrant mothers rights, handicapped rights, Ethiopian rights----identity politics. The Irish are also concerned that immigrants "are not simply labeled as economic entities, while denying them social and cultural rights." The Irish public must be brainwashed into accepting the important role immigration in Irish society, "on the changing nature of Irish national identity", and on a universal Green theme, "the value of cultural diversity". Borrowing from the Canadian handbook on social engineering, they advocate "culture sensitivity for public sector workers." The concept that maybe immigrants should learn to be sensitive to the customs of the host country is a theme universally absent from Green thinking. One could find it ironic that all across Canada, particularly Atlantic Canada, there are clubs and associations dedicated to keeping Celtic culture alive. And yet, in the heart of Celtic culture, you have an Irish government that has quickly allowed one in seven of its residents to be from another country and at least one political party, the Greens, promoting the fragmentation of that culture by its support of multiculturalism and economic growth, which drew immigrants in the first place. One wonders why the Irish spent centuries spilling blood to get the British out only to invite the East Europeans in. So much for Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone". Raised on Irish Nationalist folklore, you can't fathom my sense of betrayal. The Swedish and German Greens duplicate the same trademark idiocies of their sister parties. Though one must admit that the German Greens in the former coalition voting to shut down their nuclear program so that they can turn around and buy natural gas from Mr. Putin displayed an astonishing ignorance about the relative risks of nuclear and NG relative to their impact on global warming. Once again, a steady state economic model was not considered as an alternative to natural gas consumption. A look across the globe yields no surprises. The Australian Greens, for example, believe that "our environmental impact is not determined by population numbers alone, but by the way that people live." Notice that they did not say, "our environmental impact is not determined simply by the way people live, but by population numbers." The Aussies are to be congratulated for being able to utter the word "population", but like global comrades, it would kill them to put the stress on it. Over-consumption is the name of the game. And in constructing a population policy, should not "ecological sustainability" be the governing factor, unmitigated by a series of other points like "multiculturalism" (shades of Elizabeth May) and "humanitarian migration" which the Greens say Australia has an obligation to accept, including climate change refugees?" If so, then, how many? 10 million? 20? 30? Your country is a lifeboat and metaphorically speaking it has a carrying capacity of 20 people. Period. Whether you think you have an moral obligation to haul another 20 refugees on board because they are righteous, their cause is just, or they would afford your lifeboat more diversity is immaterial to the laws of physics, which state that your craft will sink under that weight. The trouble with the Australian Green Party is, like the others, it cannot decide if it is an environmentalist party or a human rights party. Its policy statement on population and immigration should be shortened by 13 points to read concisely "Australia's population policy should be determined by its commitment to ecological sustainability." The environment before people. The boat before its passengers. The Green Party of the United States places the same priority on human rights as other Green parties. A Californian Green Party policy direction document states bluntly, "immigration policies should be based strongly on human rights." Not on carrying capacity or sustainability or peak oil or climate change or biodiversity collapse but human rights. The rights of wildlife in the United States to survive runaway immigrant-driven population growth for this anthropocentric "Green" Party is given no mention. Instead, in a press release of May 23,2007 they called on Congress to enact immigration legislation that will protect human rights and "facilitate the path to citizenship" of the 25-35 million undocumented immigrants in the country, who must of course be given amnesty, the universal theme song of the Green movement. The Greens of New Mexico harmonize with that position in their immigration policy document: "We must continue to respect the potential contributions and rights of other new immigrants." The California Green Party goes further. They argue for "an authentic free-trade zone where people are free to travel for work," and invoke Cesar Chavez , as many soft greens and liberals do, as an advocate of this position. In fact Chavez was strident advocate of immigration restriction in defence of the working conditions of Mexican-Americans and stood on the border to patrol to guard against illegal entrants. The foundation of the party's attitude on immigration is found in a statement that could have been lifted from the policy book of virtually any Green party in the world: "Those living in the industrialized world must end the habits of waste and over-consumption that place as much as stress on the environment as does population growth in developing nations." Consumption, consumption, consumption. Bring on the immigrant millions. After all, "we are all the same people, and need to break down those psychological barriers, not re-enforce them." We are the same, yes, but we are also "diverse" at the same time and this diversity must be celebrated and amplified like it or not. The host culture is of little account in Greendom. The best way to celebrate diversity of course is to offer tantamount support to an 80% immigrant-driven population growth rate in California of 2% , nearly twice the national rate of 1.1%. If unchecked the state's population will double to 64 million by 2035 and another 32% of its 100 million acres will have to be devoted to urbanization and highways. If the population continues to grow, per capita agricultural land will be reduced approximately half of what it is today, and in 33 years about half of California's cropland will be unavailable. Currently the state must build 250,000 housing units yearly and one school per day just to keep pace with growth and is already 40% more densely populated than Europe. This is the state which, under the leadership of Governor Arnold Schwartzeneger, Canadians believe is so environmentally progressive because of his initiatives to reduce GHG. There is not one jurisdiction in the world that has accomplished that in the context of rapid, unchecked population growth. In the face of these facts all the California Green Party can do is issue a statement referring to those who favour greater restrictions on immigration as being "xenophobic" and "reactionary". (Let us hope they choke on that statement when they are paying 50% of their income on food in 2035). In response, an activist for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) replied, "We're not concerned about who is coming here, but simply the number. It is not a matter of condemning those people who have come here, but looking at resources and asking how many people this land can support with what kind of lifestyle." It appears that CAPS is the authentic "Green Party" in California. And we don't even have to worry about developing countries either. The tonic for overpopulation is, you guessed it, "economic growth". They conscript the old, discredited Theory of Demographic Transition to say that "Current global demographics demonstrate that economic well-being promotes low birthrates. (No, but it does promote GHG emissions and habitat loss). Its amazing that this 72 year old theory still enjoys currency. So there are the nominees for idiocy. The Canadians, the British, the Irish, the Australians and the Americans. The list is by no means inclusive. You might provide better examples of idiotic parties with outrageously contradictory policies. But let's examine the Green parties that were disqualified from the contest on the grounds of sanity. The Green Party of Missouri states that "Because human impact is now beyond a sustainable level, we must take immediate action to reduce population growth. Our goal is zero population growth in our country as soon as possible." The Green Party of Minnesota: "We support efforts toward zero or negative human population growth. Overpopulation combined with the resource demands and waste production of modern lifestyles are root causes of environmental degradation." The Green Party of Hawaii says flatly "Population growth must cease. We need carrying capacity studies for all counties to determine development limits." Hawaii suffered 2.4% annual population growth from 1970-1986 overwhelmingly due to immigration. It is no wonder that the state elected the first legislator on record to openly declare support for a steady state economy, Senator David Hemmings. Now the best is left to last. The model of a what Green Party can and should be. The #NZGreens">Green Party of New Zealand. Their six page Population Policy statement takes the sensible approach. It begins with an estimate of what population level New Zealand can sustain, based on the Ministry of Environment's footprint analysis. In 1998 that figure was 5.7 million, but the Green Party treats it with caution, "an indicative upper limit figure only", for it recognizes that unforeseen contingencies like the peak oil crisis, climate change refugees, war, the sudden return of 750,000 expatriate New Zealanders for example, should make government provide for "spare capacity". And "in order to maintain both spare capacity and a decent standard of living, the optimum population figure will be significantly lower than the maximum carrying capacity of the land." So while Greens the world over feel compelled to fill up the tank right away and keep it full, New Zealand Greens evidence a prudence and understanding of future calamity and existing overshoot. Points 2 and 3 of their "Key Principles" state that "A self-sustaining population cannot be increased beyond the carrying capacity of useable land available" and "The population cannot be increased beyond its capacity to offset its greenhouse emissions." Alas, the Greens of New Zealand, Missouri, Minnesota and Hawaii are the renegades of the movement, the exception to the rule. In most cases, your local "Green" Party is a misnomer. It is a name designed to attract the environmentalist constituency but its focus is not really on the environment, but on human rights. The rights of migrants take precedence over their environmental impact, which Greens won't even acknowledge. On the basis of this global tour of Green parties, a provisional international manifesto of generic Green-ness is hereby offered as a guide to their cosmology: International manifesto of Genereic Green-ness

1. 1. Consumption is almost everything. Population is almost nothing.
2. Overpopulation is a global problem, so lets not try to stabilize our own.
3. Renewable technologies and greener lifestyles will save the day
.
4. We are committed to sustainability---and growth---at the same time.
5. Growth can be rendered ecologically benign if channeled, managed or deflected.
6. We share the consensus for the need for economic growth, therefore we favour liberal immigration.
There is always a chronic labour shortage isn't there and oh, don't undocumented migrants make such a contribution to our society?
7. Since we favour liberal immigration that is non-discriminatory, then we favour an aggressive multicultural strategy for the integration of migrants. We reject the concept of a national culture.
8. We place far greater emphasis on climate change than biodiversity collapse even though more species will be lost sooner to human overpopulation than to global warming, which is not as imminent or as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity services.
9. We will only acknowledge overpopulation as a problem in developing countries. Migration of people to high consumption societies is to be countered only be lowering the per capita consumption rates of those societies.
10. Closed borders, immigration controls, or as we call the Bush fence, the "Wall of Shame" send out unfriendly signals to emigrant-countries whose cooperation we need to solve global environmental problems like AGW.
11. Relieve the wealthy of progressive income tax and capital gains tax and introduce Green Taxes. Punish those at the bottom of the income scale for not having the money to buy hybrid cars and retro-fitted houses.

People with dark skin or from Asia are not the only people who suffer racial vilification these days. In arguing for more immigration a Maltese immigrant complained on the "Sounds Like Canada" program of Friday, January 25/08 that one or two maritime provinces were mostly white and that others were "even worse". Typically, multicultural enthusiast and host Sheila Rogers did not challenge him for this outrageous racist statement.

One wonders how a CBC interviewer might react if a guest said that the downtown core of Regina was mostly aboriginal but other communities were "even worse". Or that many districts in Greater Vancouver are predominantly Chinese but others, like Richmond, are "even worse". When comments like these go by the board on the national broadcasting network, it is little wonder that so many politically correct bigots feel able to complain openly that their particular town is too "whitebread".

I am a native-born Canadian of European ancestry and I am sick and tired of being made to feel that I am some kind of disease who should be made to feel perpetually guilty for my white skin and for the multitude of sins allegedly committed generations ago, a disease that needs to be cured by a massive foreign influx.

Insults directed at the national whipping boy, Canadians of white pigmentation, are not the way to build the harmony you claim to seek.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
Canada V0P 1N0
January 28/08

To read the Royal Bank's website, one might confuse this commercial goliath with the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth. A bank that in 2006 had a net income of $4,6 billion presents itself as the Jolly Green Giant of corporate Canada. Its "Environmental Blueprint" is 12 pages in length and talks of RBC's commitment to climate change, biodiversity, forests, indigenous peoples and our water supply." And it boasts that it has been named one of the world's top 100 sustainable companies, the first Canadian bank listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and is Canada's most respected corporation for the fourth year in a row. President and CEO Gordon M. Nixon stated that RBC's corporate responsibility can be seen in, among other things (how we) "support environmental sustainability". One problem. Mr. Nixon is the same man who spoke in favour of an RBC report in October of 2005 to raise immigration levels from 260 to 400,000 immigrants annually. The environmental cost of our current level of a quarter million immigrants a year, not to mention the levels Mr. Nixon advocates, is manifest. Urban growth has devoured up to one fifth of the country's Class 1 farmland, threatened perhaps more than two thirds of its endangered species and paved over wetlands. What propels this urban growth was suggested by a $3 million federally commissioned report submitted in 1997 by UBC's Dr. Michael Healey entitled "Prospects for Sustainability". It called for an immigration moratorium and Population Plan to rescue the ecosystems of the Fraser Valley and similar regions across Canada from immigrant-driven growth. He pointed out the federal Department of Immigration and federal Department of the Environment were working at cross purposes. Today it is guesstimated that perhaps 70% of all housing units built in the sprawling extensions of Canada's major cities are occupied by immigrants, but in Greater Vancouver that figure is more like 85%. Inter-provincial migration cannot be the convenient scapegoat for sprawl that immigrationists contend it is if the facts are faced. 1.08% annual population growth, the highest of all G8 countries, clearly has Canada's biodiversity up against the ropes, while Kyoto targets simply cannot be met. Population growth and rising GHG emissions go hand in hand. The absurd hypocrisy of RBC's stated "environmental objective" can be found in the proclamation that it is "committed to continuing to reduce our environmental footprint," while lobbying to have the government import 400,000 additional "footprints" each year through Pearson and Vancouver International airports. In its "Environmental Blueprint" it states that it will "not engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests (etc.)", and speaks of comprehensive environmental risk management policies. However, it doesn't say anything of deforestation in London, Ontario or any other of Canada's growing centres to build the new housing developments the bank finances. Apparently clearcuts are fair ball in Canada because they are not a cause celebre or in the media spotlight, but whether it is in the jungles of Borneo or a forest grove in the GTA carbon sequestration is equally important to the planet.. Nor does RBC invoke their vaunted "environmental due diligence" in stopping the sprawling subdivisions they underwrite from covering farmland. They talk only of their determination to "direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes." The Nature Conservancy of Canada is a perfect example of the Royal Bank's "philanthropy". By steering money to Nature Conservancy (NC) for each client who switches to electronic bank statements, NC provides RBC with ecological dispensation, the PR brownie points---or greenie points--- it needs to mask its raison d'etre. That is, of course, providing loans to developers and home buyers so that they can keep on building the sprawling subdivisions that are exterminating the wildlife that Nature Conservancy supposedly cares about. It is a symbiotic relationship. Nature Conservancy gets a big-time corporate bag man to collect donations and RBC buys credibility as an institution that cares about the environment. The Royal Bank would like to be seen as it sees itself, as the Dr. Jeckyll of corporate environmental responsibility, but its position statements are so much green window dressing, an archive of deception, for at night this "green" corporate citizen becomes a Mr. Hyde who wreaks havoc on biodiversity and the atmosphere by underwriting and pushing for rapid, unchecked economic and population growth. The benefits of runaway population growth to the major lending institutions are self-evident. More people, more demand. Demand for car loans, credit lines, and mortgages. Recently a credible argument was made that the Royal Bank was primarily interested in expanding its client base. (Canadian Immigration Reform, January 2/08) "Its about importing potential RBC clients.Canada's financial institutions realize that future client growth, thus profits, resides in immigration. No CEO wants to be in charge when share prices decline or remain stagnant." What is critical to the understanding of RBC's immigration politics is that the origin or complexion of immigrants is as important as their number. Canada must, CEO Nixon contends, "unleash the power of diversity if it wants to improve productivity and increase its standard of living." (The notion that one must have a diverse and heterogeneous society to achieve high productivity should come as news to the Japanese and Chinese.). Presently 80% of Canada's visible minorities are immigrants and almost 75% of them are visible minorities, who constitute 17% of the population. RBC wants to tap into this talent pool, hire and promote it and capture its business. It offers scholarships only to those born outside Canada. Most telling is that on the home page on Royal Bank Scholarships for New Canadians there is only a Chinese face presented to the reader, while on the Application checklist page, of the six young people pictured, three are "people of colour". Applicants are asked to write an essay on how "new immigrants have contributed to this country." No negative impacts are entertained. The underlying assumption of the literature is that due to its aging population, Canada will soon depend on immigration to grow its labour force and will have to compete for talented immigrants in the global marketplace. Unfortunately, few are talented as mass immigration is providing us with a superfluous population that generates GHG, crowds out wildlife habitat and , according to a Statscan report of May 2006, depresses wages and displaces jobs, including those of recent immigrants. And the so-called "skills shortage" is really, in the words of one 'Pax Canadiana', "a shortage in counter help at fast food restaurants," with Canadian engineering grads working them. One must also question the nature of the "diversity" that RBC champions. Just as it has co-opted the language of environmentalism with its liberal use of words like "sustainable", "footprint" and "green", the jargon of multiculturalism has been insinuated into corporate discourse. In a company committed to "building and maintaining an inclusive and respectful workplace", it is natural that every office needs a "Multicultural Calendar" like the one advertised in one of its links. In the month of January alone, 11 dates are set aside for equal commemoration, from Guru Gobind Singh's birthday on the 5th to "Pongal" on the 14th to the First of Muharramon on the 20th. But this kind of diversity is decorative. It is the fig leaf concealing a more calculating plan. RBC's diversity is much more focused than the United Nations. The kind of multiculturalism they have in mind is more like that of Richmond, B.C.---a monoculture. RBC, you see, is in pursuit of a more narrow, lucrative demographic---the South Asian population. Now 3% of the country, South Asians , as the fastest growing minority in Canada will double that percentage within the decade. By 2017, they will reach two million, equivalent to the number of Chinese-Canadians. The prospect of four million Canadians of South Asian and Chinese origin, augmented perhaps by even higher immigration levels, has RBC salivating. Clients of these cultural backgrounds save more, and take out more and bigger more mortgages than other groups. Bank branches located in Asian enclaves flourish. Simply put, Chinese and South Asians are a boon for the banking business. (cf. insideToronto.com Jan.17/08) It is not likely then, that the Royal Bank will be calling for a repeal of the White Paper of 1966 and a return to traditional immigration patterns. In a sense, RBC's immigration agenda is the inverse of the White Australia policy, but under a politically correct banner: "The Nearly All Asian Canadian Mass Immigration Policy" better expressed in code language: "Diversity". From this unflattering portrait a question emerges, what is the genesis of growth in Canada? It is not initiated by Ottawa. It is orchestrated by the big banks like RBC and big businesses who work with and pressure government to deliver population policy that will create the profits they want. A look at the political contributions made by the six biggest banks from 1982 to 2003 reveals just what they want from government. RBC really doesn't care a rat's backend for Official Multiculturalism. That's a smokescreen. Otherwise they wouldn't have contributed all that dough to the Reform Party and its successor, the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. No, their bottom line is population growth (read economic stimulus) and low corporate taxes. A tax policy customized for Chartered Banks and not for Food Banks. And the Liberal and Conservative Parties they've paid off so generously have delivered with the Grafkin-Angus Report that recommends just that. Meanwhile food banks in Ontario have grown 14.3% since 2001. RBC and its corporate competitors are not beneficent enterprises. Chip off the green paint and the statements about corporate social responsibility and its still an organization that is about making profits for its shareholders and pursuing the obsolete and lethal paradigm of economic growth. But RBC does not work alone. It lobbies Ottawa for mass immigration at absurd levels and a growth rate which will accelerate the destruction of our environment, then cloaks its malevolence by green pronouncements, trivial green corporate practices and an unseemly arrangement with a high profile conservation group who lends the bank legitimacy in return for hush money. This group accepts the bank's money in return for saying nothing about the fact that immigration is eclipsing the wildlife it claims to be the guardian of. The collusion of big banks, environmental groups and the government's Multicultural Industry is a partnership in crime. RBC, Nature Conservancy, Multicultural-Immigration. A Triad of Ecological Ruin.

The article below was originally a comment on webdiary

On December 4, 2003, Australia’s population was estimated at 20 million and projected to reach about 30 million by 2050. Slightly less than 50 per cent of this growth rate resulted from net overseas immigration. By 5 November 2007, Australia’s population had ballooned by more than one twentieth of itself (or 5.66 per cent) to 21,131,216 and was projected to reach 34 million by 2050.#fn_i">[i] In fact, with that growth rate of 1.5 per cent per annum, it is on course to double within less than 50 years. Annual immigration has been responsible for more than half this growth, even though the birth-rate had increased in a context of misleading pronatalist propaganda.

Before British colonization in 1788 the peoples of Terra Australis managed to conserve an almost exclusively hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle. Art#fn_ii">[ii] but no written history, has been found, and reconstruction of their impact relies on anthropological, archeological and ecological studies. “Australia” was transplanted and adapted from a British society which was on the cusp of industrialisation. Pre 1788, Australia’s aboriginal population averaged continent-wide less than one person per 8.5 square kilometers – possibly as few as one person per 51 square kilometers.#fn_iii">[iii] Numerous clans inhabited the continent at different population densities, reflecting regional rainfall, soils and climate.#fn_iv">[iv] Also patterned by climate and soils, the fossil-fuel-era population distribution is similar, but much denser.

Early attempts to establish agriculture failed with some unintensive exceptions recently uncovered.#fn_v">[v] The British managed to gain an agricultural foothold using ‘white’ slaves in the form of convicts drawn mostly from the ragged army of their dispossessed. Their number was later supplemented by indentured labour, displaced aboriginals, and, until Federation, ‘black-birding’ – the practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders and bringing them to work in Australia, principally for the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company. There is thus no history or tradition of an established pre-fossil fuel agricultural society. The gold-rushes of the 1850s attracted capital, finance and economic migrants, resulting in a rapidly morphing population and economy and formation of a working class. This class made a national wage-fixing pact with capital at Federation in 1904 and also obtained the agreement of CSR to outlaw black-birding #fn_vi">[vi] and the importation of other 'non-white' labour, widely perceived as synonymous with slaving.#fn_vii">[vii]

The economy intensified after World War II, but much land was cleared and divided up for development by land speculators from the time of the gold rushes of the mid 19th and early 20th century. When the gold ran out, there was a massive depression, which probably assisted the formation of the above industrial laws.

After WW2 business promoted a fear of population implosion among politicians and a policy for mass immigration came in. High immigration, combined with the unforeseen baby-boom that accompanied the petroleum era, made the newly privatized housing industry very powerful and consolidated an economic addiction to population growth. Although the ‘white-Australia’ policy was dismantled, wages and conditions legislation under the 1904 constitution protected workers and made it unprofitable to import labor simply to undercut wages. However, in 2006-7, the conservative government found a way around this - (Workchoices).#fn_viii">[viii] At the same time net immigration was encouraged to increase from an average of around 75-80,000 per annum to upwards of 160,000 per annum,#fn_ix">[ix] at the behest of the development, housing, mining and financial lobbies. All this took place in the context of a huge increase in mining and construction, including massive engineering projects in most states which have drawn angry but useless protests from Australians. These circumstances underpin Australia’s demographic and material overshoot.

The ideology of multiculturalism has been useful for suppressing protest against this massive population growth by tarring as 'racist' any protest against immigration for whatever reason. It is ironic that the White Australia policy, which was introduced to combat the kind of slavery which the USA was built on, has been replaced with a much nicer-sounding Multiculturalism, which allows the importation of low-wage labour and the flooding of the housing market to benefit speculators, in the context of rising land prices and rising homelessness.

Footnotes

#fn_i" id="fn_i">[i] “Australia’s Population” (Population Clock), Australian Bureau of Statistics, www.abs.gov.au [5 Nov 2007]

#fn_ii" id="fn_ii">[ii] Much of which functioned as maps of areas of land with markers for water, game, people and landmarks.

#fn_iii" id="fn_iii">[iii] Total land stock is 770 million ha of 7,700,000 square km. Estimates of population range between 150,000 through 300,000 to 900,000.

#fn_iv" id="fn_iv">[iv] Joseph B. Birdsell, “Australia: Ecology, spacing mechanisms and adaptive behaviour in aboriginal land tenure”, in Ron Crocombe, (Ed.), Land Tenure in the Pacific, OUP/MUP 1971, pp.334-361

#fn_v" id="fn_v">[v] Jennifer Macey, “Vic bushfires uncover ancient Aboriginal stone houses”, The World Today, 3 Feb. 2006 12:45:00, www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1561665.htm

#fn_vi" id="fn_vi">[vi] “With Federation, the Commonwealth Parliament became dominated by spokesmen for ‘White Australia’. In October 1901 legislation was passed prohibiting the introduction of Pacific Islanders after 31 March 1904.”, McKillop, R.F., referring to Bolton, G.C., A Thousand miles away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, ANU Press, 1972, p. 239, in “Australia’s Sugar Industry” on the Light Railway Research Society of Australia site, www.lrrsa.org.au/LRR_SGRa.htm

#fn_vii" id="fn_vii">[vii] The Colonial Sugar Company aroused similar responses among indigenous Fijians who also objected to black-birding as well as to the importing of Indian indentured labour. “The Indian Connection”, Frontline, Volume 17 - Issue 12, June 10 - 23, 2000, www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1712/17120130.htm

#fn_viii" id="fn_viii">[viii] “How low can you go?”, Colin Fenwick, Economic and Labour Relations Review,5; (2006) 16(2) www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ELRRev/2006/5.html

#fn_ix" id="fn_ix">[ix] “Largest population increase ever: ABS,” Media Release, September 24, 2007, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Latestproducts/3101.0, “Net overseas migration contributed 54% (162,600 people) to this growth, which was more than the natural increase of 46% (138,100 people or 273,500 births minus 135,400 deaths).” This occurred with confusing changes to statistical methods plus new ease of transfer from temporary to permanent migrant (largely equivalent to European citizenship).

Multiculturalism is Canada's Ingsoc, a state ideology so powerfully pervasive that few in the media, in the educational institutions or the political parties would dare challenge it. One might think that the left would offer criticism, but apart from journalist and former socialist parliamentarian, Douglas Fisher, and columnist Larry Zolf, none come to mind.

The Liberal Party was able to steal the affections of working class voters earmarked for the social-democratic NDP by appealing to their cultural identities. Running candidates of the same ethnicity as the prevailing group in the riding, and granting federal money for the construction of ethnic centres was a classic Liberal formula for vote-buying. And it usually worked.

The NDP approach has always been to appeal to people's class identity above and beyond the language they speak and to their sense of solidarity to people who live similar lives but have different cultures. Multiculturalism has not been good for class solidarity.

J.S. Woodsworth, the father of Canadian socialism, founder of the CCF-NDP and described as the "Saint of Canadian politics", I think knew as much. Allen Mills in "Fool for Christ-The Political Thought of J.S. Woodsworth", wrote that during his leadership in the twenties and thirties he continued to evince a profound concern for " the social integration of the alien." Allen writes that Woodsworth talked "of uniting immigrants into a new Canadian type: he worried that the melting pot was not working and the country would become 'balkanized', there was a necessity to 'absorb', 'weld' and 'incorporate, immigrants into the Canadian way of life.'p.228

Although Woodsworth was an opponent of immigration in the 1920s and 30s because there were not enough jobs, he also recognized the need for more social cohesion. A higher proportion of newcomers of our own British traditions would mould these incoming armies of foreigners into 'loyal subjects'.

Greens have been among the most effusive champions of Ingsoc, with Green leader Elizabeth May justifying the country's absurdly high immigration levels as Canada's ongoing "multicultural project". Environmentalists claim that "cultural diversity" is the analogue to biological diversity, the necessary variation found in plant and animal forms. Trouble is, the immigration levels required to sustain these culturally diverse ethnic enclaves is fuelling urban sprawl and crowding out wildlife. Variety is the spice of life, but the human is flourishing at the expense of the non-human. Multiculturalism has not been good for the environment.

But there is a JS Woodsworth of Canadian greens. He is none other than the famous co-author of "Our Ecological Footprint", Dr. William E. Rees. This is taken from his "Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?"

"... there is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that multi-racial or multi-cultural countries are more likely to unravel chaotically in the event of rapid ecological change, resource shortages, or economic decline than are more homogenous societies. Because socio-political stability is a prerequisite for ecological sustainability, we thus have yet another reason for a pre-emptive cautionary approach to large-scale migration in coming levels and adopt explicit 'melting pot' strategies designed to facilitate the integration and assimilation of new-comers into the social and economic fabric of their adopted countries. They should also include ongoing public education programs that stress both the need for, and the national benefits of, limited immigration.

The main objectives of this approach are to discourage the development of persistent immigrant enclaves, to accelerate immigrants' development of a sense of identity with the larger society, and to improve public understanding of the modern role of economic and environmental changes that may be required for ecological sustainability. Immigration policies that favour multiculturalism and that apparently succeed during periods of growth and plenty may not be adaptive in the face of rapid global ecological change of economic decline."

So while the sheep continue to bleet "diversity", the wise old shepherds speak of the virtues of integration and cohesion.

Just as Central Asia exported the bubonic plague, and Central Africa exported the Ebola virus, Canada gave the world the ideology of Multiculturalism. It might be cautionary then to heed the words of our brave critics as they spoke them right in the guts of the ogre before the Thought Police could silence them.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Canada
December 23/07

I had quite the educational experience on Tuesday night (18 Dec 07). The phone rang at 8:30 pm and the call display read "Ontario". Who would be phoning me from Ontario at one half hour past 11 pm? Probably one of those persistent telemarketers. Yet it could be pertaining to a personal or environmental matter. Better take a chance. "Hello, Mr. Murray? I am calling on behalf of the New Democratic Party of Canada." Immediately I cut her off and launched into a rant that was broken only two minutes later by her strident objections. Everything I said flowed without a break from my lips as I knew all the statistics by heart: "The New Democratic Party, is that the party that favours 1% plus immigration for this country when there is clear evidence that population growth drives GHG emissions, when biodiversity in urban Canada is being destroyed by immigrant-driven growth , the party that pretends that something called smart growth will defend wildlife and farmland and somehow stop people from generating waste and pollution.?" "Wait, she interjected with sublimated anger, "you can't blame immigrants for these things ..." "You can blame population growth which is driven by immigration" and before she could get a word in edge-wise, I fired my three favourite correlations at her. "Did you know that since 1990 Australia's population grew by 30% and its GHG grew by 30%, that between 1970 and 2004 America's population and GHG emissions both grew by an identical 43% and that between 1990 and 2006 Canada grew by 19% and its GHG was up by 24%?" In an argument I heard last spring on the Internet, when a critic stated that a typical immigrant arriving at Pearson International consumed much less than the typical Canadian, this socialist lady, carrying an Indo-Canadian accent, vociferously denied that immigrants were doing anything to impact our environment negatively. "I don't see a problem with taking more", she said. She went on to say that claiming that population growth caused GHG emissions was simplistic and flawed. "Otherwise, why hasn't India more GHG emissions than us. You have got to be more holistic in your thinking." It was at that point I realized that I had taken the wrong tact in this debate. I should have begun my rant with an attack on economic growth, not population. So I had to make amends. "You are right. We have to take a holistic approach. But the NDP, the Greens and the Sierra Club aren't taking it. Our focus should be the damage that Economic Growth is causing the environment. But realize that economic growth is a function of population level and per capita consumption. If all you want to do is tell Canadians to reduce consumption, as do the Greens and the environmentalists, then we are going to have reduce to unbearably Spartan levels if you allow population to climb. If I freeze population, but permit Canadians to merrily consume at even greater amounts, then population will have to be reduced further." "So are you saying no more Economic growth?."she asked. "The planet is saying that and I am joining the chorus." "No one can get elected on that platform, besides, (and this is the classic cliché) we can have economic growth and a clean environment too. We couldn't promote our Climate Change strategy if people thought we were against economic growth." "Do you know there was a British study revealed on the 4th of this month that said that if we don't stop Economic Growth, we're finished, because we'll pass the 2 degree rise in global temperature threshold." "Oh, they have been saying things like that for years. They said they would never be able to feed the world and they were proven wrong." "Actually, just wait a while, and you will see what happens to modern agriculture without oil. Some say one-third of us will die." "You haven't thought of technology." At that I interjected, not that old song. Renewables are a joke. Maybe 3% of our needs so far. But if I am wrong on that, google "Jevons Paradox". Technological efficiences just promote more consumption, and more births too. "So who are you going to vote for then?" she challenged. "The Conservatives? They are worse than us surely." "I don't know that they are", I replied. " Premier Calvert left office with GHG emissions 60% higher than when he came in. I think a write-in ballot would be a good choice." At that she announced that it was midnight and she must sign off. My opinions, as filtered by the interviewer, would be relayed to someone higher up the chain of pre-fabricated thought. My conclusion? Again, if immigration is to be discussed, it must be discussed within the context of population stabilization. But the latter in turn should be discussed within the framework of a steady state economy. Immigration/population growth waves a lot of red flags and before a dialogue can get untracked the debate spirals into emotional outbursts. I think Neil Dawe has been right about this one from Day 1. Secondly, I doubt that much is to be gained from debating Socialists or Greens on population issues. Their minds are set in concrete and are unable to break free and think outside their tight box. We have to target people who don't think in clichés. Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC 18 December 2007

Note: This article was also published on webdiary on 19 December 2007. It had attracted 69 comments by 24 December 2007.

---

Andy Kerr, former president of Alternatives to Growth Oregon, posed these questions, "To those who support generous immigration, I ask you this: Why are you are on the same side as Microsoft and the other huge computer corporations and of Archer Daniel Midland and the rest of the agribusiness lobby? How can you support a policy that helps ensure that our existing poor will never be adequately valued for their labor."

Kerr's questions could well be asked of so many left-wing critics whose first reflexive response to closed border arguments are that they are "right-wing", "reactionary", "racist" or "xenophobic", despite the fact that historically the first beneficiaries of mass immigration to North America, and several other localities, have been cheap labour employers. Naomi Klein, in "The Shock Doctrine" blemishes her excellent analysis with this commonplace attitude.

If Klein wanted to probe the shock therapy applied by big capital by using immigration as a battering ram to break down the working class, she need only have looked to the history of British Columbia, where her brother Seth labours for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In the nineteenth century Chinese labour contractors imported labour to the point that perhaps one-third of the entire workforce had become Chinese. Working for half the wages, paying no taxes, they were prepared to ignore safety regulations, so the Dunsmuir Coal Company used them to break a pivotal miners' strike in 1883.The Miners Union then presented a resolution to government to restrict Chinese labourers from working underground, and another one stating that these labourers were a menace to underground safety, had lowered wages, deterred other Canadians from seeking employment in B.C., offered unfair competition and were provocative to public peace.

In 1907 five Tokyo immigration companies filled an order to bring 6,000 Japanese labourers to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway (C.P.R.) when the province was experiencing a recession. B.C. workers were against the ropes, so the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council met to form an "Asiatic Exclusion League". Two days later a Japanese ship arrived with 1177 labourers. The chemistry was right for the infamous Vancouver anti-Asian riot of September 7, 1907, an incident which has been retroactively depicted as a simple and despicable act of racism. In fact it was a reaction to B.C. businesses which were then using Japanese cheap surplus labourers instead of their Chinese counterparts. It should be known that Native Indians also seethed with resentment at the Japanese presence.

Chinese immigrant labour had finally been slapped by a "head tax" by the federal government in response to decades of lobbying by the B.C. to level the playing field with Canadian labourers. But they wouldn't they wouldn't follow suit with a similar tax on Japanese labour for fear of jeopardizing trade arrangements with Japan. Hence the end run by employers and the pogrom by B. C. workers. To demonstrate labour's outrage at the collusion between now Lieutenant-Governor Dunsmuir and the C.P.R.to orchestrate the Japanese influx, a Socialist legislator moved a motion in the B.C. House that Dunsmuir be impeached.

It should also be noted ---and this is always omitted by revisionists-the Oriental Exclusion Act was actually a misnomer. It was in reality, the Oriental Labourers Exclusion Act. Chinese merchants and their families continued to enjoy access to Canada. The purpose of the omission is obvious, to foster guilt and shame so that an agenda of "justice" an restitution can be pursued by Canada's immigration industry so that corporate Canada can have its labour requirements satisfied in the same way that robber baron Robert Dunsmuir's was. Just 30 miles from where he used Chinese labour to break the miners strike of 1883, the corporation I was working for used Chinese labour to try and break my strike a century later. As waves of Chinese, fresh from Hong Kong, passed through my picket line, escorted by police, it occurred to me that I was having a "multicultural" experience. I was so enriched. Like the miners were in 1883.

The same misrepresentation and spin was made of the "Komagata Maru" incident where East Indians were denied entry at the Port of Vancouver. Does this mean that racist antagonisms did not alloy with legitimate economic grievances? It would stretch credulity to argue that case, particularly in light of the outrageous internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942, the fact that Chinese-Canadians were denied the vote until 1948, or the right to own property in the exclusive British Properties among other indignities. But should illegitimate motives discredit and invalidate the very cogent arguments of working people to defend their livelihood?

These arguments have been made by socialists and trade unionists not only in Canada but in America a century ago by Jack London, Socialist Party leader Victor Gerber, and the legendary Samuel Gompers. They were also made by the heroic Cesar Chavez who was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez even picketed the border and reported illegal aliens who served as strike-breakers against United Farm Workers.

Today leading labour economists have carried on the fight. Dr. George Borgias of Harvard University is most notably among them. It is his contention that native-born American workers lose $152 billion annually because of job displacement and wage depression caused by immigration. And yet, how does the labour movement respond? This is what the Carrying Capacity Network asks:

"The AFL-CIO, the biggest labor union in the country, is AGAIN urging Congress to give amnesty to as many as 13 million illegal immigrants. Result: depressed wages and lost jobs for Americans while rewarding lawbreakers with the right to work and potential citizenship. Isn't the AFL-CIO sanctioning lawbreaking by pushing for an amnesty?"

Where does the Canadian labour movement stand? You can guess. In a letter dated May 4/06 to Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day and Minister of Immigration and Citizenship Monte Solberg, Secretary Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) Hassan Yussuf complained about the "zealotry" of the Canadian Border Services Agency. "(They) aggressively deported a number of undocumented residents, particularly those from the Portugese community as well as targeting members of the Asian, Chinese, Caribbean and Latin/Central-American communites. The manner in which those deportations were handled exposed a government acting with excessive zeal, hardness, and in some cases, an inexcusable lack of humanity.

I suppose the more "humane" course of action for the CLC would be just to let everybody who wants to come to Canada stay. Open borders. One world. John Lennon's dream. Just imagine. But that's globalism isn't it? Who will speak for the Canadian workers whose wages and working conditions are being hammered by this vision of brotherhood? Why, the CLC of course. Like its political arm, the NDP, it claims to represent them. Yussuf's letter concludes: "The CLC representing more than 3 million workers, joins with those calling for a moratorium on all CBSA deportation/detention activities."

How about a moratorium on immigration instead? That would do more for those 3 million workers. And more than a swift process, in the CLC's words, to "regularlize undocumented workers.whose skills are in need and who have been contributing to the economy." You have to love the CLC's politically-correct language. Calling an illegal immigrant an "undocumented resident" is like calling a drug-pusher an "unlicensed pharmacist". How does the labour movement like it when people call scabs "replacement workers"? And why doesn't the CLC just call "regularize" what it is---amnesty for law-breakers, or, as Geoffrey Blainey once put it, "an incentive for others to arrive, hoping to benefit from further amnesty."

Contemporary socialist and trade union affinity toward international solidarity even at the expense of national well-being can be traced to a Marxist legacy that sees class, not nationality, as the primary divide. Even social democracy taps into this tradition which combines as one strand in a muddled xenophilia with Christian and environmental thought. The latter mutation is expressed quintessentially in the Canadian Green Party line that since global warming is a global problem requiring global cooperation, to obtain this we must not send out an unfriendly message of "fear" by closing our borders, but on the contrary drop them instead. Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in. Instead of "workers of the world unite", the Greens offer us a new rallying cry: "more and more people, consuming less and less".

What is interesting is that American icon, Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate for President, does not share this Canadian love affair with the world. He had this to say in 2000: "We cannot have open borders. That's a totally absurd proposition. It would depress wages here enormously, and tens of millions of people from all levels, including scientists and workers, would be pouring into this country."

Australian political scientist Frank Salter had this to say about the socialist attitude to nationalism. "The Left, as it has evolved over the course of the previous century, looks down on the ordinary people with their inarticulate parochialisms as if the were members of another species. since they care nothing for the preservation of national communities. Ethnies are considered irrelevant to the welfare of people in general. It would be understandable to Martians to be so detached from particular loyalties. But it is disturbing to humans doing so, especially humans who identify with the Left."

Such is the European Left's identification with the Other at the cost of the resident national that, in the name of anti-racism, it was possible for left-wing novelist Umberto Eco to declare his hope that Europe would be swamped by Africans and third world emigrants just so to "demoralize" racists. And such is the identification of the AFL-CIO with 13 million illegal immigrants as potential recruits that it supports amnesty and essentially a corporate welfare program that reduces wages for the lowest of American workers. A scheme which advocates call "liberalism" but American workers call an invasion. The CLC (Edgar Bergen) and its social-democratic parliamentary arm, the NDP (Charlie McCarthy), sing the same tune. Crocodile tears are shed for "undocumented" workers who allegedly make great contributions to the economy, according to their hire-a-left-wing-think-tank. But Statistics Canada's conclusions about the effect of immigration on the Canadian work force echo those of Dr. Borgias for American workers. Except the May 2007 Statscan report showed that in Canada, it was the educated workers who were really taking a hit. Between 1980-2000 their wages dropped 7%. And in Britain, careful analysis revealed that the Trade Union Congress was wrong in its contention that amnesty would net the Treasury one billion pounds annually. Rather it would cost taxpayers 1.8 billion pounds a year.

But alas, socialist thought is not monolithic. The Leninists were wrong. For the working class, national identity was as important as class identity, or as Orwell put it, "in all countries, the poor are more national than the rich." If they can't find a voice on the Left, in desperation they will look to the Populist right, as they did recently in Switzerland. But just when it looked like the field was left entirely to globalists, maverick social-democratic and socialist leaders in the tradition of Berger, London, or Canada's J. S. Woodsworth are staking a claim for national, as opposed to international, solidarity. They are doing so after their constituents have been battered by one of the greatest migratory waves in history, that saw the United States for example import the equivalent of three New Jerseys in the 1990s alone, or 25 million people. One would have thought that Naomi Klein, a Canadian, would have known that the Father of Canadian democratic socialism, the Saint of Canadian politics, the Rev. J. S. Woodsworth steadfastly opposed immigration throughout his leadership in the 1920s and 30s. Woodsworth understood that his constituency was in Canada, not overseas. His motto was no doubt that of Vancouver Rev. Edwin Scott: "We are not universal nations yet. Universal nationality and universal brotherhood are two different things."

The Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has begun to make some noise about the disaster that is the illegal immigration invasion in the United States. His voting record in reducing chain migration, fighting amnesty and unnecessary visas rates B-, B-, and A+ respectively from Americans for Better Immigration. "If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now." To Sanders the American working, middle class is caught in a squeeze. "On the one hand, you have large multi-nationals trying to shut down plants in America, move to China and on the other hand you have the service industry bringing in lower wage workers from abroad. The result is the same-the middle class gets shrunk and wages go down." Five million people have left the middle class during Bush administration, Sanders observes.

Other social-democratic leaders have spoken out against open borders. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt now admits that immigration under his government was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that "with idealistic intentions, born out of our experiences with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners." Dutch Socialist leader Jan Marijnissen is strongly opposed to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans are hired as "independent contractors" to circumvent labour law. Marijnissen wrote "It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as they were in competition in the nineteenth century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn't open the borders further, but set limits instead."

Setting limits. Acknowledging limits. That is the great divide. In the past those limits have been perceived to be economic by those with the sense to perceive them. Now, some on the left are beginning to realize that the more unforgiving and immutable limits are set by nature. Former Labor Premier of NSW , Bob Carr, and his fellow Laborite retired veteran MP Barry Cohen joined environmental leaders Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe in exposing the myth of Australia as a big empty land begging to be filled up with people. Said Carr, "our rivers, our soils, our vegetation, won't allow that to happen enormous cost to us and those who follow us." Carr and Cohen call for severe immigration cut-backs and a population policy put in place.

In Klein's Canada, meanwhile, the phrase "carrying capacity" is as unknown in the socialist lexicon as it is the corporate. Biologists and ecologists might as well be speaking ancient Aramaic to leftists to make them understand that their human rights agenda cannot be built on an environment that will not sustain it. Canada cannot become the soup kitchen to tens of millions of refugees, nor can vital biodiversity services coexist with a population of 50 million Canadians. In economic jargon, its called "diseconomies of scale". In the language of real science, its called a "limiting factor".

This essay began with two questions from Andy Kerr. It will end with six or seven of mine.

Why? Why has opposition to a policy of mass immigration, a policy that drives down the wages of marginal workers, middle-income workers and professional workers been characterized and vilified as "right-wing" and "reactionary". Why has earlier socialist and trade union understanding of the negative consequences of this policy been overtaken by "love thy neighbour" zeitgeist of the post-war era? Why is the "Left" on the same side as the "Right"? The same side as Microsoft, ADM, the real estate developers and the cheap labour employers?

It is high time to challenge this labeling and to challenge those who use it to prevent thoughtful discussion. The question that needs to be posed today is not the conventional one, is it Left or is it Right? But rather, do we accept that there are Limits, or do we continue to persist in the fantasy that this country, and others, is a massive treasure trove of boundless resources waiting to be unlocked by an endless number of people who can exploit them without ecological consequences?

History shows, sadly, that the latter delusion is shared equally among the devotees of both Adam Smith and the Communist Manifesto and its derivatives.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
Canada
December 16, 2007.

To many, George Bush's $2 billion border fence will be but another testament to the futility of walls. In the face of persistent adversaries and technological advances, each of history's more notable barriers have proven obsolete over time. The 1500 mile Chinese wall was penetrated at least three times, most famously by the Mongols in the 13th century. The 300 mile Roman barrier of Limes was useless against the mass migration of Huns and Goths after the late 4th century, while only Hadrian's wall could claim some efficacy, until its garrison withdrew abruptly for the defence of Rome. And of course, the Maginot and Siegfried lines were spectacular failures.

That barriers can nevertheless be somewhat effective, however, is a reason that they continue to be built. The Moroccans built a 1600 mile wall to control Western Sahara in the1980s, and Israel has built a 120 mile barrier in the West Bank, and is planning to extend it by 140 miles. More pertinent perhaps to our interest, India is about to complete a 3034 mile $1 billion fence against Bangladesh to protect its precious Northern wilderness from 150 million Bangladeshi, many of whom have been displaced by the flooding that Indian deforestation of the Himalayas has caused.

The question is, though, how effective can barriers of any kind be in the long run. Bush's border fence, which could cost as much as $30 billion, not $2 billion, will not stop the one third of people who did not walk across the border illegally, but rather just entered on tourist, student or work visas and over-stayed. As for the other half million who come illegally each year, one has to realize that American corporations are so addicted to cheap labour, and smuggling is so lucrative, that come hell or high water ways will be found around the Tortilla Curtain, by land, sea or air.

What is troubling about most of the immigration-reduction movement---of which I am a part---the conservative wing particularly, is that they don't look at problems like the negative impact of immigration on the North American working class, and on the environment, and ask questions which go to the root causes of those problems. Questions like: "Why do people from very poor countries like Mexico want to leave their families and homeland all behind so badly that they take so many risks to move here and work for miserable wages?" American Republicans against amnesty don't ask these kinds of questions because they really don't know much about NAFTA and its impact on the Mexican people, nor do they care. Nor do they know anything about the IMF and Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), and their impact on the people of the Third World. They take no responsibility for Mexican poverty or the hardship and misery of the billions who will never even catch a glimpse of the Californian dream. They have no questions. Only answers. One answer. Send them home and slam the door shut behind them.

Well I agree that the door must be shut. And so does Ralph Nader, Presidential nominee for the Green Party in 2000, who said that open borders "is a totally absurd proposition." The environment must be allowed time to recuperate from the demographic onslaught it has suffered in the past two decades. Immigration-driven population growth is killing biodiversity and thwarting Kyoto targets. Each immigrant costs America one acre of farmland every minute and generates 23.8 tons of GHG annually. Canada has lost 18% of its best farmland to urban sprawl from immigrant-propelled growth, which is also threatening 70% of its endangered species. But shutting the door is one thing, keeping it shut is another. To do that we must relieve the population pressure that is coming from the outside.What is generating that pressure? The tautological answer would be population growth. But it is not just a fertility issue. It is an issue of economic justice, unequal distribution of wealth, and greed---institutionalized by larcenous trade agreements.

NAFTA, by allowing heavily-subsidized US corn and other agra-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, drove two million Mexicans off the land and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty, and attempt to cross the US border to feed their families. NAFTA's service sector rules also permitted large companies like Wal-Mart to sell Chinese-made goods so to bankrupt 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses. Mexican wages, not surprisingly, have fallen under NAFTA. It is considered the province of corporate lobbyists, not a "human" issue, and why not? Desperate conditions in Latin America and Mexico produce lower wages, pressure to reduce environmental protection, and help union-busting prospects.

If Mexico's plight is desperate, that of the global proletariat is worse. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis reports that one-third of the world's urban population live in 250,000 slums, half of them people under 20, and 100 million of them street kids. In a decade nearly half of all city dwellers will be poor. Davis makes it clear. The IMF put those people in those slums and made it their "implacable future", by using the leverage of debt to restructure the economies of most of the Third World, and force the retreat of the state and its social safety net. The gap between rich and poor nations widened by century's end to a Gini coefficient level of 0.63.

SAPs forced developing countries to dump their raw unprocessed commodities for cheap prices in an effort to pay off the debt and pay for expensive imported goods from developed countries which often barricaded their agricultural products. Fifty third world countries depend on three or fewer commodities for over half of their export earnings. Some spent more on debt servicing than on education. Observing this relationship it might be said that the First World preaches free trade but practices good old fashioned mercantilism.

In describing the IMF program of slashing social services and infrastructure, escalating resource extraction to generate hard currency, re-orientating farm production from serving local needs to serving global markets, and increasing dependence on imported capital-intensive technologies---all in the name of debt-servicing---Raj Patel compared IMF policy to a weapon of mass destruction:

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanction policy that kills one and half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, author of the seminal book, Eating Fossil Fuels, put the case eloquently and cogently in his article Energy Depletion and Immigration:

Closing our borders alone will not stop the flow of illegal immigrants. It will only leave them more at the mercy of their employers within this country. As long as there is such a disparity in wealth and well-being between the US and other countries, there will be people attempting to flee to the US no matter what abuse they are met with on this side of the border. If we truly want to solve the immigration problem, then we must start by addressing the reasons why people would rather slave in the US than remain in their homelands. To solve the immigration problem, we must first face the fact that the US has built itself up on the riches of other nations (and) stop the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, then we must raise up the living conditions in their homelands. If these people could make a decent living in their own countries, they would not want to leave everything that is dear to them in order to slave in the US.

Unfortunately, Pfeiffer is among the vast army of environmentalists whose environmentalism is trumped by their laudable human rights agenda. Like many others, he has catalogued not only the appalling economic cost of the Bush border fence, but its cost to the wildlife whose viability is dependent on cross-border mobility. But he doesn't consider the countervailing cost to wildlife on the whole continent that the population growth from out-of-control immigration will cause. Indeed, the prime focus of any critique of world trade arrangements should not be there effect on global wealth distribution, but the fact that unfettered trade permanently reduces carrying-capacity. Ecological considerations supersede all others.

As Dr. William Rees has noted, trade only appears to increase carrying capacity because each trading country or region is treated as if it is a separate open system, and not integrated into a closed global system. Many wealthy nations have ecological footprints vastly in excess of their bio-capacities. For the UK, Holland and Japan, it is four, five and six times larger respectively, and the United States burdens the global commons with an ecological load twice its biophysical limit. Why?

Trade allows consuming populations in ecological overshoot (eg. the UK, the US) to feel insulated from their stressed local ecosystems, and without negative feedback they feel little need to curb their over-population or material growth and confine it within carrying capacity. Developing countries too, who receive remittance payments from expatriates in wealthy countries are somewhat buffered from the harshest reality of natural capital depletion.

So while open-borders advocates argue that is unjust to allow goods, services and finances to flow unhindered across borders but not people, Rees counters that "merely liberalizing migration to match the free-flow of goods/capital, the world should rather seriously consider re-regulating both to help achieve sustainability. On a planet in ecological overshoot, achieving sustainability will demand lower levels of material consumption, reduced movement of goods and people, and the rehabilitation of ecosystems." ( Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?")

Like a 21st century enclosure movement, global capitalism has chased third world farmers off the land into the lap of the cheap labour employers of North America and Europe. To open the doors ever wider would only serve its interests, it would only further depress the wages and displace the jobs of low-income native residents, further despoil the environment, not relieve world poverty but cripple our ability to alleviate it.

But not accepting immigrants or refugees makes it a moral imperative, and a matter of urgent self-interest, to aggressively redress trade agreements and SAPs or abolish them, and vastly increase foreign aid conditional on family planning. Building walls, figuratively or materially, is but an interim complement to these measures, a necessary but not a sufficient step to protecting our environment. An immigration moratorium, and a population plan that provides for population stability within our national carrying capacity as determined by that plan, can only buy us time.

Ultimately, we cannot build a wall against global warming, peak oil, peak grain or the tsunami of humanity that one day will sweep over us if we don't get the IMF and the World Bank off their backs and turn back the clock on globalization.

In closing our borders, we must not turn our backs.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island BC
Canada V0P 1N0
October 22, 2007.

Researcher Brishen Hoff of Massey, Ontario made some interesting calculations. He found that the benefits of much touted 900 acre solar panel "farm" planned near Sarnia, Ontario would be wiped out by the normal flow of immigrants admitted to Canada in just 22 days. Hoff laid out his case this way: "Let's assume that its purpose is to serve domestic Ontario needs, to relieve the pressure on Ontario's finite electricity-generating capacity, and be part of a plan to replace current environmentally-unfriendly power generation." "The solar farm would generate 40 megawatts, enough electricity to power 6,000 homes. As of 2002, there were about 2.6 people per household in Canada. That means that those 6,000 homes shelter roughly 15.600 people. If Canada takes 262,000 immigrants per year (as it did in 2006), it takes 717 immigrants per day. Within about 22 days of immigration, it has taken close to 15,600 new people. In that time, the benefits of the solar power marvel near Sarnia are used up." "In other words," Hoff concludes, "in less than one month of business-as-usual immigration, if we are to satisfy the assumptions we have made, Canada will need another solar farm or some other energy source to supply the needs of the other newly-arrived." It should be noted that immigration drove 74% of Canada's population growth over the last census period. But the problem doesn't end there. The 15,600 immigrants who are added in those 22 days will have an additional negative environmental impact, which Hoff lists in point form:

1. The construction of this solar electricity plant will consume large quantities of fossil fuels and produce a large amount of GHG.
2. The farm land that the solar panel site has taken over will be lost forever, thereby increasing our reliance on our areas, either on Canadian farm land whose supply is very limited or on nearby foreign farm land whose supply is decreasing because of population demands.
3. The immigrants will consume much more than the household electricity produced by the solar farm. They will consume water, electronics, paper products, air travel, etc. Increases in human population inevitably lead to the expropriation of other areas for the use of the new people.

Hoff's analysis seems to validate Kenneth Boulding's Second Theorem: ".technical improvement will enable population to grow, and soon enable more people to live in misery than before." Hoff observes fatalistically, "Whatever energy humans have been able to exploit, has been accompanied by growth in their population. Unfortunately, this only makes them more dependent on new energy sources. If humans did stumble upon a new source of energy more abundant than oil, it is probable that there would be a corresponding population explosion that would rapidly wipe out the benefits of the new energy source." Studies done in other countries have made similar correlations between immigrant-driven population growth and increased energy use and pollution. Professor Mark Diesendorff of the University of New South Wales warned that Australia would not be able to reduce its GHG emissions if it continued its mass immigration policies. It is no coincidence that while Australia's population has grown 31% since 1990 its GHG emissions have increased 30%. Immigration currently accounts for 54% of the country's growth, or one net immigrant every 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Leon Kolankiewicz of Numbers USA demonstrated that since 1970, 88% of America's increase in energy use was due to an increase in population, mostly driven by immigration. Only 12% was attributable to an increase in per capita energy consumption. In other words, it's not so much that people are driving SUVs rather than fuel efficient cars. It is just that there are 3 million more drivers on the road out there. In the UK, government statisticians reveal that of the 11 million new houses that will need to be built before 2050---much of it on formerly sancrosanct Greenbelt land---59% will be built to accommodate Britain's growing population, nearly 70% of that driven by immigration. More immigrants means more people, more houses, more energy consumption, more emissions in one form or another. Since the publication of Dr. William Rees watershed book, "Our Ecological Footprint", the Green mantra has been to reduce our individual footprint. But as these studies show, it is the sum total of individual footprints that matter. Not just the per capitas. The number of per capitas. Ultimately, it's a numbers game. As always, Garrett Hardin said it best. "The population problem has no technical solution." Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC October 5/07

When SPA National President Dr. John Coulter responded to ABS figures showing record population growth by denouncing political leaders for continuing to promote such a suicidal policy, he could have used the same speech, with minor editing, to attack Canada's parliamentary leaders. Delete references to water shortages, but add some other insuperable challenges. But at least Dr. Coulter has one ally in his corner. Ian Lowe and the Australian Conservation Foundation. They are doing what one expects of an environmental organization: looking out for the environment. In North America, on the other hand, our flagship environmental organization, the Sierra Club, and its Green clones, is essentially a feel-good yuppie organization which, in deference to political correctness, chases peripheral targets rather than address the core cause of our crisis---economic and population growth. As we are being swept away in a population tsunami the Sierra Club and the Greens throw us a beach ball called greener lifestyles and renewable technologies. Apparently, if we all live like Ghandi and install solar panels, we can have as many people as we like. "Population is a red herring" said one Frank de Jong, who doubles as a club member and Ontario Green Party leader. It was when one of them spoke on behalf of the "environmentalist community" that I felt compelled to react. His name was Andre Maintenay of the Ontario Chapter of the Sierra Club, and this was my letter: Andre Maintenay mentions "the environmentalist community" for whom he presumes to speak. Where is this environmentalist community? When the Census Report was released to the media in the second week of March revealing that Canada suffered the highest population growth of any G8 country and numerous studies have been done demonstrating the damage that such growth has done to biodiversity in Canada, this "environmentalist community" said boo. The names of people who are paid to lead high-profile environmental organizations were notably absent from the letters sent to the media outlets complaining of their pro-growth bias and even euphoria. Instead, it is ordinary, individual Canadians, who endure more congestion and pollution and see more farmland and wetlands paved over for subdivisions to accommodate this constant diet of forced population growth, who must carry the ball. It used to be that an environmentalist was somebody who accepted Paul Ehrlich's IPAT formula. That is, environmental degradation was the product of population level times average per capita consumption rates times technology. Now he is somebody who completely ignores the "P" in that formula and simply focuses on reducing consumption, or in contemporary parlance, reducing our "footprint". This is the environmentalism of the willfully blind and the blissfully ignorant, of people more concerned about political correctness and avoiding taboos to curry favour and popularity rather than addressing root causes. Like the Moonies they boast of their many good works, but their various good causes that beat around the bush of runaway population growth amount to no more than, to use Albert Bartlett's metaphor, "polishing the wood furniture in a burning house." It was Dickens, I believe, who said that without courage, all other virtues are of no avail. Whatever virtues these Green organizations possess, they are of little value if their leaders do not summon the courage to acknowledge the Elephant-in-the-Room, explosive population growth in Canada and the United States, as a major factor in environmental erosion. "There is 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." Jim Motavalli E/The Environment Magazine Jan. 2004 Tim Murray October 5/07

On Friday September 7, 2007, the venerable Canadian environmental author Farley Mowat made a boldly generous but stunningly futile gesture. He donated 200 acres of his Cape Breton land to "Nova Scotia Nature Trust". He called on others in the province to follow his example so that good land wouldn't fall into some developer's clutches and be destroyed for profit "like every other part of the western world." But while Mowat's motives are beyond dispute and his affinity for wildlife unquestioned, he continues to evidence no understanding of the root causes of biodiversity loss. In North America it is runaway population growth, fuelled largely by mass immigration and coupled with excessive consumption that is crowding out wildlife habitat, wetlands and farmland. The question to be put to the environmental movement is, can nature preserves, greenbelts and national parks permanently shield wildlife and flora from the developmental pressures issuing from this growth? Ontario commentator Brishen Hoff answers with a categorical "no". "History has proven that no lands are protected when the population surrounding them is growing. This applies to countries, national parks, islands, or whatever. Once growing populations that surround pristine areas reach a tipping point, the demand for the resources of the protected area will become so great that all safeguards, laws, or barricades will be obliterated and the resources will be exploited." That is why Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado established as his Fundamental Law of Planning that a workable, durable local plan cannot be effected in a community until the regional population is stabilized. Curiously, advocates of secure borders and more restrictive immigration have been reproached and ridiculed by soft greens and mainstream environmental NGOs for proposing the equivalent of an international "gated community" that couldn't hope, they allege, to fend off the heavy global traffic of people in the real world. Yet none of these critics will acknowledge that their little fortresses---their nature preserves, their greenbelts, their parks, their strict land-use zonings---have little hope of standing up to the pressure of the growing populations we have recently seen. Growth spilled out of the urban boundaries of Portland, Oregon---poster child of "smart growth"---into surrounding farmland. And with no let-up from immigration houses are being built on formerly sacrosanct British greenbelts, the "lungs" of Britain. And as long as economic growth is God, conservation lands are not secure either. They can and have been withdrawn by legislation and executive order. At one time an Act of Congress removed 1400 square kilometers of the original Yosemite National Park for timber and mineral production. "Wildlife habitat will continue to be lost as natural capital is relocated form the economy of nature to the human economy", until the economy shifts to a kind of steady-state model, writes Professor Brian Czech of Virginia Polytechnic Institute Oddly, there is virtually no environmental organization in Canada that makes a connection between immigration and environmental degradation of any kind. Not the Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Canadian Parks and Wilderness, Ontario Nature---the list goes on. None of them speak of a connection. Quite the contrary. The problem is not whether we grow, so the mantra goes, but how we grow. If we grow "smart", we can welcome the whole world here. And the biggest Welcome Wagon in Canada is the leader of its Green Party, Elizabeth May, who argues for an immigration level even higher than that supported by her rivals. She calls this "Canada's Great Multicultural Project". May parrots those two sweet-sounding buzzwords that many environmental organizations use so frequently---"cultural diversity". But cultural diversity in Canada and the United States cannot be sustained without massive and fresh injections of newcomers to bolster existing immigrants who otherwise would assimilate. Viable multiculturalism requires unrelenting mass immigration. And mass immigration marginalizes wildlife habitat. Cultural diversity therefore comes at the cost of biological diversity. So let's dispense with the cant. The correlation is clear. Growing cities, vanishing wildlife, dial "1" for English. One final irony, who was the man who spear-headed the national fund-raising campaign this summer to raise campaign donations for Green Party leader Elizabeth May? None other than Farley Mowat, the man who wants to protect animals, birds, and plant life from human encroachment. It was Mowat who once famously compared our species to yeast in a vat, "mindlessly multiplying as we greedily devour a finite world." But apparently Canada's not finite, or at least that portion of it beyond the safe bosom of a conservation charity. To think that Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who dueled with Elizabeth May over the immigration issue when she was president of Sierra Club Canada, named his newest ship, "The Farley Mowat" That makes two contradictions.

Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes it taboo to discuss the population question and to air views that are critical of immigration? …

Since the early seventies, “a steady and insidious process among governing circles, opinion-formers, the greater bulk of the media, including the BBC, has built a powerful and near universal censorship, by consent…that the absolutely fundamental ecology question, the need for a sustainable balance between numbers and resources---is almost totally ignored. The sad corollary of this is that mass migration---since it has a major and obvious impact on the overall population situation---cannot be rationally discussed either.”

Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes it taboo to discuss the population question and to air views that are critical of immigration? If so, where is it coming from: the journalists, the presenters, the researchers, the producers or the administrators? Is state media more a captive of political correctness than the private media?

In attempting to answer some of these questions, it is useful to look at two fascinating accounts, one about the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC), another about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) and finally to summarize the disgraceful record of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

In “The Treason of the BBC” , the late Jack Parsons argued that “The BBC has been systematically excluding virtually all material on the question of basic population policy.” For example, BBC reporters allowed Beverly Hughes, a former Minister of Immigration, to “blandly repeat, unchallenged, the government’s mindless policy of continued mass immigration to meet the alleged needs of the economy.” Also, it granted a free pass to former Home Secretary Charles Clark to say that there were ‘no obvious limits’ to net migration and rapid growth. At the same time, the BBC did not question the fact that “our present government has adopted a policy (without discussion or mandate) of deliberately increasing our numbers by about one million every five years,” making Britain the fastest growing country in Europe with a population density almost twice that of China.

Parsons asks, “How can BBC claims about the carrying capacity of the prison system and its “overpopulation” be made so openly, so effortlessly, so devoid of fear and moral opprobrium, while not the slightest hint can ever be allowed to slip out vis a vis the vastly more important case of the carrying capacity and numbers of the nation as a whole?”

He accuses those who run the BBC of “colluding in a very Great Betrayal, fostering the myth that human numbers have so little consequence that there is no need to take them seriously.” “The charge I am leveling at all executive levels of the BBC as a corporate body concerns what I am convinced is coercive, institutionalized bias which for years has prevented virtually all BBC news of, and discussion about, a literally vital object, the long-term balance between human numbers, resources and the quality of life…; this was not always so, but has been the case for at least 15 years."

The signs of population myopia were apparent to Parsons in 1967 when he asked the BBC why it was so concerned about the Tory Canyon Oil-Tanker Spill disaster, but so unconcerned about the doubling of the world’s population in 30 years. Since the early seventies, “a steady and insidious process among governing circles, opinion-formers, the greater bulk of the media, including the BBC, has built a powerful and near universal censorship, by consent…that the absolutely fundamental ecology question, the need for a sustainable balance between numbers and resources---is almost totally ignored. The sad corollary of this is that mass migration---since it has a major and obvious impact on the overall population situation---cannot be rationally discussed either.”

Parsons, in a letter to a BBC Complaints Unit, asks, “Dare one hope that, one of these days, someone in the higher echelons of the BBC will screw his/her courage to the sticking point and actually issue and follow through on a set of instructions that free the BBC---and hence the nation­from this appalling and near-totally disabling taboo.” He is given to wonder “Why does this large, wealthy, powerful, highly prestigious institution…cringe so abjectly at the very idea of free speech in the realm of discourse?” And why the taboo? “Has there been an explicit but secret directive to all producers to steer clear of the subject? Has this policy been built up by means of nods, winks and frowns on high; or does it stem from tacit acceptance by all concerned at the prevailing orthodoxy in the wider society?”

According to Parsons, four things are needed to reform the BBC. Firstly, there needs to be major change in ‘media Zeitgeist’ (thinking) that will permit an open discussion about population. Secondly, the BBC needs to “stop cowering beneath its cloak of political correctness” and, by honest analysis, foster the emergence of a mature, ecologically informed electorate. Thirdly, the BBC needs to hire reporters who are population experts. “Some BBC presenters, who have an overweening confidence in their qualifications, start laying down the law on those population topics which are allowed a mention, and in the process frequently display their ignorance…They pick up and mindlessly repeat half-baked notions about alleged labour shortages and pension problems, and swallow hook, line and sinker any free-floating opinions about how much better things will continue to become as numbers inexorably swell.”

Fourthly, it would be nice if the BBC followed its own Producer Guidelines. “Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All BBC programmes and services should be open-minded, fair and show a respect for truth. No significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented at the BBC.”

Until then, however, its Motto will remain that of the Three allegedly Wise Monkeys: See no population problem! Hear no population problem! Speak no population problem!

Mark O’Connor, poet and one-time Vice-President of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP, re-named SPA), has made a similar assessment of the ABC. In his upcoming book, "Overloading Australia", O’Connor concedes that the ABC is critical to Australian democracy and is able to speak to the people---“and often does”. “But the ABC has in some parts of its news and current affairs sections failed to provide objectivity or fairness to portray debates or news coverage relating to population, immigration or economics." It is living the Comfortable Lie: that growth is good and sustainable, and that the mass immigration that fuels it must continue. “The fact must be faced. There is something deeply wrong in some parts of it.”

But O'Connor is unable to locate precisely where the fault lies. Whether researchers withhold information from presenters, or presenters refuse to use the research provided to them, or whether producers, strategy planners or management dictate programming, is a question outside observers can't answer. "But there certainly is a bias," he asserts.

He offers some examples of this bias. During those years when Australia had the highest per capita immigrant intake of any country in the world, the ABC refused to challenge propagandists who illogically and brazenly claimed that Australia's high immigration intake was "shamefully low" and "proof of racism". In addition, the ABC collaborated with both the government and the opposition party to promote high immigration by ignoring inconvenient facts like the one about Australia's high per capita immigrant intake and suppressing most of the debate. And while going after the jugular of the One Nation Party as if it were alone in its call for a zero net immigration policy, “among its many acts of censorship, ABC TV News suppressed the fact that the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Democrats (two other parties) had long been calling for zero net migration."

O’Connor speculates as to why the ABC behaves in this manner. “The ABC’s failure through nearly three decades to deal with population issues ­the most important matter facing Australia today--- may have less to do with individuals than with a pervasive institutional culture.” Nevertheless, “if there are such persons blocking the debate, then it is assuredly time they were persuaded to move on to other areas where their biases will do less harm.”

He concludes, “The ABC has a problem with its news service and current affairs programs. It may not be able to rectify past unfairness, but it needs urgently to offer guarantees that the censorship will cease, and that at least in future those who disagree with high immigration or with ‘birth-bribes’ will receive equal time on its programs.” New ‘balance and accountability’ guidelines announced by management in October of 2006 “will not address ABC News’ pro-growth, pro-natalist, pro-conventional economic views.”

Can what has so far been said of the BBC and the ABC be said of the CBC as well? In one word, yes, and more. While some regional centres have attempted to bring more balance to immigration issues, CBC Radio, especially the National centre in Toronto and the Vancouver centre, have emphatically not. In general, the CBC (like the ABC previously) has refused to engage the public on the two questions that critics keep asking: Why is the government importing more people per capita than any other country in the world? And what effect is this infux, which gives us the highest growth rate of any G8 nation, having on our economic, cultural and environmental health?

Timidity and cowardice are not the exclusive province of CBC journalists, but the fact is that only the private media outlets have on occasion exposed abuses of the immigration system and questioned the country’s high immigration intake. The CBC, on the other hand, has done what it can to promote mass immigration on the basis of its misinterpretation of its 1991 legislated mandate to promote “multiculturalism”. Somehow, CBC logic equates the stated “CBC Vision” (to reflect “the cultural diversity of our people”) with support for mass immigration. In addition, to the CBC, the promotion of a diversity of cultures displaces the promotion of a diversity of opinions.

Those very many Canadians who voice negative concerns about immigration are simply denied airtime by the people they subsidize. As Immigration Watch Canada has noted, the CBC sees no contradiction between holding out one hand to ask for public funding while clenching the other in a fist to drive into the mouth of the taxpayer who dares to challenge the CBC line on immigration. Furthermore, the CBC allows generous airtime and interviews with pro-immigration groups, so that they may in turn, as a quid pro quo, advertise for the non-commercial CBC. So to partiality and deceit, one can therefore add corruption to the list of CBC immigration vices.

So what then is the remedy? Suffice it to say that the CBC’s commitment to mass immigration and multiculturalism comes at the cost of balanced, honest journalism. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage can obviously rectify this situation by ordering the CBC executive to answer for this conflict of interest. It can further help by demanding that the CBC terminate the corporation’s corrupt arrangements with the immigration industry, its blatant pro-immigration advocacy and the employment of its employees who engage in it.

Such measures would seek not to curb journalistic freedom, but to end shameless CBC journalistic abuse---and return public broadcasting to the public. As with the BBC and ABC, our National Broadcaster should be offering a forum where indeed “no significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented”. The exclusion of topics or the shunning of voices should be foreign to its corporate culture and democratic mission.

The BBC, ABC and CBC conspiracy to silence critics of immigration and population growth has been an insult to democracy and to the public that has had to put up with it. The conspiracy has to end now.

Thanks Professor Quiggin from supplying that quote_#fn1">1 from our PM. It confirmed that renters do not count amongst John Howard's concerns and that is why they are forced to subsidise, with their taxes, the cost of private home ownership. This includes, amongst many other things, the first home owners' grant and rental assistance for welfare recipients. In both cases the money simply helps further fuel the housing hyper-inflation rather than help to make housing affordable.

I think this debate largely misses two other key factors which have been even more critical in forcing up the cost of housing in recent decades.

1. Much of the cost of housing is in fact the result of the privatisation of the housing market begun by Menzies.

The government-owned Housing Trust of South Australia never cost South Australian taxpayers a cent, yet for decades was able to provide affordable good quality housing to all sectors of South Australian society. Money that would have been unproductively invested in property speculation in the Eastern states was, instead, directed towards establishing viable manufacturing industries in South Australia.

2. That high housing costs are a consequence of high immigration

High immigration now at unofficial, but real and stratospheric href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/backscratching-at-a-national-level/2007/06/12/1181414298095.html">300,000 per annum deliberately brought about by the supposedly 'strong border control' Howard Government to suit the needs of property speculators, property developers and dependant industries. There is abundant evidence for this coming out of the mouths of the land speculators themselves. For example read www.realestate.com.au or read this from a 1973 submission by a property developer to the National Population Inquiry:

A large number of industries, including the building industry could not have developed to their present size without the immigration policy ... Population growth promotes expansion in building activity.
This is the mainstay of our economy, which as opposed to that of Japan, is substantially concentrate on national infrastructure rather than purely on export industries.

- cited in "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France" p114 of Sheila Newman's Master's thesis of 2002 downloadable from candobetter.org/sheila

As Queensland Deputy Premier Anna Bligh recently put it :

"The only way we could really (stop population growth) is to put a fence up at the (Queensland) border, or to cancel or freeze all new home building approvals," she said.

"That would have a very serious impact on the construction industry that a lot people rely on for jobs."

Remember, this is the 'left wing' female ex-student-activist Deputy Premier of the 'Smart' State speaking.

So we need to grow population in order to provide jobs for those already living here. And of course, tomorrow all of today's new arrivals will depend upon yet more new arrivals in order to create jobs for them. And the day after tomorrow all those newer arrivals will depend upon yet more new arrivals to create jobs for them, and so on until we are all only permitted to consume 5 litres of water a day each and are living stacked on on top of each other all the way up to the mesosphere in concrete boxes.

And, of course, as Professor Quiggin has pointed out, those who have invested in the hyper-inflated housing market expect the value of their investment to be at least maintained, if not increased. How else is this to be achieved without a constant flow of immigration?

How could anyone possibly question the economic capabilities of the various Governments which have brought about these circumstances?

---

Footnotes

#fn1" id="fn1">1. Prime Minister John Howard said in 2004:

I haven’t met anybody yet who’s stopped me in the street and shaken their fist and said: "Howard, I’m angry with you, my house has got more valuable."