immigration

Australian palm forest (photo by Sheila Newman)

Mark O’Connor and Bill Lines’s Overloading Australia has only been out for a short time and the growthists are becoming hysterical. Their arguments are as hopeless as ever. One Telegraph journalist, Tim Blair, has even attacked Mark O’Connor for being a marriage celebrant. In a sort of three-year-old’s idea of getting married,

“Interestingly, O’Connor is a wedding celebrant. How he combines that with his opposition to population growth is anyone’s guess.”

Doesn’t Blair know anyone who practises contraception?

It must be hard working for the Murdoch Press, where no-one writes sensibly about serious democratic and environmental concerns, presumably because they will affect sales on realestate.com.au which rely on continuous population growth of course.

And just when you thought it was safe to read Fairfax again (after the decent article on page 3 on Overloading Australia) they drag the recent expatriate, Brigid Delaney, in from the cold (she has just spent three years in London) to do a number on O’Connor and Lines.

Just an old-fashioned cringe

Delaney starts out with some very old-fashioned cultural cringe. Holding up her subjective ideals of [battered] New York and [impoverished] London as ‘models of innovative and successful cities’, she stigmatises stopping population growth as ‘stagnation’. She implies that O'Connor and Lines's book calls for no immigration. This is not true.

What stopped her from urging Australia to have cities more like Calcutta and Mexico City, I wonder?

This does not compute

She says that Australians live 'high on the hog', then, instead of suggesting we should be less materialistic, she proposes more economic growth and lauds imported 'work ethics'. Is she really so stupid that she doesn't realise that work and economic growth mean more material production and consumption?

She even tries to sell the idea that failing to surrender our remaining quality of life to overpopulation for ‘diversity’ in order to have ‘economic growth’ may ‘slow the development of our inner lives’!

Frankly, if Brigid’s ‘inner life’ is as bereft of originality and cogency as her writing, I would urge her to seriously review her lifestyle goals.

The article reads as if she fell asleep between paragraphs and woke up forgetting what she had just written.

Fails to address content of O'Connor and Lines' book

Unable to counter the environmental concerns raised by Mark O'Connor's and Bill Lines's book, Brigid instead tries to frighten people away from the serious nature of these concerns, by implying that they are dangerous to articulate because they could be used by people to cloak a dislike of immigration for other reasons. She doesn't dare to directly slur the authors themselves, who are both seriously accredited environmentalists; instead she tries to stigmatise their subject as socially dangerous.

At the end she is conflating environmentalists wanting to reduce population with Nazis in Berlin wanting to stop immigration, because one might provide a cloak for the other! To me, it is Brigid’s arguments that are dangerous, because they seem contrived to polarise people away from their democratic right, of voicing their opinions about unsustainable political, environmental and economic policies.

She talks of how immigrants “energise their adopted countries; they bring new skills, culture, views and work ethic,” then later she describes xenophobia as rife in Britain.

Does she not realize that the people she describes as xenophobic are exactly the kinds of British immigrants we are accepting in droves here? People who will tell you openly that they came here to get away from the high immigration there, and, far from hiding under an environmental cloak, express no environmental concern or interest at all?

Cloaked agenda of mass immigrationists

For one with such Macarthyist ideas, Brigid doesn't seem to care that the mass-immigrationists use their purported love of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' to hide their real agenda for Australia, which is to make an enormous amount of money at the expense of taxpayers and grab more political power at the expense of democracy and to hell with the environment. I hate to say this, but those selfish vested interests find most of their support and many of their members, in the mainstream media (which they also own, I forgot to say). Brigid's thesis in her article is unsettling for the reason that she really doesn't seem to know what she is talking about, but she is prepared to slur a seriously documented concern, and by association, the authors of Overloaded Australia, presumably to make a buck.

Australians should all be aware that Fairfax Press makes enormous amounts out of marketing Australian property globally through its domain.com.au, as well as in those forest-destructive pages and pages of real-estate advertisements and consumer lifestyle images.

Sad journalism

It is sad that that is about all that the mainstream press can find as a response to widely shared and felt environmental concerns and despair about wildlife, water, soil and democracy. And it is sad that a journalist shows so little human concern for the feelings and intelligence of her fellows. It seems as if, only those who come from elsewhere, might have intrinsic worth. And, only other cities, not ours, might be worth living in.

Right at the end she comes out with what seems to be a bizarre confusion of high immigration with ecological diversity:

"A society without immigrants will be the social equivalent of what's happening to our gardens — less colour and movement, less diversity, a sort of homogenised, sun-bleached patch where the only things growing are the plants we've seen before."

Blind to real diversity

This isn't Shakespeare. And she seems to be a true ecological illiterate. Apart from the counter-intuitive assumption that people cannot bear to live without constantly changing environments, right to the plants in their gardens, her statement doesn't make any sense.

Fruit bats in an Australian garden (Photo by Julia Buch)

What does she mean by there being 'less colour and movement, less diversity' in our gardens? The only way that is true is where we have concreted them, deprived them of water, and where immigrant plants and animals: pencil cyprus, privet, aloe-vera, African agapanthus; Indian mynas and Euruopean blackbirds, European wasps and cane toads, domestic cats and dogs – not to mention the humans, of course - have taken over en masse and annihilated the indigenous diversity; the quolls, potoroos, snakes, lizards, butterflies, microbats, flower-wasps and rosellas, cuckoo-shrikes, honey-eaters, wattle-birds, magpies and kookaburras, which is so much more intense in Australia than in most places – making concrete New York and grey London seem like dead planets.

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

Republished on Eye on Immigration and Online Opinion (in a slightly abridged form) together with forum discussion.

See also: "Bligh Government tramples on community rights to impose over-development" of 11 Jun 08, "Redland City to pay with increased water charges for population growth" of 19 May 08, "More chickens of population growth come home to roost in Queensland" of 14 May 08, "About immigration" of 14 May 08, "Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane" of 30 Apr 08, "How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth?" of 26 Apr 08, "The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections" of 30 Mar 08, "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of 30 Mar 08, "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community" of 8 Mar 08,
Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's Thesis: "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France" downloadable from here, in individual chapters plus five appendices and here, the whole main thesis.

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

We are long past the point where adding extra numbers in any way increases the synergy of the inhabitants of this country. Consequently any additional population growth must necessarily make each and every one of us poorer on average as the per capita access to natural resources necessarily decreases in proportion to the increase of the numbers of people.

However, it gets even worse than that, because of the dis-economies of scale inherent in large populations. An obvious example is that Australians are paying extra water rates to finance costly water desalination and sewage recycling plants required to provide water for additional people.

Had we stabilised our population, this would have been totally unnecessary. We could all have been adequately supplied by our existing less unnatural and less technologically complex water infrastructure.

Similar points could be made about transport, electricity, health, education and other services.

To cope with increasing numbers, it is necessary to destroy ever greater tracts of native bushland, to abuse our topsoil and waterways, and to unsustainably dig up ever more of our finite endowment of mineral wealth.

Three and a half decades of extreme 'free market' economic policies have further compounded these problems. These policies hinder governments from making use of what economies of scale are possible. They prevent effective planning in the interests of all members of society. Obvious examples include the huge inefficiencies of the private property market and the shambolic state of Australian urban planning, a result of the dismantling of Whitlam's Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970's.

In some ways it may be the case that immigration does indeed enable the transfer of wealth into, as well as out, of Australia:

• The purchase of a home by wealthy or middle class immigrants as a means of buying Australian citizenship, which is effectively a transfer of wealth from the source country into Australia;
• The poaching of skilled workers, often trained at the expense of taxpayers of other countries, including of poor third world countries - a practice, for which the Queensland Bligh Government has become infamous;
• The selling of Australian university degrees and vocational training, which has notoriously become yet another means of purchasing Australian citizenship_#main-fn1">1.

Little, if any of this wealth trickles down to ordinary Australians and whatever benefit they do gain is more than negated by the loss of previously available educational, training and employment opportunities, and consequent housing inflation (also discussed below). Even if it can be shown that Australia, as a whole, gains, rather than loses wealth through immigration, that wealth will most likely evaporate within this generation_#main-fn2">2.

In any case, on a global scale such wealth transfer is a zero-sum game, at best.

All things considered, it seems far more likely that we are not only becoming more impoverished, but we are becoming even more impoverished than we might expect to be if we had simply divided the existing wealth amongst larger numbers of people!

In a perverse way, it seems to me that this may have actually made it harder, rather than easier, to argue the case against population growth and immigration.

Whilst I can't know for certain if this was true for others, I will try to summarise some of the ways that this fed into my own conscious and sub-conscious thought processes and caused me to avoid questioning our high immigration policies for many decades.

My own intuition caused me to conclude that, if, somehow, immigration made us worse off on the whole, it would surely be harder, rather than easier, for any group to gain from immigration. Therefore, when faced with the strident assertions from all the seemingly credible authorities that immigration was economically beneficial, I found it easier to deny my own gut instincts and not to make the considerable investment of emotion and time necessary to question this pervasive message. Instead, I just quietly hoped that the advocates of immigration, who promised me a more prosperous, vibrant, interesting and sophisticated society, were right.

Alternatively, on occasions when the economic arguments did not seem to quite ring true to me, then the only other likely plausible motive would have been an underlying altruism of an enlightened elite more willing, than the ordinary, backward, redneck, xenophobic masses, to share the wealth of this country with others less fortunate than ourselves.

However, the conclusive evidence, after many decades of this social engineering, is that Australia has, instead, become a poorer and more dependant country as consequence and this has not been brought about because Australia's elites are self-sacrificing and altruistic.

Contrary to what I expected, a small group has, paradoxically, not lost, but rather gained from this chaos and suffering, at our expense. That group is the growth lobby. First identified and described in detail in Australia by Sheila Newman in "The Growth lobby and its absence" (2002) and Growth lobby thesis without appendices.[1], it is really a group of land speculators and landlords operating in an organised way on a corporate level.

Land speculators and landlords openly welcome the way that growing demand increases the price of vital resources over which they have acquired a monopoly. They profit from commodifying and then controlling access to resources and services which include water, land, power, housing, roads, food production and transport, which each one of us needs in order to live a dignified life, or even simply to live.

As one consequence, in Brisbane at the start of 2009, even previously well-off professionals are being impoverished by insatiably greedy landlords, who exploit these circumstances to increase rents at every possible opportunity. A surveyor, who lives near me (who acknowledges that his own work entails the destruction of bushland to build new housing developments to cope with population growth), told me how he was unable to travel back to Germany this year for his holidays, because of being personally affected by recent rent increases.

The growth lobby also includes property developers, financiers, building companies and suppliers of building materials. There are also others that gain from population growth through high immigration, such as immigration lawyers, employment agencies and cheapskate employers.

Whilst these activities may provide a facade of economic prosperity, none are capable of increasing the underlying ability of this society to provide for its own needs.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh in April 2006, then Deputy Premier, ludicrously defended population growth on the grounds that it was necessary to keep people in the construction industry employed_#main-fn3">3.

How could Premier Bligh, supposedly an intelligent person, have failed to ask herself the obvious question: How are those additional people then to be employed? Must we build yet more houses to keep them employed and import yet more people to Australia in order to provide a demand for those houses?

At some point such 'growth' has to end and Queenslanders must be able to find gainful employment by meeting the needs of other Queenslanders instead of

future inhabitants.

The longer Australians put off stabilising our population and establishing a steady state economy, the worse will be our circumstances.

But the growth lobby wants this situation to continue indefinitely. To ensure that the forced march to dystopia continues, the growth lobby pours funds into the coffers of Australia's major political parties, including Anna Bligh's Labor Party. It creates obligation and dependency in our political parties and governments. In turn, our governments endlessly facilitate the real-estate economy, in the face of every democratic objection, merely to keep themselves in Government.

If we are to hope for any kind of a decent future for ourselves and our children, these corrupt arrangements must be brought to an end and the power of the growth lobby must be broken.

The above article has been expanded upon the original version, published on 24 January - JS, 26 Jan 08

Republished on Eye on Immigration and Online Opinion (in a slightly abridged form) together with forum discussion.

See also: "Bligh Government tramples on community rights to impose over-development" of 11 Jun 08, "Redland City to pay with increased water charges for population growth" of 19 May 08, "More chickens of population growth come home to roost in Queensland" of 14 May 08, "About immigration" of 14 May 08, "Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane" of 30 Apr 08, "How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth?" of 26 Apr 08, "The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections" of 30 Mar 08, "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of 30 Mar 08, "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community" of 8 Mar 08,
Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's Thesis: "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France" downloadable from here.

Footnotes

[1] Sheila Newman's theory on the Growth Lobby: "The Growth Lobby and its Absence :The Relationship between the
Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France", Masters by Research, 2002: downloadable from here, in individual chapters plus five appendices and here, the whole main thesis. UPDATE: See also more recent publications including three books by Sheila Newman here. http://candobetter.net/node/1882

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-txt1">↑ See ABC Radio National Background Briefing program "Paying to be permanent" of 17 Aug 08.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-txt2">↑ As Sheila Newman put in "Expanded Australia" in the June 2006 edition of the Sustainable Population Australia newsletter:

"For these unimaginative and exploitative reasons, we are losing access to bushland, water, good soil, beaches and pleasant lifestyle for everyone, in favour of an 'economy' built on land speculation, class division, middlemen, and with a complete absence of recognition that we are trashing the last great Pacific paradise in return for money that will evaporate within this generation, leaving us a poor and overpopulated island, similar to all the other Pacific islands that have become victims of colonisation since the 18th Century."

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-txt3">↑ "Qld govt rejects population cap" in the Age of 22 April 2007. (A similar story was published in the Courier Mail around the same, but the URL is unknown.)

Source of illustration: http://www.masicile.com/sicile-armee-italienne-145.html

It is one of the big challenges we face and has divided the media. It has enriched many societies, but migration and the growing cost to communities of accommodating large-scale inflows of people raises challenging questions.

Not a left or right issue and not a question of racism

This is not a left or right issue or racist. It is about social and environmental sustainability. After presiding over a system in chaos, with common sense in short supply, the UK Government claims the continual pressure of inward migration is inevitable and sees no real limits.

UK: Immigrant numbers soared with Labour in power

Since Labour came to power, Home Office figures show the number of foreign nationals given UK passports has soared. By 2050 the Government Actuary’s Department estimates the UK’s population could rise to 90 million, 70 per cent of this due to inward migration - enough to fill a major city the size of Birmingham every five years.

Net immigration topped 300,000 in 2006, three times the average figure in the mid-'90s—a level "unprecedented in our history," according to a parliamentary inquiry in 2008. With the exception of the United States, Britain took in more immigrants in 2006 than any of the world's leading economies, says the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Add to this asylum seekers and an unknown number of illegal immigrants who arrive each year, adding to the estimated 600,000 illegal immigrants already living in the UK. Is this a sustainable policy supported by the environmental lobby? Is this a future we would vote for? We need to know but are not being asked.

Source of illustration: http://www.seneweb.com/news/article/1468.php

High immigration proponents need to be accountable to community

The supporters for this need to explain how the unprecedented level of opportunist immigration whether through the large increase in work permits, asylum applications or illegal entry can possibly be sustainable in the longer run? This is a legitimate concern for millions of people, whatever their colour and background.

Nearly five million adults of working age in the UK were on out-of-work benefits last year, four million of whom, according to the government's own figures, want to work. Unemployment [1] has jumped to 1.86 million by October 2008 and rising. Over a million young people are not in education, work or training. Yet the Government has more than doubled the number of work permits to non-EU immigrants since 1997 to a record 1 million, despite the unprecedented influx of migrants from Eastern Europe who do not need permits. Many migrant workers are being exploited, depressing wages for employer profit, while taxpayers pick up the cost of low-wage welfare payments.

"Politicians living on borrowed time"

Labour MP and social welfare expert, Frank Field, said: “politicians were living on borrowed time over Britain’s unprecedented and unsustainable levels of immigration, which risked turning the country into a ‘global traffic station’ for migrant workers and amounted to a massive transformation of our population.”

Violence rising

In some London boroughs, which now have immigrant majority populations of over 50 per cent, the proportion of immigrant origin school children is far higher. In towns like Oldham, that have experienced race-fuelled tensions, 14 per cent of the population are Muslim, but the percentage under 20 is much higher, with potential social implications for increasing alienation and parallel societies, in conflict over jobs and cultural values.

A report by London’s Metropolitan Police released in May 2007, in the wake of growing fears about knife and gun crime, found that asylum seekers and migrants from failing states like Somalia were contributing to gang warfare and were having “a disproportionate negative impact on their peer groups.”

New settler countries seriously environmentally stressed

For many years there was space in the Americas and Australia to absorb large immigration flows, but population growth leading to growing environmental stress across the world must cause us to think where all this is leading.

USA

Even in the land of immigrants – America, the rate of immigration is now a growing concern. Despite a long held belief that the United States is a land of endless frontiers, since the early 1970s the US population has risen by an astonishing 100 million – nearly a third - with over a million new legal migrants coming in every year and a further half million illegals melting into the US population annually, according to the US Census Bureau. Figures from the US Border Patrol suggest the number of illegals is much higher, says Virginia Dean Abernethy, head of the US-based organisation, Population, Environment Balance.

Around 1.8 million illegal immigrants are apprehended each year by the Border Patrol, with around 70 per cent getting in undetected on their first or second attempt, according to the director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, UC San Diego.

In California, taxpayers have protested at the welfare costs for so many new immigrants who have moved into the state. A US government study found this was costing each household $1,178 more in tax every year. Economist, Lester Thurrow, in the 1990s calculated that maintaining the quality of infrastructure requires a nation to commit 12.5 per cent of its GDP for each 1 per cent of population growth.

Trends in immigration

By 2050 the United Nations projects the U.S. population will be over 400 million – some say much higher. Writing in Newsweek in July 2003, former UN director Joseph Chamie observed: “We're seeing enormous growth coming about because of migration. We project 80 percent of the projected growth of the U.S. population in the next 50 years is due to migration, immigrants and their descendants.“ With America’s appetite for consuming a large amount of the world’s resources, this is not good news for what remains of the planet.

The US Center for Immigration Studies found that US Census Bureau figures for 2002 [Is there any update on this?] showed that women in the top-10 immigrant-sending countries living in the United States, collectively had 23 per cent more children than women in their country of origin. Mexican immigrants in the United States, for example, had 3.5 children per woman, compared to 2.4 in Mexico, confounding views that higher living standards necessarily lead to lower fertility.

The UN predicts that to keep up with a rapidly expanding global population, one billion new jobs need to be created over the next decade just to maintain current employment levels. With many of the world’s poorest countries already suffering huge unemployment and some of the highest birth rates, even the medium-term outlook is unsustainable.

The movement from countries that, for many reasons, do not provide sufficient opportunities for their people to countries that provide a better life is understandable but will have major social and environmental consequences.

We need more than band-aid solutions

In this post cold war world, we need more than ‘band aid’ campaigns and must focus real political will on tackling global environmental loss, the bloody turf wars, economic problems, overpopulation and under employment that leads to poverty and despair.

The United Nations 2006 Revision of population estimates finds that between 2005-2050, eight countries are expected to account for half of the world’s projected population increase: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, the United States, Bangladesh and China.

Between 2005-2010, net immigration in seven countries will more than double population growth in Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Major countries of net emigration are projected to be China (329,000 annually) Mexico (306,000), India (241,000), the Philippines (180,000), Pakistan (167,000) and Indonesia (164,000).

Source of illustration: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/halfaworldaway/

Australia

Some people applaud Australia’s immigration system. They fail to say that Australia is letting in more immigrants each year than the country’s total annual birth rate. This, in a country that has suffered years of devastating drought, that leading Australian scientists say is set to get much worse, as its booming population competes for fragile agricultural land. While Prime Minister Kevin Rudd swept to victory on a 'green agenda' the country continues its open immigration policy for its reckless 'growth' agenda - putting even more pressure on food resources. From December 2006-7 the population grew by 338.600, with 163,600 births over deaths and net immigration of 175,000.

Canada

Similarly in Canada, where much of the country is too barren to support people, the Government is letting in around 260,000 immigrants a year – over twice the 116,000 increase in the country’s annual birth rate - and all four political parties want it to reach 330,000. According to the Fraser Institute’s Grubel Report, the cost to the taxpayer is $18.3 billion per year in services in excess of tax revenues paid by immigrants.

UK: Asylum applications

In 1985 there were just 4,390 asylum applications to the UK. Now, politicians, paralysed by the huge growth of the asylum-seeking industry, concede far greater numbers as normal, re-branding it as a ‘managed’ immigration policy. Home Office statistics show that by 2002, the number of asylum applications was 84,130, excluding dependants. ‘Grants of settlement’ in 2003, including family formation boosted numbers to 140,000 in further ‘chain migration’. After a fall, asylum claims have since risen to a three-year high, with 25,000 in the 12 months to June 2008, while removals are at a six-year low and the backlog is rising fast.

Even the Conservatives’ pre-election plan to allow 20,000 asylum seekers and their dependents to come to Britain, in further chain migration, is equivalent to building a town the size of Truro in Cornwall or Godalming in Surrey every year. This is still environmentally unsustainable in a country as densely populated as Britain.

All populations age

With typical short sightedness, ministers tell us we need more immigration and higher birth rates to support aging populations in Europe. Migrants get old too and need support. Are we to believe that ever-increasing populations are needed to suit the balance sheets of the pensions industry rather than the health of the planet?

No real debate

There has been no real debate of these vital issues, the supposed benefits of which are wide open to challenge. No one wants to offend fundamentalist visions to “go forth and multiply,” while the left now baulks at confronting the connection between high population growth, immigration and many developing countries, because it may offend ‘multi-culturalism.’

The UN estimated in 2004 there were over one billion slum-dwellers in the world from a global population of 6.5 billion and rising. When politicians call for continual economic growth in gross domestic product, rather than income growth per person, that would make people better of, they miss the point. Countries with small or stable populations can produce strong growth. If economic well-being depended on rising populations, Africa, Indonesia and the Philippines would be rich. Innovation and specialisation are more important.

Through history immigrants have contributed greatly to economic enterprise, but the scale and shape of current migration is putting increasing burdens on welfare systems. Whatever Governments claim are the economic benefits of immigration, figures from the UK Refugee Council say immigrants are six times more likely to be unemployed and suffer from disproportionately high levels of social exclusion.

UK Immigration tax-burden

Research published in June 2004 by the Association of London Government found that 45 per cent of ethnic minority children in the capital are in workless households. Local government’s High Ethnicity Authorities’ Group also recognises the significant extra cost of funding the educational and social needs of highly diverse communities. In Europe, the USA and Canada similar facts unfold.

The UK’s Local Government Association warned that “Councils find it difficult to provide services for growing populations that are not recognised by the official statistics and for which they, therefore, receive no financial help from Whitehall” – increasing the local council tax burden.

Costs obfuscated

There is a danger too that government will obscure real immigration costs, with the amnesty for many UK asylum seekers now regularised into mainstream benefit statistics. In a further move, the Office for National Statistics confirmed in April 2004 that it had reduced the amount of information provided about ethnic minorities and non-British workers.

Source: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2006/08/index.html

What is going on?

We read about scam health tourism to the UK for free treatment and find that immigrants were not being screened on arrival for diseases like TB and AIDS, potentially costing the health service billions in drug treatment.

We hear of illegal immigrants being given rail tickets to make their own way to reception centres because of immigration staff shortages. Yet, former Chancellor, now Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was cutting 40,000 civil servants to save money. What is going on?

Crime hits us all, not least in vulnerable communities, but immigration has seen increases in drug-related crime, new terrorist concerns and unprecedented levels of black on black street gun violence. Since Jamaican gangsters moved into Bristol in late 2000, intent on fuelling the market in crack cocaine, police statistics showed a 72 per cent increase in serious crime. The impact has spread across the UK.

Crime, Immigration policy, and overcrowded prisons

After being vague as to reasons why prison numbers were at an all time high, the Home Office finally admitted that more than one in eight prisoners in Britain’s overcrowded jails were foreign nationals.

With the outrage over the release of hundreds of foreign criminals who should have faced deportation hearings, it is astonishing that a Home Office news release back in September 2003 promised that: “Refugees or asylum seekers who commit serious offences will no longer be able to rely on the protection of the Refugee Convention as a means to thwart their removal from the UK.” Yet, half of the foreign prisoners released in 2007 were allowed to walk straight onto Britain’s streets. All this is putting unprecedented strain on our penal system, with the Government releasing many prisoners early because of jail overcrowding.

Rate of immigrant imprisonment in EU

Many EU countries have even higher percentages of foreign nationals in their prisons. According to research by the Prison Research Unit at Kings College, London, in the Netherlands 33 per cent of prisoners were non-citizens. In Spain it was 30 per cent, in Belgium, an astonishing 41 per cent, while in affluent Sweden a quarter of the prison population were foreign nationals.

These are things we must face in our efforts to tackle existing inequalities in our society, not bury them in the politics of denial. The government has spent billions over the last 25 years trying to turn round vulnerable urban areas. Yet still we have stressed communities with high unemployment and high crime.

Housing, benefits and large families

A well-briefed asylum industry is running rings around the Government at taxpayers’ expense. A fast track to housing, education, benefits and healthcare is a powerful lure to economic migrants. Research by the Rowntree Foundation found UK benefits made many large families far better off than they could possibly expect if parents were working.

Politicians resist necessary policy change

One of the few more imaginative proposals to emerge has been the possibility of supporting countries to set up asylum processing centres in areas less favoured by the asylum seeking community. This radical idea now seems to have been buried by politicians as unacceptable. If, as is claimed, asylum seekers head for places where they have language affinity, why are many people from countries like the Congo living in London rather than France, and how is it we have asylum claims from India, a long time democracy?

Yet, for asylum seekers given leave to remain in the UK, we could do far more to provide specialist skills with the voluntary sector to help them become key workers in their country of origin.

Time is running out

The safety valve of migration is part of our collective history, but large-scale migration now raises vital social, environmental and economic questions about where the world is going and how we deliver reform and a better life for people wherever they are born. Like most of the key problems of the 21st Century, time to find solutions is running out.

[1]The statements about 'nearly five million adults... on out-of-work benefits' and 'unemployment has jumped to 1.86 million' need explaining for non-UK readers: It is the way we sub-divide UK labor market statistics - 5m are on long-term out of work benefits, such as disability allowance of various categories or just long-term discouraged workers on social security welfare payments with savings of less than £8000. Over this and you can't claim. Many are able and want to work (4m according to stats) but what is called the claiment count currently 1.86m and rising is the weekly welfare benefit to help people signing on as unemployed and actively seeking work. This is around £57 a week for 6 months, plus some help with housing rent and taxes if they are living independently and paying a rent - not a lot in the UK, when you consider asylum-seekers get around £44 a week plus access to free housing, healthcare and schooling. - This is one reason why the UK is such magnet for large families who jump to the top of the housing queue, ahead of single people on the social housing waiting list for years - causing much resentment. All these sub-divides of labor stats were originally done to try and smokescreen rising unemployment figures under the Tories in the 1980-90s.

Source: http://people.howstuffworks.com/immigration.htm/

Dramatic rises in numbers of illegal entrants

Over 15,000 illegal migrants were apprehended by coastguards as they tried to enter Greece by boat in 2008, up 65 per cent on the previous year. Over a 100,000 African immigrants have landed in the Spanish Canary Islands trying to gain access to the EU in the last few years.

In Italy, the number of illegal immigrants entering the country doubled in the first seven months of 2008 over 2007.

Spain, Portugal and Malta have all become similar targets. Approximately 1,000 migrants were picked up at sea when they landed in Malta between January and June 2006. Officials in Valletta compare this as the equivalent of 50,000 reaching Spain in the same time frame. The majority were attempting to reach Italy. This is the magnitude of the problem of illegal immigration in Malta where the population density is 1,200 per square kilometre, says Maltese Foreign Minister Michael Frendo.

Both Spain and Italy have faced major influxes of illegal immigrants. After announcing a new amnesty in July 2006 that it would grant citizenship to immigrants that could document they have stayed in Italy for five years, Italy has now implemented state of emergency measures.

More than 15,000 illegal immigrants entered the EU via Italy between January and July 2008. The figures come in spite of a government crackdown on crime and an increase in the number of deportations. Many arrive on boats organised by people traffickers. Most come across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa. Once ashore they hope to take advantage of the Shengen zone’s open borders within the EU and locate work.

Italy's crackdown on crime and immigration

Italy’s crackdown on crime has seen stringent new measures introduced, making it an offence punishable by up to four years jail to enter the country illegally. A decree allows the government to deploy soldiers to several cities in an effort to control crime. Property rented to illegal immigrants can be confiscated under the new legislation.

The Italian authorities, like others in Europe, often find the countries of origin of illegal arrivals are reluctant to accept them back if they are deported. Italy's prisons are already crammed with foreigners. Some 20,000 people out of the 55,000 prisoners currently serving sentences or awaiting trial in Italian jails are foreigners. The number of foreign prisoners continues to increase because of difficulties carrying through expulsions ordered by the judiciary.

Between 600,000 non-EU citizens are currently living illegally in the country according to Italy's three largest labor unions CGIL, CISL and UIL and 800,000, according to the research institute Eurispes’s annual report on immigration.

Both Italy and Greece had unemployment rates of around 11 per cent in 1999, while Spain’s unemployment rate exceeded 15 per cent in the same year. Nevertheless, Italy has admitted over 2.5 million, Spain about 2.5 million and Greece nearly 1.5 million immigrant workers in the last 15 to 20 years.

Five amnesties have taken place in Italy since 1986, involving more than two million immigrants; four in Greece, four in Portugal since 1992 and three in Spain. These amnesties confirm that such strategies do not solve in the long term the challenge of dealing with undocumented migration.*

Spain: Balancing rights

In Spain, where legal immigrants alone make up nearly 9 percent of the population, Prime Minister Zapatero surprised many at the start of his second term by directing an about-face of his administration's previously lenient immigration policies. In June 2008, just three years after authorizing a mass legalization of 750,000 undocumented workers, Mr. Zapatero expressed support for the EU's Return Directive – a policy that allows member states to hold undocumented migrants, including minors, for up to 18 months, and, if deported, ban them from returning. Faced with a 10.7 percent unemployment rate, Zapatero announced plans that would pay jobless immigrants to return to their home countries.

Zapatero's immigration policy has been criticised by immigrants-rights organisations. Antonio Abad, secretary-general of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees points out that by increasing the monitoring of the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, Spanish authorities have compelled sub-Saharan migrants to begin their sea journey from points farther south, endangering themselves even further. "It takes the people who need the most protection and makes things even harder for them," he says. He also criticizes Zapatero's support for the Return Directive. "When you limit one person's rights, you limit all of society," he adds.

Senegal is becoming a jumping off point for many would be immigrants, smuggling them to the Canary Islands, where they move on to Spain and the EU. Stories of success are fuelling efforts to make the attempt. Senegalese fishermen, many out of work due to intensive foreign fishing in their waters, have found a lucrative new business in smuggling. In an economy where the local wage is approximately $80 USD a month, a boat owner can charge over 100 individuals $1,000 each to attempt the journey. Between January and June 2006 more than 10,000 made the attempt from Senegal to the Canaries.

The Aegean

With its beaches, and historical sites the Greek island of Patmos has long been a popular tourist destination. But recently the tiny Aegean island has drawn a new type of visitor to its shores.

Over 4,000 illegal immigrants arrived on the island in 2008. Municipal authorities have now said they will block their ports to would-be immigrants arriving from neighbouring Turkey, arguing that the unwanted visitors will exceed the number of permanent residents on the island.

The islands of Lesbos, Samos and Patmos have been besieged with almost daily boatloads of migrants, the largest influx being Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians. Arrivals from Africa, mainly Somalia are increasing.

Athens has called on the European Union to establish a coastguard to halt the flood attempting to enter the 27- member bloc by sea. Greece is faced with monitoring 16,000 kilometers of coastline, the largest external sea border of any EU member state.

Last year Greece received 112,000 would-be immigrants, according to statistics from the Interior Ministry. Some end up staying in Greece while many more continue their journey westward. Clashes between illegal immigrants battling to sneak aboard ferries bound for Italy from the western Greek port of Patras have broken out on an almost daily basis, with hundreds of immigrants living in makeshift camps at the port.

However, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said that asylum seekers face "undue hardships" in Greece, often lacking legal aid to ensure that their claims receive adequate scrutiny from the asylum authorities. The refugee agency has described Greece's recognition rate for refugees as "disturbingly low." The overall protection rate for refugees of all nationalities in 2006 was 1 per cent in Greece, compared to 45 per cent in Italy and 50 per cent in Sweden. Greece routinely arrests all illegal immigrants and asylum seekers found in its territory and detains them in reception centres for up to three months.

While initial problems with the flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East centred on the Aegean islands, migrants are now causing problems in the capital. The historic centre of Athens has been riven by several street battles in recent months, involving rival groups from Afghanistan, Iraq and war-torn African countries often involved in dealing drugs and wielding axes and machetes.

"People are scared and depressed, it's getting worse," said Vassiliki Nikolakopoulou of the group, Panathinaia.

The top policy adviser for immigration issues at the Interior Ministry blames the influx of migrants. "Because of this phenomenon, we see more and more immigrants in central Athens trying to survive, often through illicit activities." Official, Patroklos Georgiadis, said that Greece supported the stricter line on immigration being promoted by the bloc's French presidency. "There will not be another wave of legalisation of immigrants in Greece in the near future," referring to the amnesty programs that have granted work and residence permits to some 500,000 migrants since 1997, most of them undocumented foreigners - at least half from Albania.

Portugal

In Portugal thousands of immigrants from Brazil and former Portuguese colonies in Africa have been allowed to settle in Portugal, to boost the population from its current decline in numbers. This will lead to more immigrants accessing other EU countries.

EU:New rules for expelling undocumented immigrants

Last summer the European Parliament approved new rules for expelling undocumented immigrants, among them a provision allowing member nations to keep migrants in detention centres for up to 18 months. Foreigners who have been forcibly deported also face a five-year ban on re-entering the European Union.

The measures met stiff opposition from liberal lawmakers and human rights groups, but aim to standardise rules for deporting immigrants, which vary widely across the 27-nation bloc. Under the terms, EU countries are required to give illegal immigrants seven to 30 days to leave Europe after receiving deportation orders. Those who don't depart voluntarily, or who officials fear may go into hiding, can be detained for up to 18 months while awaiting removal to their home country or a third nation. This includes families and unaccompanied children, though EU nations are urged to detain minors only as a last resort.

Supporters contend the rules were needed to give weight to immigration laws but critics argue the EU measure will erode humanitarian standards in Europe.

A Swedish Dilemma

Immigration has also had a big impact on Sweden. For some time, the government has been concerned about unemployment levels among the foreign born as compared to natives of the country, higher levels of social-welfare dependency, school dropouts and crime. Although Sweden does not require potential citizens to pass a language test, immigrants who have been sentenced to prison for a criminal offence are not allowed to naturalise.

In an article ‘Immigration and the welfare state’, Christopher Caldwell of the Swedish ‘Weekly Standard’ in February 2005 reported that in the last two decades, Malmö has acquired a population that is almost 40 percent foreign. Most of the students in its schools are of foreign parentage. Some immigrant neighborhoods in the city have unemployment rates exceeding 50 percent. Crime is high.

Sweden has become as heavily populated by minorities as any country in Europe. Of 9 million Swedes, roughly 1,080,000 are foreign-born. There are around 900,000 children of immigrants, between 60,000 and 100,000 illegal immigrants, and 40,000 more asylum-seekers awaiting clearance. The percentage of foreign-born is roughly equivalent to the highest percentage of immigrants the United States ever had in its history (on the eve of World War I).

Modern Sweden has built its sense of identity on two pillars: its generous welfare state and its status as a "moral superpower”. Indications are that the latter achievement is in the process of destroying the former, says Caldwell. It married solidarity to prosperity. This prosperity spurred a generosity towards the Third World that along with the generous welfare system helps explain how cities like Malmö became a magnet for immigration.

The Rosengard housing project in Malmo turned into a problem almost as soon as it was built. Today the windblown courtyards, convenience stores, and halal butchers are filled with heavily veiled women pushing baby carriages.

Swedes are looking at their neighbours. They see that Finland's tight immigration policies have resulted in lower social burdens. But it is to Denmark that Swedes have looked with most anxiety. There, the rise of the Danish People's party has succeeded in winning passage of Europe's most stringent laws on immigration. Denmark now restricts asylum admissions, welfare payments, and citizenship and residency permits for reasons of family unification. Denmark's crackdown has left Swedes wondering what is to stop many more in the E.U. from coming to their generous welfare state.

In 2008, net immigration into Sweden reached record levels, with more than 100,000 people entering the country and projections that the foreign-born population will reach 14 percent by the end of the year.

Norway

In neighbouring Norway the number of people applying for asylum has more than doubled in 2008 putting huge pressure on the immigration agency UDI. As many as 60 new asylum seekers are arriving in Norway every day, and the UDI predicts 2008 will show a total of nearly 15,000. Asylum was granted to just over 40 percent of the applicants. UDI has asked all of Norway's mayors how they can help accommodate the influx. Initially, many immigrants settled in East Oslo, but social pressures have resulted in the Government introducing a dispersal policy to other areas of Norway. It is common now to see burka-clad women on the streets of remote fiord towns.

Britain

Britain too has long been a magnet for immigrants attracted by existing large immigrant communities in the country, easy access to welfare and housing and the government’s poor rate of removals of those refused permission to stay. The notorious Sangattte camp near Calais for years acted as magnet for illegals seeking to board ferries to the UK and claim asylum rather than elsewhere in the EU. Since Labour came to power in 1997, government statistics show the number of foreign nationals given UK passports has soared with 84 per cent of immigrants coming from outside the EU. By 2051 the Government Actuary’s Department estimated the UK’s population could rise from the current 62 million to over 90 million, 70 per cent of this due to inward migration.

Net immigration topped 300,000 in 2006, three times the average figure in the mid-'90s—a level "unprecedented in our history," according to a parliamentary inquiry in 2008. With the exception of the United States, Britain took in more immigrants in 2006 than any of the world's leading economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Add to this an unknown number of illegal immigrants who arrive each year, with an estimated 600,000 already living in the UK.

Many other west European member states now have significant immigrant populations, notably France, with its legacy of former African colonies. In November 2006 the Dutch parliament voted to allow over 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Holland before April 2001, to remain in the country. The country has one of the largest Muslim populations in Western Europe, after France. In Ireland, the second largest foreign group receiving free state accommodation are now Nigerians, according to the Irish Statistics Office 2006 census. However, Eastern EU countries still remain largely untargeted by immigration. Welfare payments are much less attractive and there are no significant immigrant communities to provide support

The safety valve of migration is part of our collective history, but large-scale migration now raises vital social, environmental and economic questions about where the world is going and how we deliver reform and a better life for people wherever they are born. (2,364 words)

*European Immigration: A Sourcebook Published: December 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7546-4894-9. Price: £75.00 Edited by Anna Triandafyllidou, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

I have been silent for a while, because there were not much news worth reporting, aside from the usual Italian obsessions with Sex and Politics, such as "Have the new pretty and young female Ministers of the Berlusconi Government bartered their professional position for those of a sexual nature with the Boss?"

These questions seem far from the tragic reality of the moment (or maybe a welcome and psychologically needed diversion), reflecting a desire to score points - for sex equality, justice, integrity, etc.- by whoever is NOT in power.

However, going through the site www.italianiliberi.it, an association whose objective is to preserve the identity of Italian unique culture and historic memory, against the European Union power, I came across some pertinent articles that I would like to share with you.

We, at Candobetter, may be familiar with the genre, and this is a variation on the theme of a wholesale loss of European identity and of national territory to an apparently non-stop alien invasion. The main sufferers are the countries that have created the European Union, not knowing that they were to renounce their cultural heritage.

I have chosen for your attention, two articles that express anguish at the process of collapse of a cherished traditional way of life.

They are the Italian paleontologist Ida Magli and the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, some of whose ideas are convergent, though Magli, called the successor to the late journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci, is more virulent in her judgement. Her more Italo-centric article is entitled:

"Why the left wishes the end of Italians?"

Here we need some clarifications. The Left Parties in Italy are all pro-immigration, and they assume that all the anti-immigration stances are motivated by racism, while most of the times are a reaction to real economic distress and just as real social insecurity brought about by unseemly and unlawful customs.

Magli tries to analyse the reason why the Italian "left" so much hates its traditions, its ancestors, it history, its language, to the point of wishing their annihilation.

The policy of what in effect should be described as "open borders" or "open season on Italian soil, security, education and cultural heritage" is anti-economic and destructive. But rationality is not something that animates politics:

"The violence with which the Left insists on an immigrant invasion, will have only one result: the future end of the Italian civilisation. They know it, even if they pretend not to know it....The social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, ethnology, etc., have definitely demonstrated that what guides the behaviour of people and of individuals is determined by a complex environmental web, where language, customs, religion, tradition, history, are united in what we brazenly call "culture"...But this understanding has been suddenly erased, when it was decided to formalise the old project of an European Union, which has actually eliminated the awareness of its own history, to substitute in its place the fusion of every existing population on Earth... But we know that only "the people"are responsible for passing on their culture to keep it alive. The immigrants will keep and transmit their own, and rightly so."

If Magli asks herself why the Left is so keen on destroying our culture to introduce Multiculturalism - and the resulting chaos - Finkielkraut gives a convincing answer, coated in ironic terms:

"Do Europeans still live in Europe?"

We all have the same sensation: sorting out the question about what is Europe, nobody seems to know anymore.

"...an impressive number of opinion makers, journalists, citizens, politicians, affirm that there's no answer, or, better still, no answer is required. Europe, they say, is nothing tangible, and this Nothing is not an handicap, but its destiny, its vocation, its latest and cardinal virtue.

The French philosopher Jean-Marc Ferry defines Europe as an identity whose principle is to be open to other identities..."

He is saying that its identity is not to have one. To be stranger to itself. Unknowable and unloved.

"This way of thinking" continues Finkielkraut " is due to the trauma of Auschwitz. The apocalyptic form that has assumed the exclusion of the Other in death camps, has to be rescued by the birth of a different idea of humanity, which cannot be divided by any interior dissension. And Europe, the very place of origin of the crime, must give an example and atone for it by destroying that place ..."

This thesis is very interesting and it may have truth in it. It explains also the furious debates over any type of laws regarding normal duty by foreigners required to adapt to the host country (the obligation to remove the veil for identification purposes, special language classes for children of immigrants, regulation of gypsy camp sites and the measures against gypsies who force their children to beg and steal, etc.,) criticised as human rights abuses and latent xenophobia, when not openly accused of racism. In this case, the rhetoric raises its ugly head and we hear screams of: Nazis! Fascists!"

Another example is the ideological debate on admitting Turkey into the Union, debate which assumes a surreal character, as it refers to a country that has, in past centuries

been an enemy of Europe and its ideals.

"To ask if Turkey is part of Europe - or if this country is at its margins or been part of the experiences that have moulded the Old Continent and given its particular physiognomy: Christianity, Renaissance, Reform, Enlightenment, Romanticism - means to forget that Europe itself is not anymore part of Europe because it has cut itself from its sanguinary past... I am Nothing therefore I am Everything, seems to affirm the post-national, post-European Europe... This Europe of the Memory has become a Tabula Rasa. But another modality exists: to live in the duty of preserving the Culture... Man lives in society not because he inherits it from other men, but because he commemorates other men. To commemorate means to revive what is great in our dead..."

But this type of memory is not anymore practised. If Europe grows away from itself without looking at its past, it is not just because of the memory of past atrocities - and which country or society is immune from violence ? - but because, alas, culture, this great transmitter of values, the heritage of our humanism, has no more importance.

In this context of de-Europisation, we're facing not only a lax attitude towards immigration on part of leftist Italian politicians, but a general complicity in erasing national traditions and sense of belonging, everywhere on the whole European territory. Immigrants know that they can count on the sense of guilt which confuses the society they are prepared to invade. They know, in spite of government's declarations and good intention, there is the countereffect of a political left which, in the name of virtuous sentiments, sabotages every attempt at establishing some sort of order.

It is too late: the European Parliament and the European Commission have decreed the death by stealth of the Old Continent. One day at the time, one more Mosque, one more more Rom child forced to beg in the street instead of going to school. because--as the Italian Supreme Court has admitted--begging is part of their culture and deserves respect, one more under-age Nigerian prostitute, one less barrier of the Schengen treatise to border trafficking: it happens all here, in front of our very eyes, but then we are impelled to look away. It is all too disturbing, what can we do?

Welcome to the Happy Realm of the Ostrich!

Comment: The above article was originally posted on 3 December 2008. I don't regard the cause as being hopeless as Marisa seems to. It should still be possible for Europeans to find a way to stop their becoming demographically overwhelmed if they stand up for their rights assertively. Perhaps some pragmatic compromise can be made even with the non-Europeans in their midst as it would not even be in their interests to allow Europe's population to continue to grow indefinitely. The article "Why U.S. immigration reformers can still remain hopeful" of 13 Nov 08 by Leon Kolankiewicz may point to a way forward. - JS

Economic house of cards, ecological devastation

That the home building industry is the prime mover and catalyst of our ecological ruin was never more clearly illustrated than by statements recently made by University of West Florida economist Rick Harper, director of the UWF’s Haas Centre for Business Research. Harper argued that the real estate market would never recover from the current recession until population growth soaks up existing housing inventory and prices consequently begin to appreciate. “If we don’t stimulate population growth…we are going to take 10 years or more to recover from this recession”, he said, “we’ve had a huge overbuilding of the housing sector, there was just too much investment in residential structures.” He therefore advocates an easing of immigration standards to allow more people of higher education and net worth into the country.

Bob Carr

The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades.

Bush administration

The Bush administration followed a similar course. By outsourcing decent working class jobs and tolerating the blatant mass employment of millions of low wage “undocumented” service sector workers they not only relegated 5 million Americans from the middle class but eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector. Land speculation and homebuilding assumed a greater importance in this new economy with a hollow core. Like a drug addict who has forsaken proper nutrition for energy, the new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix (and birth incentives to a lesser degree) for energy.

One fix never enough for an addict

But each succeeding fix requires greater injections to achieve the same jump start, and the cycle of boom and bust plays out with greater and greater consequences. More severe labour shortages, that call for more foreign injections, and the devastating ecological results, largely unsung, manifested in massive losses in prime farmland at a frightening pace and a cost in wildlife habitat that lies at the perimeter of expanding urban boundaries. Not to mention the greater energy consumption, waste disposal and pollution involved with never-ending urbanization. North American studies reveal that at most, rational land use planning could only mitigate half these problems. The other half are the inevitable consequence of largely immigrant-driven population growth.

Never enough fuel, never enough money

But real estate development itself requires fuel. It requires a favourable interest rate climate, and local governments bought and paid for together with their planning departments, staffed with growth managers who can converse in “greenspeak” and greenwash to assuage anxieties about their development plans. And of course it requires home buyers. People. The more the merrier. And where do people come from? Through the airport or the maternity ward, and the federal government is the gatekeeper at the first and most important port of entry, and quite influential in manipulating the volume at the other port too. Home buyers, in turn, have a requirement too. Financing. This holds the key, at least in Canada, to the demographic pyramid scam of the immigrant-propelled economy. For the big Canadian banks and credit institutions are not only the essential lubricants of home purchase and land development, but potent immigration lobbyists and influence peddlers as well.

Royal Bank of Canada

In fact the president and CEO of Canada’s dominant Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 2008 reiterated the position taken by an October 2005 RBC report that the government should hike its annual immigration intake from its present approximately 240,000 to some 400,000. No doubt he would be speaking on behalf of his competitors in that ambition. What is most impressive about Mr. Gordon Nixon’s political strategy is that is conducted on a broad front. RBC realizes that the federal government may be the gatekeeper, but the environmental movement is the barking dog which must be silenced if the gate is to be left open wide for the avalanche of consumers that it wants.

Financing entropy

So RBC laid out a Machiavellian plan. To cover their quest to underwrite the conversion of Canada’s best farmland to sprawling subdivisions and hundreds upon hundreds of species at risk to extinction in the process, they concocted an “Environmental Blueprint” that would signal to the environmental movement that “(they) support environmental sustainability”. They declared that would not for example“engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests”. But the trees of urban Canada were presumably fair game, as are the rich fields of BC’s Fraser Valley and the Class 1 farmland of Ontario that is being developed at a pace of perhaps 60,000 acres per year. One might think that this kind of ecological damage, not to mention this threat to our national food security, would meet with the outrage of our environmental NGOs. Apparently RBC thought so too. That is why they bought their silence.

Silencing the barking dog

To prove their determination to “direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes”, they arranged to steer money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) for each client who switched to electronic bank statements. A cute deal for both parties. NCC, always thirsty for dough, got a corporate bag man, and RBC got to wear a green cloak over its mercenary endeavours. It was not done for the environment, it was a strictly commercial transaction, ecological dispensation for suburban sprawl in return for cash and acquiescence.

Failure of environmental flagships

Many of us have been dumbfounded by the failure of flagship environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club of Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation to publicly contest the federal government’s mass immigration policy. NCC not surprisingly has been silent too, even though population growth is an obvious culprit in habitat loss. How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.

Ideological myopia and donor bases

The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good Doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr. Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialized countries are already overpopulated.

Demographic lockjaw

The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the BC Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organization. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.” Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the raison d’etre of the organization, and the environment itself. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.

Arguably then, homebuilding is not the prime mover of ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the ‘green’ watchdogs who haven’t barked because big money has thrown them a bone.

Tim Murray,

Quadra Island, BC

December 29/08

The following was posted as a comment to the article "About Immigration". Until I got half way through the article, I had not realised that it had been spoken back in 1993 and not recently. Our social, environmental and economic outlook has considerably worsened since 1993, but little else has changed from what Mark O'Connor describes, that is, except, in my experience, the baiting of opponents of immigration as 'racists' is not as widespread as it was back then. At least in on-line discussions, this old favourite of "open borders" advocates, is used much less. However, apart from that, nothing appears to have changed in 15 years. Back then the case against population growth was almost as well known as it is today and was ignored back then as the growth lobby exerted its anti-democratic influence on the national population policy direction behind closed doors just as they do today.

This time we must ensure that the knowledge that we have about the harmful effects of human population growth does inform our national population and immigration policy, so that in another 15 years time, we don't find ourselves living in a crowded desertified and polluted third world slum. - JS 9 Dec 08

Author and poet Mark O'Connor on "immigrationism":

The world average for net immigration is of course zero. Most countries take in about as many immigrants as they produce emigrants. Overpopulation may be the greatest current problem for most nations, yet a well balanced immigration program need contribute little to this.

Only a handful of countries, such as Australia and Canada, have seriously unbalanced immigration programs. In these countries many more thousands of people enter the country than leave it each year. The net influx then becomes a serious problem both for the economy and for achieving population stability and ESD (Ecologically Sustainable Development).

The word 'immigrationism' in my title is not a mere synonym for immigration. We are talking about an ideology - one that is currently omnipresent in the media. Immigrationism is the belief that a large surplus of immigrants over emigrants is a normal and healthy situation.

Like all ideologies, immigrationism is dangerous because it invokes our moral sense and then applies it to a simplified and perhaps misleading model of the universe. Yet, like all ideologies, it becomes less dangerous once one has a name for it. One can then keep long-term tabs on the creed, note and remember what sorts of people its leaders have been, and also which awkward facts its PR may have swept under the carpet.

Oddly enough, we have had till recently no common word for 'immigrationism' and have had to speak clumsily and rather misleadingly of 'the ethnic lobby' (as though most immigrants were immigrationists). It is even possible that I am the first person to coin or use the word 'immigrationism' in the present debate. Yet if so, how have we done without it? Immigrationism is surely as vivid and identifiable a presence in Australian politics as environmentalism or monetarism.

There is now a second near-synonym which I will occasionally prefer this is 'the politically correct line on immigration,' or PCLI for short. As this second term suggests, immigrationism is part of the wider problem of political correctness - that is, of orthodoxies and assumptions that may constrict debate.

The current PCLI often presents itself as self-evidently humane and altruistic, and its opponents as selfish and chauvinistic end of discussion! However, our immigrant intake is not in fact dominated by refugees but by those whose skills are allegedly of value to us, and by those whose own ethnic groups, motivated by ethnic chauvinism ('racism') or family loyalty, have lobbied hardest. Further, a glance at the politically correct discourse of mainstream Australian media will show that it is in fact obsessed with materialist values, e.g. with ways to increase GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

So let's take a closer look at one of the crucial code-words of the PCLI.

#RacistBaiting" id="RacistBaiting">The Use of 'Racism' to Inhibit Debate

Twenty-five years ago, in the Vietnam era, we Australians had a conservative establishment, a rather complacent, self-indulgent and self-perpetuating establishment. It saw itself as right-wing, and it far too readily dismissed its dissidents as pro-Communists or pink. Today we have a similarly complacent establishment, but one that sees itself as left-wing, and far too readily dismisses its dissidents as crypto right-wingers.

This I think is the explanation for the common cant use of the word 'racism' in contexts which have little or nothing to do with race. Many of those who misuse this word are quite literate enough to know that 'racism' is not a loose synonym for any and every kind of prejudice against minorities. (They may not realize, though, that by their misuse of this word they merge cultural or ethnic differences into racial ones, and thus recreate a central plank of Nazi propaganda).

They use the word in this way because they need a 'boo-word' - a word with such intensely negative connotations that, hopefully, no opponent in debate can shrug it off, yet so vague in its meaning that it can be applied to practically anyone who disagrees with them. As with the McCarthyites, who called anyone to their left 'pro-communist,' the trick is to loosen the original denotation of a word until it means less and less, while retaining the original intensely negative connotations. At the same time the true believer refuses to notice any degrees or gradations. To him or her 'a pinko is a pinko,' or 'a racist is a racist.'

In recent months the news programs of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) have run several items of Australian news each week that are introduced by the logo or title 'RACISM' - a remarkable feat of political correctness considering that most of the items were in fact not about racial but about cultural or ethnic issues. Somehow the more accurate terms 'ethnicism' and 'ethnic chauvinism' don't seem to appeal to them, or to some newspapers that follow their lead.

Such witch-hunts, once launched, can go a long way. Once their term 'capitalist running dog' or 'communist fellow traveller' is extended to anyone who questions the politically correct orthodoxy, almost the whole population is at risk. Similarly, once 'racism' comes to be a loose synonym for any kind of prejudice the war against 'racism' can continue without limits - or it could in a dictatorship. The recent raids on the Immigration Department might be just a beginning.

As the McCarthyist and Fascist eras show, a witch-hunt in progress attracts misguided idealists. It also attracts the competitive egos of some mediocre writers and artists who, lacking original ideas of their own, seek to carry the pre-established views to new extremes.

Even democracy itself, a philosophy based on respecting the will of the majority, could be under threat since the true PCLI apparatchik is liable to brush aside the will of the majority as 'revisionist' or 'racist' or whatever.

The good news for environmentalists is that such outbreaks of ideology are a bit like boils. At least in a democracy they tend to come to a head and burst, leaving a painful slow-healing sore. We need to keep the pressure on them until they do.

So, to the larger issue of political correctness.

#PoliticalCorrectness" id="PoliticalCorrectness">Immigrationism and Political Correctness

A central question for this conference is, I take it, how could a democratic government introduce a policy as problematic and unpopular as Australia's recent immigration policy?

• We have known for at least the last 20 years that we were headed for an age of automation and computers in which the last thing we would require was more labor. Instead we brought in a million migrants over the past 10 years, and wound up, perhaps not entirely unrelatedly, with a million unemployed and an economy half-ruined. (And as the economy sinks, more and more environmental standards are being abandoned.) [Note: This speech was given in 1993]
• We have long known that the present population of Australia (which refuses to contemplate any major change in its wasteful and destructive life-style) was already doing permanent and morally inexcusable damage to this nation's fragile environments. Yet we have set immigration levels that have kept our population on course to double at least every 50 years.
• We know that the population of those currently in world refugee camps greatly exceeds the total number of immigrants we could conceivably take in over many decades. Yet for the past ten years we have kept refugees to a mere 11,000 odd per year, while we have taken in anything up to 160,000 other immigrants per year, mainly from countries whose populations have no real need to emigrate. Indeed one of our largest sources of immigrants is a European country whose chauvinist government actually bribes its people to have more babies.

So we have a policy that is environmentally, economically, and morally a shambles, and which the Australian electorate has overwhelmingly rejected in all the opinion polls.

Yet you could tune in to a whole year's editions of the ABC's TV NEWS and 7 30 Report and discover only that our high immigration policy is good and inevitable, and that anyone who questions it is probably a secret member of the Hitler Youth League.

Environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich and David Suzuki have condemned Australia's population growth as extreme by First World standards. They have also argued that the First World's population growth is actually far more of an environmental problem than that of the Third World. Granted that each Australian expects to use resources equivalent to at least 30 Third World citizens, Australia's 17 million [now 21 million] is already the equivalent in environmental load of about 540 million Third World citizens - roughly the population of Africa, and almost all of it supported on our coastal rim.

Yet, for over a decade, parts of our national media, notably including some SBS and ABC TV programs, have been spreading an ideology according to which Australia's traditional culture and national identity are cripplingly narrow and inadequate; hence, only massive immigration from as many overseas countries as possible can restore Australia's credibility by turning us into a progressive multicultural nation. Persons opposed to population growth have often been accused of cultural chauvinism (what the illiterate calls 'racism') and the effects of population growth on environment, urban problems, the economy, and on Aborigines, are either dismissed or are presented as benign. The SBS/ABC ideology sees itself as a progressive, egalitarian and international one.

#Dilemmas" id="Dilemmas">The Dilemmas Our Opponents Are Facing

An advocate of high immigration rates obviously needs to believe that Australia can take millions more people. To defend this position, he or she may ask, 'How can you or anyone else presume to tell when Australia is overpopulated?

The environmentalist's answer is very simple, 'If the current population, with the lifestyle it presently requires the government to provide, is already doing permanent and unacceptable damage to the farm-lands, the forests, the rivers, and the unique native species of which we are custodians, then we are already overpopulated.'

Some immigrationists will wriggle further on that spike by demanding, 'But couldn't we all reduce our environmental impact on everything by 50 percent each, and so have twice as many people?'

The environmentalist's reply is nothing less than devastating 'We could, but we haven't. Australians today demand more resources per person than ever before. It will be time enough to re-open the case for more people if in a decade or so this pattern of consumption has been reversed.'

Some immigrationists are social optimists who claim that population isn't a problem any more because 'we' are just about to introduce some much improved system for equitable distribution of wealth. But once again, the environmentalist may simply ask them (a) how they're so sure their system will work where Karl Marx's failed, and (b) just how soon are they promising to install it nationally or globally, and (c) whether better distribution will necessarily save the environment.

This leaves the committed immigrationist in a hopeless dilemma. Only ecological illiterates still believe in the 'empty country' myth. Yet if Australia is already approaching its optimum population, or has exceeded it, immigrationism is irresponsible.

The simplistic myth of Australia as a 'land without people for people without land' has been tried and found wanting. Out of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived after the Second World War from depressed agricultural areas in Europe, very few succeeded in finding land in Australia. Most of the land that was economically farmable (and much that wasn't) had long since been ruthlessly cleared. Post-war immigration to Australia did not mean finding a use for an 'empty' land, it meant further overloading the balance of cityfolk to farmers - that is, of food and import consumers to food and export producers.

In short, for those emotionally committed to immigrationism the optimum-population debate is a morass. It involves issues many of them are either not expert in or simply don't care to think about. Many immigrationists prefer to see their creed simply in terms of human charity, of helping people. Yet, like the Unjust Steward in the Bible, they try to give away what is not quite theirs to give. In a more modern analogy, the would-be charitable immigrationist is a bit like someone who writes a check to the Salvos [Salvation Army] on someone else's account - and without even finding out if the account has the required funds.

The only way to avoid entering this debate is to deny your opponent speaking-rights - that is, to rule him or her out of court. How do you do that? Well, if you are unscrupulous you go for 'moral monopoly.'

#MoralMonopoly" id="MoralMonopoly">The Art of Moral Monopoly

The essence of the moral monopolist tactic is to claim that you preeminently possess some virtue - which in reality is shared by almost the entire community - and that your opponents disgracefully lack it. (Respect for 'motherhood' used to be a favorite choice.)

Claims to moral monopoly usually involve a conspiracy theory. In the U.S. in the 1950s the followers of Senator McCarthy obsessively denounced a supposed conspiracy to overthrow the government. This conspiracy was largely a myth, but the myth was a godsend to the accusers. It allowed them to turn the widespread and minimal virtue of allegiance to the national government into a sort of moral monopoly of their own. This helped free them from the responsibility to argue logically or to be nice people. It was also a great cover for vested interests.

The belief that all human beings are sharers in the brotherhood of humanity is a basic cherished view of our culture, for at least the last 30 years. Yet in Australia in the 1980s some members of the multicultural lobby attempted to make this commonplace virtue a peculiar possession of their own group. They did this by setting up a conspiracy theory that people who preferred lower rates of immigration were part of an omnipresent 'racist' conspiracy.

We can now see why the 'racism' ploy forms such an essential part of the immigrationist position. Without it, the debate would largely turn into one on the environmental and economic carrying-capacity of Australia.

Conspiracy theories constructed by moral monopolists often rest on very odd assumptions. Some immigrationists claim that Australia is obliged to maintain high immigration until we have a roughly representative mix of the peoples of the world (or alternatively, of 'Asia' or of 'the Pacific region') right here in our own country. Needless to say, no such moral obligation exists. The people of Thailand, China, Finland, etc. are not ashamed of having a predominance of people of a particular ethnicity or culture in their country.

Indeed, national boundaries since the age of nationalism began, have been increasingly drawn along ethnic lines. It is a little hard to see why Australia alone or almost alone has an obligation to radically change its ethnic mix, and to become a sort of microcosm of the world - unless they mean to argue that Australia is not a real nation but a sort of international treaty area, like Antarctica. But then the moral monopolist doesn't debate; he or she assumes.

Source (pdf 27K).

Federation for American Immigration Reform media release, 24 Oct 08

(Washington, D.C.) A new report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) demonstrates why Georgia has taken a lead in adopting state-based policies to control the costs of illegal immigration. According to the new study, "The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Georgians," the state currently spends about $1.6 billion a year to provide three basic services to illegal aliens and their dependents - K-12 education, public health care, and incarceration of criminals. These costs associated with the estimated 495,000 illegal aliens residing in the state amount to a $523 a year burden for every Georgia household headed by a native-born American.

K-12 education for the children of illegal aliens constitutes the largest share of Georgia's cost burden, finds the report. The annual price tag for schooling an estimated 64,100 children who are themselves illegal aliens, and an estimated 89,700 U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, runs to about $1.38 billion. Unreimbursed health care costs add an additional $210 million to the taxpayers' tab, while another $22.6 million is spent incarcerating illegal aliens who have committed other crimes in Georgia. All of these costs compound an already difficult fiscal situation, as state officials estimate a current budget shortfall of about $2 billion.

"At a time when governments at every level are struggling with huge deficits, slashing vital programs and services, and US-workers are losing their jobs, we see repeated examples of how illegal immigration is adding to already significant fiscal worries," said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "As Georgia businesses have padded their profit margins in recent years by using illegal aliens to undercut American workers, the true costs for this low wage labor force have been passed along to the taxpayers."

In response to the spiraling costs associated with illegal immigration, Georgia adopted workable state-based enforcement policies in 2007, which have begun to have a positive impact. "Georgia provides a case study in how a state can respond effectively to crushing cost burdens associated with illegal immigration, and provides a model for other state governments," said Stein.

"The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Georgians" is the latest in a series of studies FAIR has produced examining the impact of illegal immigration on state governments and local taxpayers. "Until fairly recently, regions like the South had been largely unaffected by the phenomenon of mass illegal immigration. The findings of this report, that illegal immigration now costs Georgia $1.6 billion a year, is evidence that mass illegal immigration is truly a national problem that demands real enforcement solutions at the federal, state and local level," concluded Stein.

"The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Georgians" is available on FAIR's website, www.fairus.org as a pdf report (460K).

This media release has been distributed by Bill Ryerson of the Populatiion Media Center (www.populationmedia.org)

Contact: Jack Martin (202) 328-7004, jmartin [AT] fairus.org.

About FAIR

Founded in 1979, FAIR is the country's largest and oldest immigration reform group. With over 250,000 members nationwide, FAIR fights for immigration policies that serve national interests, not special interests. FAIR believes that immigration reform must enhance national security, improve the economy, protect jobs, preserve our environment, and establish a rule of law that is recognized and enforced.

Bob Dane
Press Secretary/Communications Director
Federation for American Immigration Reform
25 Massachusetts Avenue - Suite 300
Washington DC, 20001
Office 202-328-7004

Thirty years ago I was a wild and woolly graduate student at the University of British Columbia in Tim Murray's rain-drenched and green home province on Canada's west coast. Among the odds and ends taped to my office door on campus was a cartoonist's sketch. The sketch depicted a doomed mouse defiantly giving the finger to a screaming, demonical hawk in full dive, its deadly, gleaming talons extended and on the verge of both piercing and crushing the life out of the pugnacious rodent.

If not exactly "speaking truth to power," at least this was saying, "I know you're about to destroy me, but screw you anyway."

I was reminded of this cartoon as I read Tim's trenchant and grim post "Is It Game Over for Immigration Reformers in America?" It may well be that those of us toiling fruitlessly for decades to stop what author Lindsey Grant once called "the juggernaut" of U.S. and global population growth - before catastrophe or collapse intercedes - are like that little mouse. I'm inclined to agree, and yet persistent pessimist (realist?) that I am, even I have to admit that perhaps a thin sliver of hope remains; it may even be that this is not forlorn hope or mere grasping at straws.

Tim's analysis is that Barack Obama's win and the Democrats' consolidation of their control of both the House and Senate augur ill for immigration reduction and U.S. population stabilization efforts, and he's absolutely right. The first type of "immigration reform" this emboldened cabal will attempt is a revival of the amnesty proposal - supported by elites almost across the board - that failed in the Senate last year after a popular outcry by rank-and-file Americans across the land. Derided as a "shamnesty" by its opponents, and denied to be an amnesty at all by its proponents, this bill, if passed, would legalize the status of some 12-20 million illegal immigrants now estimated to already be in the USA.

But far more damaging to the prospects for ever stabilizing U.S. population, the amnesty would allow the newly legalized to begin petitioning the government to admit their immediate relatives, under the family reunification provisions of current U.S. immigration law. One estimate is that this chain migration would eventually result in 100 million new legal immigrants being added to the U.S. population over the next two decades - in addition to background or baseline levels of 60-65 million growth.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned a system of checks and balances that would prevent hasty or ill-considered changes in federal government policy and direction. Usually, passing a law requires getting over more hurdles than a finalist in the 110-meter Olympic event. But many of these hurdles were swept away by November 4's political tidal wave, and the significantly strengthened Democratic control of both the executive (presidency) and the legislative (House and Senate) branches of government.

Tim, joined by many American political analysts, argues that inexorably growing Hispanic and other immigrant populations bolster a multicultural or pseudo-"progressive" consensus that because immigration is good, more (and more and more) immigration must be even better. (Earth First! founder Dave Foreman referred to this as "progressive cornucopianism," part of the left-wing variant of the widely shared delusion that there are no limits to growth. Right-wingers prefer greedy growth while left-wingers prefer feel-good growth. Both worship growth without limit and operate under the reining paradigm that denies the existence of ultimate limits to expanding human appropriation of the earth.)

One Hispanic commenter on CNN, a former high-ranking operative in the Democratic Party, claimed that in the largely conservative Rocky Mountain West, dominated by Republicans for years, big Democratic wins in New Mexico, Colorado, and elsewhere were made possible only by angry Hispanics registering and voting in droves because they were outraged by anti-illegal immigration crusaders Tom Tancredo (retiring Republican congressman from Colorado) and CNN commentator Lou Dobbs.

Reading Tim's post and similar observations also reminded me of what NumbersUSA founder Roy Beck and I wrote in our 2001 monograph Forsaking Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization. It is worth quoting at some length, because it anticipates the very dilemma we now face:

"Still another reason environmental groups didn't want to tackle immigration numbers to slow U.S. population growth may have been their fear of changing demographics. As the population of foreign-born Americans and their children rose ever higher, they became an increasingly powerful political bloc whom many environmental leaders feared could thwart environmentalist initiatives and legislation if they perceived environmental groups to be hostile to immigration.

"In 1970, immigrants comprised about 5 percent of the American population. By the late 1990s, that figure had risen to almost 10 percent and was still climbing rapidly with no sign of cresting - a predictable consequence of the four-fold increase in immigration levels over the past four decades. In certain key states - particularly California (25 percent), New York (18 percent), and Florida (15 percent) - and a number of influential cities, the percentage of foreign-born in the population was much higher still and was large enough to be the balance of power in some elections.

"The bloc of foreign-born Americans and their children in the late 1990s already was far larger than the bloc of black Americans. The Census Bureau showed that if Congress did not change immigration policy, the bloc of recent immigrants and their descendants would be more than a third of all Americans by the year 2050.

"A number of interests, ranging from private businesses to political parties to environmental groups, assumed that Congress will not change immigration policy and that this revolutionary demographic shift is virtually inevitable, a fait accompli. All positioned themselves to take advantage of the shift as best they could and to keep the shift from hurting them.

"In the case of businesses, this could mean reaching new rapidly growing markets by advertising in a foreign language. In the case of political parties, it meant nurturing immigrants as a source of donations, votes, and political power. And in the case of environmental groups, it could mean trying to avoid any issues that might cause this developing power in American politics to oppose environmentalist political goals.

"Particularly in California where the foreign born and their children already comprised more than a third of the population, Sierra Club leaders worried aloud not only that advocating U.S. population stabilization might lose immigrants, their friends, and family as supporters, but that sensitive political alliances with ethnic politicians could be jeopardized as well.

"Sam Shuchat, the executive director of the California League of Conservation Voters - an organization immersed in state politics - pleaded with the Sierra Club not to '...commit suicide over the immigration issue. This is something the environmental community cannot afford.'

"In this fearful way of thinking, advocacy of immigration reduction to stabilize the population and protect the environment could only be seen by immigrants already here as an attempt to prevent them from becoming a majority of the population in California during the next few years - and of the country later in the next century. Having their future power thus threatened by environmentalists, immigrants would insist that their elected officials vote against environmental protection measures, according to the demographic-fear scenario.

"Former Zero Population Growth president Judy Kunofsky, who also chaired the Sierra Club's Population Committee in the late 1980s...has logged a quarter-century of service and leadership within the environmental and population movements. Kunofsky recalled that some years back, a staffer for a Hispanic member of Congress from Southern California told a Sierra Club representative that the Congressman was outraged that the Club wanted to limit immigration.

"Later, various Latino citizens groups in Los Angeles threatened not to cooperate with the Club on air pollution issues if it were to actively oppose immigration. 'When you have ethnic spokesmen saying to environmentalists that "we won't work with you on clean air if you support immigration restriction," that is an admission that increasing their own numbers takes precedence over all other considerations and that environmental concerns are secondary.'

"Whether the commitment of immigrants toward the environment was that shallow or whether their desire - or ability - to be some sort of monolithic voting bloc was that strong remains undetermined. Public opinion polls would suggest that immigrants were not especially wedded to current immigration numbers and would not react as an angry group if the numbers were reduced back toward a more traditional American level. For years, polls showed immigrants generally agreeing with native-born Americans about reducing future immigration.

For years, polls showed immigrants generally agreeing with native-born Americans about reducing future immigration.

"UCLA astronomy professor and environmental activist Ben Zuckerman was among those in 1998 who dismissed the suggestion that immigrants would retaliate against immigration reduction by insisting that the natural environment of their new country be despoiled. He wrote that if the Sierra Club renewed its proscriptive commitment to U.S. population stabilization, 'political allies will continue to vote for sound environmental legislation when it is in the interests of their constituents - which is what they do now.' Yet even Zuckerman conceded that: "Politically, excessive immigration is very difficult to deal with because, in states with large immigrant populations, politicians are afraid to appear anti-immigrant, and in states with few immigrants, the national level of immigration is not a political issue."

"Whether the fear of immigrant retaliation was justified or not, if believed by environmental leaders, it could have greatly affected their decisions about pursuing U.S. population stabilization. Certainly there were some reasons for the environmental leaders to have adopted such a belief during the Sierra Club's referendum campaign. They heard from some self-appointed immigrant spokespersons who made the threat of retaliation. And Sierra leaders may have drawn similar conclusions from a contingent of California Democratic state-level politicians, many of them Latinos, who directly challenged the Club to defeat the immigration-reduction referendum. 'A position by the club to further limit immigration would be considered immigrant bashing by many elected officials of color with near-perfect environmental records,' Santos Gomez (an appointed member of the Club's National Population Committee) wrote in a newspaper op-ed piece. Pete Carrillo, president of the Mexican Heritage Corp. of Santa Clara County, Calif., told a reporter that if the Sierra Club returned to its policy calling for immigration reductions it would produce 'a gap as wide as the Pacific Ocean between the Sierra Club and the Mexican American Community.'

"Thus, intimidated environmental leaders may have chosen the logic of the executive director of California League of Conservation Voters: If immigrants did retaliate, that would be something 'the environmental community cannot afford.' It would not be a question of whether the environment could afford another doubling of the U.S. population but whether the environmental community could afford immigrant retaliation if environmentalists tried to stop the doubling. Protection of the environmental institutions may have been placed ahead of protection of the environment."

At the end of our 2001 monograph, Roy and I paid homage to the courage and consistency of the late, legendary environmental leaders David Brower and Gaylord Nelson. Brower was former executive director and board member of the Sierra Club, and founder of the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute. Among many other achievements, former Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson and Wisconsin governor founded Earth Day in 1970 and worked as a counselor to the Wilderness Society from 1980 to his death in 2005. To the end of their long lives, both Brower and Nelson remained fiercely outspoken about the need to stop U.S. population growth and rein in immigration. They spoke out even in the face of growing queasiness and paralysis by other environmentalist elites who were understandably fearful of being pummeled and discredited as racist xenophobes by those demagogues ever willing to fling these charges (because they know they work). Nothing will stop a typical high-minded environmentalist in his or her tracks faster than the threat of being accused of "the greening of hate," however baseless the charge.

Roy and I also held out hope in 2001 that, "The growing grassroots concern of numerous rank-and-file environmentalists and ordinary Americans with the multiple problems unavoidably aggravated by overpopulation and overimmigration may yet overturn their leaders' stubborn denial of demographic and ecological realities." I'd be the first to admit that this has not yet happened, and perhaps never will, at least in time to make much of a difference.

Recently, I coauthored a study on immigration and U.S. greenhouse gas emissions with Steve Camarota for the Washington, DC-based thinktank the Center for Immigration Studies. We found that immigrants, on average, increase their per capita emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) four-fold when they move to the United States from their countries of origin. We also concluded that immigration, because it is expected to account directly and indirectly for about 80% of projected U.S. population growth to 2050, will also account for a comparable percentage of the projected increase in U.S. CO2 emissions under the business-as-usual scenario.

This stunning finding elicited a collective yawn of indifference from the American environmental establishment. To my knowledge, the big guns of this establishment were utterly silent. The Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, and others of their ilk - all of whom purport to want to save both nature and humanity across the country and the planet from the ravages of wanton human/industrial activity - all ignored this study. Instead, the only commentary our research generated was from mass immigration's ever-vigilant defense brigade, some of whom attacked it as "nutty" and another example of "the immigrant blame game," while accusing us of wanting not only to keep people out but keep them poor and pure.

Challenging the many manifestations of the growth paradigm that permeates modern industrial society has always been an uphill, perhaps even futile struggle. In spite of the perennial optimism and hope of people like Donella Meadows (lead author of 1972's The Limits to Growth and subsequent updates) or immigration reformer Roy Beck, in recent years, I sense a growing despondency and resignation that perhaps "overshoot and collapse" really is human civilization's unavoidable destiny. The best-selling 2005 book Collapse by Pulitzer Prize-winning Jared Diamond, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, William Catton's pioneering Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Debora MacKenzie's 2008 article "Why the demise of civilization may be inevitable," in New Scientist, and of course, the www.dieoff.org website founded by Jay Hanson all recount the terrific momentum of irrupting, irrationally exuberant human societies, in which voluntary, collective restraint and the ability to accept "living within limits" are utterly incomprehensible.

Here I can do no better than to quote the late Donella Meadows, in one of the last articles she penned for her syndicated newspaper column The Global Citizen, before her untimely death after a brief but hard-fought struggle with cerebral meningitis in 2001. In a column entitled "Polar Bears and Three-Year-Olds on Thin Ice," she wrote:

Some biologists are saying the polar bear is doomed.

A friend of mine, in response to this news, did the only appropriate thing. She burst out weeping. "What am I going to tell my three-year-old?" she sobbed. Any of us still in contact with our hearts and souls should be sobbing with her, especially when we consider that the same toxins that are in the bears are in the three-year-old. And that the three-year-old over her lifetime may witness collapsing ecosystems, north to south, until all creatures are threatened, especially top predators like polar bears and people.

Is there any way to end this column other than in gloom? Can I give my friend, you, myself any honest hope that our world will not fall apart? Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of the polar bear, the whale, the tiger, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral reef, while fearing for the three-year-old?

If we believe ... that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, ... well, then yes, it's over.

Heck, I don't know. There's only one thing I do know. If we believe that it's effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last, well, then yes, it's over. That's the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally I don't believe that stuff at all. I don't see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there's something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls.

Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there's something wrong with us.

In other words, even on the much narrower question of reducing immigration to stop U.S. population growth and avert environmental disaster, although the outlook is grim, it is not hopeless. For one thing, there are cracks in the seeming monolith. Democrats and even ascendant Hispanics and other ethnic groups buoyed by rising immigration are not at all united in favor of open borders. At least before Hispanic politicians, certain Latino chauvinists, and others with a vested interest in an ever-larger Spanish-speaking population in the USA convinced many Hispanics that the pressure to crack down on immigration was little more than anti-Latino bigotry, many Latinos themselves believed that if immigration was a problem, it was because there was too much of it.

For example, in a 1996 Roper poll, 52 percent of Hispanics favored reducing immigration to 300,000 or fewer annually (from more than a million). The 1993 Latino National Political Survey, conducted by a research team from the University of Texas, and the largest poll ever conducted of this ethnic group in the United States to that date, found that 7 in 10 respondents thought there were too many immigrants (actually higher than the percentage of non-Hispanic whites or "Anglos" who did). A 1993 Hispanic USA Research Group poll found that three-quarters of Hispanics believed fewer immigrants should be admitted.

I myself lived in Latin America for three years, speak Spanish, and married a Honduran from Central America. In both Latin America and North America, to Latino audiences ranging from one to many (in classes and on radio and TV shows), I talked incessantly en español about the perils of overpopulation, and often found a less skeptical audience on the part of Latin Americans than North Americans.

As the above polls indicate, wherever they may stand now, Latinos in the USA are not immutable on the question of immigration. In many of their home countries, Latinos have also shown that concern about illegal or excessive immigration is not strictly an Anglo or North American phenomenon: Mexicans upset about Salvadorans and other Central Americans; Hondurans and Costa Ricans about Nicaraguans; Dominicans upset about Haitians; and that's just in Central America and the Caribbean.

Out-of-control immigration actually led to the notorious "soccer [or futbol] war" between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969. For years, hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants had been pouring across the border from heavily overpopulated El Salvador into neighboring Honduras. As one online account puts it:

The Honduran government and some private groups came increasingly to place blame for the nation's economic problems on the approximately 300,000 undocumented Salvadoran immigrants in Honduras.... Attacks were also launched in the media on the impact of Salvadoran immigrant labor on unemployment and wages on the Caribbean coast. By late May, Salvadorans began to stream out of Honduras back to an overpopulated El Salvador.

Tensions continued to mount during June 1969. The soccer teams of the two nations were engaged that month in a three-game elimination match as a preliminary to the World Cup. Disturbances broke out during the first game in Tegucigalpa, but the situation got considerably worse during the second match in San Salvador. Honduran fans were roughed up, the Honduran flag and national anthem were insulted, and the emotions of both nations became considerably agitated. Actions against Salvadoran residents in Honduras, including several vice consuls, became increasingly violent. An unknown number of Salvadorans were killed or brutalized, and tens of thousands began fleeing the country. The press of both nations contributed to a growing climate of near-hysteria, and on June 27, 1969, Honduras broke diplomatic relations with El Salvador.

Early on the morning of July 14, 1969, concerted military action began in what came to be known as the Soccer War.
   -  OnWar.com, Armed Conflict Events Data, at:
       www.onwar.com/aced/data/sierra/soccer1969.htm

My point is just that even on the narrow question of immigration reform alone, although the immediate future is daunting, it's impossible to say how both the political climate and demographic trends may change in just a few years time. While I myself think long-term demographic projections are crucial to understanding the consequences of current and future assumed demographic parameters (birth rates, death rates, immigration and emigration rates), I recognize all too well the shortcomings of these same projections, because the underlying demographic variables are inherently unpredictable. Too many times projections from even the most reputable sources have proved utterly, laughably, wrong, because no demographer has a crystal ball; unfortunately, over the last decade or two, these projections have proved to be too conservative - that is, they have underestimated actual growth.

People like Roy Beck who know far more than I do about America's immigration politics are indeed concerned about what an Obama presidency and a stronger Democratic congress portend for immigration reform. But they are not ready to throw in the towel just yet, and some actually argue that Obama will be better, or at least not as bad, as McCain would have been.

The larger issue Tim raises, that of the struggle against the pervasive ethos of perpetual growth in population and consumption that surely doom the ecosphere and our prospects for environmental sustainability, remains as challenging as ever. Just ask the mouse in the cartoon.

By Leon Kolankiewicz, 14 Nov 08

The writing clearly is on the wall. Nothing stands between us and a North American continent of 500 million people by the year 2050. Nothing except perhaps peak oil, peak soil, water shortages and a basic ecological meltdown. What brokers might euphemistically term as "buying opportunities" of which I'm sure even another K2 event would qualify. But short of those trifling road bumps to "progress", nothing else seems to offer much hope in stopping this juggernaut of mindless population growth. The corporate machine demands cheap labor and the rhetoric of cultural diversity offers the perfect smokescreen for its cold and mercenary motives.

Key minority groups and their hired guns have unwittingly become collaborators in this agenda to squeeze working and middle class Americans out of decent paying jobs and weigh down the environment of America beyond its carrying capacity. They rallied behind a candidate who received, by the end of August, some $389 million in donations from Wall Street corporations, much more than his opponent John McCain received, leader of the GOP, reputedly the party of plutocrats_#main-fn1">1. A candidate who, while he exhibited so many obvious virtues not in McCain's possession, nevertheless did not demonstrate any ecological literacy concerning the country's tolerance of growth or the fact that five million American workers lost their jobs to out-sourcing and the kind of immigration policies that he supports.

The emerging power of the multicultural electoral coalition to turn the tide of American politics can best appreciated by looking at Hispanic voters. 10 million Latinos voted in the November 2008 Presidential election. 67% (6.7 million) voted for Obama. 40% of them, or 4 million Latino voters, were immigrants.

78% of immigrant Latin voters voted for Barrack Obama, a porous-borders candidate. That translates to 3.12 million votes.

3.12 million votes is but 2% of the votes cast in the 2008 election. Not much. But not chicken feed either. It certainly wouldn't have been in 2000. And the disposition of votes is what is critical. The Latino vote grew by 32% in just four years to 9% of the electorate, but that 9% is not spread like a pancake across America. It is concentrated in such a way as to have played a pivotal role in denying McCain 6 states.

If that isn't enough, Republicans have to look over their shoulders at the growing electoral force of Asian Americans, twice as many whom preferred the Democrats in 2008 in percentage terms as they did in 1992.

Is the ethnic immigrant voter like the aggressive door-to-door salesman? Once he gets his foot in the immigration door, that door can never be closed? What is the tipping point of political sycophancy? Once a solid 10%, 15% or perhaps 20% of ethnic voters demonstrate that they will vote en bloc as their orchestrators command, the other 80% of the electorate which is fragmented around other issues then just folds? The ethnic tail need not be long. Just solid and determined, and when it wags the Euro-American dog will roll over and perform tricks for it.

Thus what we will have is not a two party system but a one party state. Two growthist "big tent" rainbow coalition parties that embrace cultural and racial diversity, bravo, but not intellectual diversity--because they don't entertain the cognitively challenging concept of population stability or steady state economics.

Do multicultural lobbies play disproportionate and decisive roles in keeping the floodgates open in other countries? Australia? The United Kingdom? In Canada it has been said that ethnic voting blocs deliver two dozen seats, and that federal policy toward Israel or India for example is unduly governed by the sensibilities of expatriates living in those constituencies. Should this be the case then, it is no wonder that the policy of mass immigration should persist for decades in the face of adverse public opinion. For it is not public opinion that matters. But the opinion that is channeled through the ballot box and concentrated in strategic areas.

As time passes, more and more of these areas will become fortified with immigrants. In the United States, some 12% of the population are foreign born (officially), and in Canada, it is 18% and rising. For some the newcomers' culture and even their pigmentation is cause for alarm. What should be worrisome is the impact their numbers will have, and that of the children and grandchildren that they will issue from them. I could live with tortillas and Spanish-only. I couldn't live without an environment.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
9 Nov 08

See also: "An immigration policy bought and paid for?" of 24 Feb 08.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1.#main-fn1-txt">↑ www.opensecrets.org All of Obama's Wall
Street donors and the amounts they gave can be found here. Quite enlightening.

Reducing our immigration numbers is not enough. Our Immigration Department should be closed except to manage the intake of refugees and individual cases.

The "problem" of an ageing population is being used as a smoke-screen to artificially increase our numbers because it is "good for businesses". Any skills lacking should mean an adjustment to our education and training schemes. Businesses don't pay students' prohibitive HECS fees!

We will never meet our Kyoto obligations while we continually compensate for our "ageing population"! Our abysmal figures of biodiversity losses should sound warning bells that our environment is already heavily stressed. Even a strong economy will never be able to replace the "services" of our biodiversity.

We only have one planet, Earth! While our global population continues to increase, more natural resources are threatened. We live firstly in an environment, not an economy! Migration has given us an optimum population and it has been good for our prosperity. However, we have passed "sustainable" growth. Instead of bringing economic and livability benefits to our lifestyles, our over-population is causing greater stresses and expenses. Natural resources are finite. Will businesses be able to find a solution to climate change, irreversible ecological damage and a threatened ecosystem?

Our economy is dictating government decisions, aimed at continual economic growth through population growth. Other countries have healthy GDP figures without immigration. Our economy needs to be based on 21st century technology. Our grandchildren will be cursing us and singing "advance Australia bare" unless we stop our population growth.

This was originally published in Immigration Watch Canada (www.immigrationwatchcanada.org) on 20 Oct 08.

In the wake of the market meltdown and the looming global recession, even those governments most ideologically pre-disposed to porous borders and generous immigration quotas now seem willing to slam on the brakes.

Let's look at what Australia and the UK have said in the past week.

In Australia, the centre-left government of Kevin Rudd, which defeated the Howard regime in December of 2007, was set to follow through with the 2008-9 "Migration Program". This plan would add 31,000 skilled migrants and increase immigration an even further 19.8% over the previous year. This was to happen despite the fact that 46% of voters polled in late 2007 believed that immigration should be reduced, a figure which Australian researcher Katherine Betts says would be much higher now.

Then came a surprise comment a week ago. Prime Minister Rudd, reacting to climbing seasonally-adjusted jobless figures, announced that migration quotas would be reduced accordingly.

According to Australia correspondent Roger Maynard, "While the yearly intake of migrants is decided in the run-up to the May Budget, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has already made it clear that the figure will be influenced by financial conditions."

"'It's been this way since time immemorial and will be this way into the future as well,' (Prime Minister Rudd) answered in response to a journalist's question about whether it might be time to cut the immigration rate, which is at its highest for many years'.

'We adjust it according to economic circumstances', PM Rudd said."

Those Canadians who have any knowledge of our immigration history know that up until 1990, Canada's policy was the same as Australia's.

Australian correspondent Roger Maynard adds this significant note : "Australian Council of Trade Unions president Sharan Burrow said there had to be certainty that immigration was not fuelling unemployment. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry agreed that immigration should be cut if the economy slows and unemployment rises."

The most shocking news of the month, however, came from the U.K. After more than a decade of high immigration, the Immigration Minister in Gordon Brown's Labour Government, Phil Woolas, finally called for strict limits on the number of migrants coming to Britain . He did so amid fears of unemployment reaching 2 million by Christmas (a figure that might "fuel racial tension"). He also expressed his government's determination not to permit the country's population to rise to 70 million people (from its current 61 million). In drawing a connection between immigration on the one hand and unemployment and population growth on the other, Woolas' remarks drew praise from Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, as a "potential breakthrough" for a government minister.

The recent developments in Australia and the United Kingdom obviously prompt the question: Why haven't the winds of change that have swept through the cabinet rooms of these countries made their way into Canada's PMO, the House of Commons in Ottawa and the country's provincial and municipal circles? If the centre-left in Australia and the U.K. have done an ideological make-over because of high immigration, why haven't Jack Layton and the NDP? And since the other parties in both Australia and the UK agree with their government's concerns about high immigration, why are Canada's other parties (the Conservatives, Liberals, Greens and Bloc Quebecois) saying nothing?

The standard "worker shortage" argument should be dismissed. Recent major layoffs and unemployment in many areas of Canada should take precedence over immigration industry claims of worker shortages, most of which are highly suspect or blatantly false.

See also: "Opposition leads calls to slash immigration in 2009" in Courier Mail of 21 Oct 08, "More want migrant intake cut" in SMH of 12 Oct 08, "Sydney predicted to reach 6 million" in SMH of 20 Oct 08, "Dissatisfaction with immigration intake rising" on the ABC of 13 Oct 08, "Rents to soar in Melbourne on lack of housing" of 10 Oct 08.

It is clear to me, viewing Australia's problems with addressing "growth" from viewing the U.S.'s problems in doing so, that both governmental systems are straightjacketed into the same capitalistic premise: that growth is not something to be concerned with; that promoting unlimited growth is possible.

Here's my analysis of the present U.S. presidential campaign that shows the futility of hoping a candidate for such high office will bring any kind of significant change to pursuing growth. Money and power determine their candidacy and their politics. (Although, as usual, I will vote for the one who just might bring a small amount of change, and that is in this case Obama.

Analyzing the 2008 US Presidential Election

By Richard Pelto

Television and newspaper coverage of the election process can be like entering some kind of weird third dimension. Because coverage is essentially secretarial-like rewrites of press releases, and electoral lying is given euphemistic names like "fact-challenged," or "distortion,"the average-citizen reader can only wonder what is going on.

In addition, columns adjoining coverage of the election provide superficial facts but little analysis about an economy being rapidly flushed down a toilet because of widespread excesses of greed, next to a hard-to-justify expensive military "mistakenly" raining bombs on civilians.

Most importantly missing from the journalism 2008 election coverage is how the GOP-Demo campaigns mirror each other on issues like Afghanistan, campaign finance, the death penalty, gun control, housing, immigration, stem-cell research. Only minor, tactical differences separate the two candidates on issues like health care, Iran, Georgia, social security, and taxes. On the abortion issue there is substantive difference. And Obama is now providing welcome fresh-air change of our "globalization" policy.

But even the spin-meisters of the campaigns note similarity. Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain-Palin, made the case that Obama's response to the bail-out of corporate despair was derived from McCain. "Whether calling for a bipartisan oversight board or prohibitions on golden parachutes, Barack Obama is simply following in John McCain's footsteps while trying to respond to this financial crisis, as he followed in John McCain's footsteps when he attempted to respond to the recent crisis in Georgia," he said. "Again, Barack Obama has shown indecision and a lack of leadership at a time when the American people need certainty." The final sentence is representative of the mindless rhetoric that characterizes U.S. elections today.

To analyze what "change" these candidates portend we must begin with the coverage in Iowa which began with the press apparently and slavishly following whatever consistency existed in the two viable party’s electoral narrative. Iowa provided the introduction of Obama’s unquestioned repetition of "change," and, once the campaign was down to two candidates, his opponent, despite the similarities and mirroring noted above, attempted audaciously hijacking the word "change." The journalists tirelessly parrot the terms, print polls that attempt to determine which word struck a deeper chord in various age groups, and then pontificate on consistency of message and the polls’ statistical indicators, assuming apparently that the public was well-informed.

But no reporter seriously asks or presents just what "change" might mean either in an Obama presidency, or the more unfathomable "change" parroted by the GOP-nominee, John McCain. Both are "establishment" candidates, and thus both are beholden to the money/power that buttresses it.

It is a given that the public, today, for many easily-justifiable reasons, is very desirous of "change." and some forms of it is likely with Obama. It is particularly informative, then, to carefully note that Obama’s governmental prescription is similar to decades-long policy. Analysis makes clear one has to wonder how much "change" Obama would bring. On Iraq, he initially did not vote for the war’s authorization. That’s clearly different from Bush who made up journalistically sparse-questioned "facts" that led us into it. But as the many years of our occupation of Iraq passed Obama swung more and more toward Hillary Clinton’s position that an indeterminent number of troops and bases must remain there until some undefined advantageous time to pull them out. Thus, after scratching the surface, Obama’s position isn’t substantively different on Iraq nor with George W’s on the so-called "war on terrorism," especially given Obama has indicated he would aggressively pour those troops taken out of Iraq into Afghanistan and Georgia.

One must then assess the foreign policy philosophy of the candidate. Bush’s present focus on endless (and financially draining) "warring" with Islamic militancy appears to be little different from what Obama’s policy would be, given his appointment of Zbigniew Brzezinski as his chief foreign-policy advisor. This is the man who funneled large amounts of money to a wide range of Islamic fundmentalists like Osama Bin Laden in order to create more resistance to the Soviet Union, and is now advising about the Islamic-like danger posed to Israel by Iran. This "change" is decidedly minimal. In addition, another advisor, Sarah Sewall, who heads a human rights center at Harvard and is a former Defense official, wrote the introduction to General Petraeus’s Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various killing operations. Is she a likely means to "change?" Do these "advisors" help define this great "change" that Obama will bring about that the candidate and press herald?

Bush’s globalization has created much unrest and dissatisfaction because it essentially involves exporting industry to cheap labor and importing as much cheap labor as possible. So who does Obama choose to provide advice on how to change policy toward it? It’s Anthony Lake, who pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the Haiti economy after overthrowing Aristide, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians and set the stage for the current ongoing political and ecological disaster in Haiti. Lake is a person with a long record of support for globalization. And Obama and McCain continue the globalization push to maximize illegal immigration in order to gain abundant cheap labor while pursuing an assumed unlimited growth. There’s no "leadership" or "change" involved in the Bush/McCain/Obama positions on a "comprehensive immigration reform" amnesty, except a few appearance gestures to "strengthen" the border. Neither shows any understanding at all of the population-growth consequences of additional millions of people impact on resource depletion and already dangerous ecological degradation.

Many are dissatisfied with the costs and impacts of Bush’s unconditional support of Israel. So what kind of "change" would Obama’s advisor, Dennis Ross, bring to this policy, given he pushed the principle that the legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli government to expand into doing whatever they want in the occupied territories. And Ross was one of the people who, interestingly, led the political assault on former Democratic President Jimmy Carter after he wrote a recent book critical of Israel. Would he help in being an agent of "change?"

It is beyond doubt that Obama will exacerbate our present policy of unsustainably importing large numbers of illegal-immigrant cheap labor. He will undoubtedly create an even more porous border policy through his support of a variety of political measures facilitating the importation of millions of illegal immigrants. These measures incentivize immigrants' arrival by rewarding their coming here, either through amnestying the illegality of entry or providing such things as free or subsidized schooling, welfare, housing and medical care. And both candidates promulgate their immigration "changes" before activist Hispanic audiences calling for even more porous borders. Thus they make a mockery of professed concern for population-growth exacerbated problems involving the environment and growth management.

The issues not covered: too rapid population growth, rapidly receding availability of strategic resources, and ever-expanding ecological degradation, cry out for emergency "change." This is made clear by the disconnect that exists between peak oil concerns and the presidential race. As prices at the pump rise, each candidate is now talking about their so-called "solutions" to the problem. None of which seriously address population growth and its exacerbating impacts on consumption. Despite clear new warning signs from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Nigeria that peak oil is apparent, McCain made clear he would remain unwaveringly oblivious to the true causes of rising fuel prices, preferring initially to dwell on irrelevant—actually, counterproductive—measures like suspending the federal gas tax during the summer months or taxing Big Oil. This is akin to thinking one is curing melanoma simply by putting a band-aid on it.

Here’s, first, a quick summary of the two candidates positions on energy, and then a more extensive attempt to analyze their positions and the reasons for them.

Obama incorporates improving national energy efficiency as a central plank of energy policy, in housing and the economy overall. McCain is silent on the topic, utterly silent....Both support clean coal. Both support cap and trade. McCain supports nuclear and more drilling, Obama is silent on both....While both candidates have policies on CO2 abatement, neither even bothers to mention the more immediate, critical issues of sulfur, nitrates, and particulates in our air that cause real, measurable damage to people, plants and all other animal groups. ...Both call for more hybrid cars and electric cars, but neither provides the meaningful financing to encourage the shift to cars that are considerably more expensive than the present auto fleet.

"John McCain is energy illiterate. He's just witless about this stuff," Matt Simmons, prominent oil-industry investment banker and lifelong Republican recently stated at a conference meeting involving a dozen oil and gas men in Lafayette, La. He surprisingly added, "I'm supporting Obama." He then said, "He's just witless about this stuff. McCain says things like, 'Oh, we're going to wean ourselves off foreign oil in four years and build 45 nuclear plants by 2030.' He doesn't have a clue. Here's a man who for at least the past 15 years has strenuously, I mean strenuously, opposed offshore drilling. And now it's 'drill, drill, drill.' And he doesn't have any idea that we don't have any drilling rigs. Or that we don't have any idea of exactly where to drill."

Examining the "oil dependency" positions of the candidates' energy advisers gives us little hope our newly-elected government will meet the peak-oil challenges head-on in 2009. They are Jason Grumet for Obama and James Woolsey for McCain. Woolsey’s public comments do indicate he has at least some understanding of the peak-oil issue. But both Grumet and Woolsey say in the campaign that our "oil dependence" is a problem, and both overstate that plug-ins, flex-fuel vehicles, alternative/renewable fuels can remedy the situation. Obama's adviser serves as executive director of Washington's influential National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP). The commission's December, 2004 report, "Ending the Energy Stalemate," tells us a lot about what the candidates' advisers are thinking about U.S. oil security. McCain's adviser James Woolsey also serves as one of the NCEP commissioners.

The principal NCEP report co-chair was John Holdren. Dr. Holdren's position on peak oil is therefore of considerable interest in so far as it appears to have influenced the views of the presidential candidates' energy advisers. The question that needs understanding is when will global production of conventional petroleum reach a peak and begin to decline, as U.S. domestic production did around 1970, and as most graphs now show has occurred since 2005. Holdren thinks peak oil is "not very important" because we need to cut our oil dependence in any case because of 1) global warming and 2) supply-side security risks.

Grumet and Woolsey’s position is exactly the same—peak oil concerns are overridden by the environmental (climate) problem and geopolitical risks to the oil supply.

Reaching this peak globally will create what is now occurring: large increases in the price of oil, plus a costly and demanding scramble for alternatives to fill the widening gap created by too-rapid population growth (especially in the U.S.) between the demand for liquid fuel and the supply of conventional petroleum.

The preponderance of evidence says that the peak of conventional oil production is occurring now whereas oil-supply optimists say it probably won’t happen until after 2030, perhaps not until after 2050. Similar arguments go on about conventional supplies of natural gas, the total recoverable resources of which are thought to be not greatly different, in terms of energy content, from those of crude petroleum.

It is clear that the U.S.’s present heavy oil dependence carries substantial economic and political risks in a world where high proportions of the reserves and remaining recoverable resources lie in regions that are unstable and/or controlled by authoritarian governments that have sometimes been inclined to wield oil supply as a weapon. It’s also clear that world oil use is a huge producer of conventional air pollutants, as well as being about equal to coal burning as a contributor to the global buildup of the heat-trapping gas CO2. Given these liabilities, it makes sense to be looking urgently for ways to reduce oil dependence no matter when we think peak oil might occur under business as usual.

A "climate first, peak oil not" view dominates mainstream thinking in Washington, but neither Dr. Holdren, or the presidential advisers say anything appreciative of the importance of the timing of the peak.

In a Mary O’Driscoll interview, Grumet reacted to a question about peak-oil impact, "We were intent, Mary, on not having kind of a Robert Ludlow dirty bomb, you know, airplanes into cooling towers. I mean what we looked at was a number of very, unfortunate, but very realistic events. Civil unrest in Nigeria; unfortunately life is imitating art. I mean we're seeing that now reported in newspapers, coupled with some low-tech terrorism. We looked at al Qaeda hijacking a tanker and crashing it into the Port of Valdez, and at a major explosion at a natural gas facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have taken natural gas off the market requiring them to use crude oil to replace their own domestic energy. And then some terrorism that just caused a real anxiety among the oil producers in Saudi Arabia. You put all that together, you take 3-and-a-half million barrels off the market and let me read to you from my cheat sheet of doom; gasoline prices at $5.74 a gallon, global oil price at $161 a barrel, a recession, two consecutive quarters of a drop in GDP, a drop in consumer confidence by 30 percent, inflation 12.6 percent, a 28 percent decline in the S and P 500, as well as I think some very realistic foreign policy concerns... " Thus rather than focus on peak-oil likelihood and impact, he connects oil dependency with the so-called war on terrorism.

Later Grumet was asked this question by Mary O'Driscoll: Well then, what do we do in the short term?

Jason Grumet: We eat it. I mean this is the reality that I think we were hoping to reveal. You know when the national commission put out its report last December the number one priority issue that we addressed was the need to deal with domestic oil security. I think that we have -- the SPRO is a significant buffer. It's very good news that our economy uses about half as much oil to produce the same GDP now as we did before the first oil embargo. So we are in a better position in some regards than we were before, but we use 25 percent of the world's oil. We possess 3 percent of the world's reserves and we are fundamentally now in a system that is stretched so thin ... now if it wasn't civil unrest in Nigeria it could've been a labor strike in Venezuela. I mean these are very real risks and the answer is prices go up.

Mary O'Driscoll: Right.

Jason Grumet: And we probably wind up using our SUVs a little bit less and saying to ourselves, why hadn't government done something to protect us from this?

Mary O'Driscoll: But I mean you're talking about a recession kind of situation, so I mean will we even be able to drive our SUVs at that time? I mean it's a little unnerving I must say.

Jason Grumet: I did see, I saw the Mad Max movie over the weekend and it kind of prepared me for the realities of $160 a barrel oil.

Mary O'Driscoll: Oh boy!

Jason Grumet: These are career-ending prices for many people in this town [Washington] and I think that, our hope is that collectively the Congress and the administration will start to see that not only do we have to work on these issues as matters of national energy policy, that these are issues of national security, economic strength and our foreign policy prerogative.

It is apparent that Grumet fears the potential effects of a sudden withdrawal of 3.5 million barrels per day (mmb/d) from the world market, and he notes that this would result in "gasoline prices at $5.74 a gallon, global oil price at $161 a barrel, a recession, two consecutive quarters of a drop in GDP, a drop in consumer confidence by 30 percent, inflation 12.6 percent, a 28 percent decline in the S and P 500."

At the end of 2004, the EIA data indicates that world oil production (crude + condensate + gas liquids) stood at 79.905 mmb/d. Grumet doesn’t note that at only 1% annual growth, which is below the historical average since 1983, the average daily oil supply for 2007 should have been 82.326 mmb/d. What was it? Supply stood at 81.190 mmb/d, a shortfall of 1.136 million barrels with respect to the modest 1% growth target. The biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, had basically flat-line production despite repeated promises of increasing production. Most of the "growth" that did occur was in gas liquids, which are not used as a transportation fuel. This has not been a sudden oil shock, but rather forms part of a gradual ongoing oil crunch that some call "peak oil."

Thus, neither Jason Grumet or James Woolsey are completely uninformed about potential oil shocks, but they appear to be very badly informed about the ever-accelerating peak oil squeeze resulting from politically-encouraged population growth mostly in the U.S. but also to a lesser degree in Europe.

The energy plan of Barack Obama generally follows the following NEPC guidelines:

• Increasing and diversifying world oil production while expanding the global network of strategic petroleum reserves.
• Significantly raising federal fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks while reforming the 30-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program to allow more flexibility and reduce compliance costs. New standards should be phased in over a five-year period beginning no later than 2010.
• Providing $3 billion over ten years in manufacturer and consumer incentives to encourage domestic production and boost sales of efficient hybrid and advanced diesel vehicles.

"Increasing and diversifying world oil production" obviously did not happen, and it's unlikely to happen. New CAFE standards were enacted in the Energy Independence and Security Act (HR. 6) signed into law in December, 2007, but are belatedly to be phased in by 2020. The NCEP report also advocated ramping up alternative fuels like ethanol to "help to diminish U.S. vulnerability to high oil prices and oil supply disruptions while reducing the transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions." Unforeseen cost consequences of this policy soon became apparent, along with its dimunitive impact on our reliance on oil.

Obama’s plan now is to cut oil imports by setting tough new fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and providing retooling assistance to the automakers to help them meet these standards. Also by increasing biofuels production and improving the efficiency of industrial oil use. All these measures would have been undoubtedly helpful 10 years or more ago, but the continuing systemic-growth push mandates (that both Obama and McCain support, or at least seem oblivious of its consequences) means that the industrial cliff is now higher and the gravity pull of peak-oil consequences is much greater.

Obama’s energy-solution steps provide too little help coming too late, an observation which becomes more and more obvious when we consider that a global food crisis is happening at the same time a strategic commodity-availability scarcity is now apparent, and the price of oil recently soared above $140/barrel. Instead of addressing the consequences of peak oil, the candidates are intent on pursuing a politically-correct policy of mitigating anthropogenic climate change so their primary energy initiative is a carbon emissions cap and trade system. This scenario makes problems arising from our oil dependency take a backseat—because they are not perceived as urgent. This approach to our "oil dependency" only makes sense from a climate perspective, which requires us to change our energy consumption and infrastructure over several decades.

The soaring oil price and its underlying causes are the invisible elephant in the room in the presidential race. While many of the candidates' proposals can be chalked up to pandering in an election year, there is no evidence that the candidates get this "peak oil" problem. As the first DOE secretary James Schlesinger said, "We have only two modes—complacency and panic." Complacency rules, and panic awaits and one doesn’t have to be a soothsayer to foresee that anxious day when our leader-to-be exclaims, "Oh, no! Oil is $161/barrel! The economy is falling apart! What do we do now?" This will be similar to the George Bush/Paulson belated decision to institute a public-financed bail out of a suddenly DOA-subprime economy as a last-minute response to a potential disaster.

Of course there is always a range of opinion involved in politics. Even within a political party. Here’s the Democratic Left’s take on Obama: He opposed Rep. John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and supported continued funding for the war. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to rape federal land for profit. He did not back the single-payer health care bill , sponsored by Kucinich and John Conyers. He advocates the death penalty and nuclear power. He backed the class-action "reform" bill—the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)—that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama’s second-biggest single bloc of donors. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges. And history may note that Obama’s support for the bailout was his most egregious act of all.

Maybe the most important point on which to judge the candidates is how they will steer our relationship with China. Barack Obama referred to China's recent space walk as a sign that it was catching up while America floundered. John McCain, attacking waste in Washington, said: "We owe China $500 billion." Mr Obama went one better, saying (more accurately) China "now holds $1,000 billion of our national debt". Linking finance with power, he added: "There has never been a country on earth that saw its economy decline and yet maintained its military superiority." The best that can be said about those comments is that they show both candidates being careful about what they say.

The lesson? Change is definitely needed, but too long-delayed change may have unforeseen consequences. And the Bush Administration’s last-minute economic moves to institute socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else makes clear even long-repeated dogma can get thrown out the window, given this government bailout was contrary to the republican party’s long-enduring public statements of non-governmental "interference" in the economy, which may or may not be an indictor of just how desperate the decision-making process was in this process.

Serious exigencies are in the offing. Thus journalists have a serious responsibility to report and present information that will allow voters to cast an informed vote. In order for that to occur better journalism and more analysis by the electorate must occur if we are not to be saddled with a similar eight years of Bush miserable leadership most polls show we now do desperately hope to "change." It is clear that McCain is more of a "Bush Junior" on military and neo-con influenced foreign policy abroad then Obama is, but it is clear the latter is a close second. And both candidates would continue present porous, population-growth immigration policy which exacerbates all our problems, while not being frank or realistic about energy policy. It is clear the momentum toward unsustainability consequences will continue regardless of which candidate wins. And unquestioning reporting probably helped cause Obama and McCain, who are in too many ways more of a Bush "shadow" than a Bush alternative, to be the present, active, viable candidates. That makes clear the system determines the political process, and it is probably important to understand "you can’t buck the system."

This is making one thing crystal clear: It is clearly time to assemble the best possible parachute.

See also: An immigration policy bought and paid for? of 24 Feb 08 by Tim Murray, Obama's Chicago Boys of 12  Jun 08 by Naomi Klein.

"In 2007, Canada admitted 429,649 permanent residents, temporary foreign workers and foreign students." (1) "Canadians are also among the highest per capita polluters in the world, producing an average of 23 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per person each year." (2) 429,649 immigrants MULTIPLIED BY 23 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions EQUALS 9,881,927 metric tonnes of greenhouse gases directly from immigration annually. "Annual greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands plants in 2007 are expected to be 39.3-41.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent." (3) So how many years of allowing 429,649 immigrants into Canada would equal the tarsands in greenhouse gas emissions? 41.4 million metric tonnes DIVIDED BY 9.9 million metric tonnes EQUALS 4.18 years! Therefore, there is a new tarsands worth of greenhouse gas emissions added to Canada every 4 years. In other words, 1 year of Canada's current immigration intake produces 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions as 1 year of the tarsands. (1) http://www.migratenow.ca/articles/127.asp (2) http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/22/tech-canada-greenhouse.html (3) http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/recent/tarsandsfaq#4 Thanks to Tim Murray (http://sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com) for this comparison idea. You can read his full article: CLICK HERE

“We have increased sprawl which is a real problem, it’s related to bad land use planning. It’s related to bad policies that’ll affect where immigrants settle….it’s a problem, but curbing immigration is really focusing on the wrong, and rather trivial aspect of the problem.” Elizabeth May, leader, Green Party of Canada , May 17, 2006. In the game of population growth, land capacity is not as relevant as carrying capacity. Antarctica is a big place with lots of room for lots of people, but how many people can it support? Yet Canadian politicians persist in the assumption that their country is a vast tropical cornucopia that needs ever more injections of people to unlock a hidden bounty of even greater wealth. In fact all four party leaders want to exceed current immigration levels by a third or more, despite the fact Canada already has the fastest growth rate of all G8 nations. That the broadest sector of Canada is either mountainous, permafrost tundra, wetlands, marsh, bog, lake or boreal forest hostile to human habitation is not our toughest sell. That only says that there is little room at Canada’s Ecological Inn, that rather than be billed as a Big Five Star Hotel we should be marketed as a cheap one room motel. The sad salient fact is that 94% of Canada’s land cannot be farmed. Actually, a more plausible figure is that only 5.2% of Canada’s land base is arable, a ration of 3 acres per citizen. That speaks to our carrying capacity. What should concern us about that pathetic arable portion is where it is situated, how much of it is being lost, how recently it has been lost, and why. Of the over 5% of Canada’s land base that is devoted to farming, 40% is found on the prairies, but 51% of the best farmland, the Class 1, is found in Ontario. According to Statistics Canada, in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) more than 2,000 farms and 150,000 acres, or 18% or Ontario’s Class 1 farmland were lost between 1976 and 1996. By comparison, in the London region of Middlesex County between 1996 and 2001, 8500 hectares (21,000 acres) were lost. Since 1966, over 6 million hectares of land in Canada and over 1.5 million hectares of land in Ontario have been lost from agriculture to development. But the key question is, why? (cf. http://members.becon.org/=pals/canada12.html ) It is interesting to observe how the pace of farmland conversion accelerates after 1990 , when Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall under the guidance of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced a new era of substantial increases in immigration levels. Case in point: In the twenty years before 1996, an average of 7500 acres of Class 1 farmland was lost annually in the GTA, but after 1996, in all of Ontario, which is inclusive of areas not subject to population pressures as intense as Metro Toronto, losses averaging 60,000 occurred----a loss rate eight times greater than before the era of mass immigration. http://www.ontariofarmlandtrust.ca/issues-and-programs/saving-farmland To cite another example from Statistics Canada, from page 126 in Human Activity and the Environment . “Approximately 4700 sq. km. of Class 1, 2 and 3 agricultural land or about 1 sq. km. daily was lost between 1981 and 1996.” But the loss rate increased to 1.3 sq km. daily or 33% between 1991 to 1996. There is quite clearly a correlation between population growth and farmland conversion, and in Canada 70% of population growth is driven by immigration. Undocumented evidence suggests that in Greater Vancouver and Toronto, as many as 85% of the residents in the new subdivisions that sit on former greenbelts are foreign born. Yet the champions of farm protection such as Ontario Farmland Trust, Ontario Smart Growth, Smart Growth BC or the David Suzuki Foundation will not dare to mention the ugly “I” word. For them, as for the Growth Management Industry, the Greens and the NDP, it is all just a matter of “land use management”. Yet several American studies have revealed that it is not. A Centre for Immigration Studies report of 2003 established that land use management was necessary but not sufficient, to save farmland, as “sprawl”, that great scapegoat of the environmental movement, accounted for only half, on average, of disappearing rural acreage. A US Bureau of Census study of the 100 largest U.S. urbanized areas concluded in the early 90s that land-use restrictions could not win any lasting, sustainable, protection of agricultural land and natural habitats surrounding cities. Census data established that the sprawl rate was twice as high nationally at 51.5% as the per capita increase in the consumption of land at 22.6%. A city like Denver could contain its per capita land consumption to 8.1% but see its overall land consumption rise by 56.7%--seven times as much. Portland, Oregon was trumpeted as the showcase of smart growth, until too many sheep finally burst the pen and the greenbelt outside city limits got developed. Los Angeles, wrongly tagged as the sultan of sprawl, won an award for increasing its density by 8% for two decades until 1990. Then came 3.1 million immigrants with no where to go and 394 square miles of orchards, natural habitat, rural spaces and farmland were lost to urbanization. In recent years a report by Smart Growth BC painted a rosy picture of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), calling it a success story “in the context of North American regional development”. (That is damning it with faint praise!). It was a patent falsehood that from 1973 to the end of 2003, “there has been no net loss of farmland in B.C.” The key to that statement lay in the definition of “farmland”. If it is defined as good soil, then the ALC has been playing a shell game with the trusting public, exchanging coveted marketable farmland under its protection for relatively poorer land in more remote locations. The telling concession from Smart Growth BC comes in these lines: “However the quality of farmland in the ALR has decreased, with 2.8 hectares of prime farmland excluded for every hectare prime farmland included. Likewise, the ALR has shifted to the northern part of the province, with 90% of the inclusions in the north and 72% of exclusions occurring in the south.” Harold Steves, a former MLA who fought for the ALC at its inception, corroborated that point recently on CBC radio by stating that the ALC was adding very poor “Class 6” land from north east BC and the Cariboo and releasing good land from the Fraser Valley. The lesson that should be drawn from the ALC experience is that even North America’s poster child of land use planning and farm protection could not stand up to population pressure and political manipulation. B C.’s Lower Mainland is the magnet for immigration, not Williams Lake or Fort St. John. Yes of course Premier Gordon Campbell made a calculated decision to weaken the ALC by turning over the decision making from one provincial panel to six smaller regional panels that would be more vulnerable to “community” commercial interests. Predictably these panels down south have complied with what Campbell’s friends have wanted them to do. But without population growth there would be no demand for new housing and big box commercial developments and potential developers would not be knocking at the door demanding that land locked in the ALR be released. Five hundred acres of farmland in Williams Lake lies unmolested because developers know that the 30,000 New Canadians who will fly into YVR- Van International next year ( statistics courtesy of Regional Development, Metro Van ) have no interest in moving to Williams Lake. Not because it is protected by any land reserve or land use bylaws. One can only marvel at the naïve confidence that the smart growth coalition of environmentalists, planners, progressive developers, and so forth, place in paper fortresses. Despite historical evidence, they believe that dedicated national parks will forever remain inviolate, that greenbelts will never be encroached, or that the sacred will never be touched. Australian writer Mark O’Connor had this warning about that kind of thinking: “These parks have supposedly been created in perpetuity: yet there is a risk that further shifts in ideology may leave a future government free to revoke national parks. It would by then be able to plead the housing and resource needs of a much expanded population, plus its need of export earnings from lands that would be otherwise going to waste. Developers constantly agitate for governments to become less sluggish in releasing more land.” The ALC was a significant achievement, but an anomaly, a product of a unique political culture that likely will never be duplicated. It is interesting that no NDP administration in any of the three other provinces that elected them ever implemented similar freezes on development of farmland. And yet mass immigration apologists who argue that farmland loss to development can be prevented by smart growth won’t even wait until this pie-in-the-sky land-use regime is established before they would wantonly inject more than a quarter of a million people into this society annually when it clearly threatens our ability to feed ourselves. A clear case of criminal irresponsibility. One wonders, would they allow cars to pour onto a newly built highway before traffic controls were in place? The reality is, farmland is not currently protected. It is open season and therefore population growth must be stopped now. Immigration and fertility policies must be fashioned in light of that imperative. A post-carbon world will be unforgiving of transportation costs. Presently 35 times more is spent in fossil energy in transporting a head of lettuce from the Salinos Valley in California to Toronto than in actually growing it . If all the food that Torontonians ate was grown locally in the acres that are now being sold to developers, it would save enough fossil fuels as to be the equivalent of taking 162,000 cars off Toronto’s streets. In Food, Land, Population and the US Economy , Mario Giampietro and David Pimentel postulated that to achieve a sustainable food system and national economy the United States must reduce its population by one third “or face disaster”. And their research did not even consider the impact of declining fossil fuel production. It would be prudent for Canada to factor in imminent resource shortages and worst case scenarios. To be on the HMCS Titanic with a captain who stops to pick up additional passengers with an iceberg visible dead ahead is a surreal experience, especially when he, like so many, believes the ship to be unsinkable and with an unlimited carrying capacity. We need to protect our food source and keep it close at hand. And remember the admonition of Canadian writer Ronald Wright, who, in summarizing the collapse of civilizations, remarked, “Don’t build on agricultural land.” In reviewing this account, my question is directed to myopic policy makers. “Will mass immigration mean mass starvation in Canada?”

In Australia both major political parties support record high immigration. This ensures that it is rarely questioned in Parliament or in the news. In Canada, the situation is even worse_#main-fn1">1. Dan Murray reports that Canadians face a 'choice' at the Federal elections scheduled for 31 October of four out of five major parties which see nothing wrong with Canada's record high and growing immigration rate and none which are campaigning to reduce it.

At the end of week #1 of the election, some immigration-related questions for all parties

Four out of five major political parties in Canada seem to think there is nothing wrong with Canada's current high immigration levels.

Here are some details on what Canadians have heard on the immigration issue during Week #1 of the election. Questions for each party follow:

(1) The Conservatives : Prime Minister Harper has indicated that immigrants are an issue, but mostly as a source of potential votes. In the first week, he spent about a third of his time talking to ethnic groups. Significantly, his first photo-op of the entire campaign was in Richmond, B.C. where he appeared with a Chinese family. Although he said the Chinese family was a typical Canadian family, and that he was trying to protect the middle class, he will probably admit that his principal reason for visiting the Chinese family was because high immigration levels have resulted in the Chinese now being over half of the population there. Since 1990, the Chinese have become a large percentage of the populations of many other areas in Metro Vancouver and of areas in Greater Toronto. In another example later in the week, Mr. Harper repeated the tactic of appealing to ethnic groups by speaking to a group of East Indian (Sikh) business people in Mississauga to get their support.

Here are some questions politicians might want to ask themselves :

A. When a political leader makes a point of starting his election campaign with members of an ethnic group and then spends a large amount of time addressing other ethnic groups, particularly those who have recently-arrived in large numbers, what message does he send to other groups, particularly long-term Canadians? Is he saying that he will give priority to the interests of new groups at the expense of those of long-term Canadians?

B. Ridings such as Richmond and others have witnessed extremely high immigrant inflows for no obvious good reason. Is he saying that it does not matter that a surge in the newcomers has created a situation in which new immigrants now outnumber the long-term Canadians in those ridings?

C. Let's be frank with people of all political stripes. The approach of most political parties towards recent immigrants is a mixture of sycophancy and platitudes such as "creating diversity". The attitude that political parties convey is that anyone from anywhere has a right to come to Canada. And Canada's political parties will perform all the obsequiousness that is necessary to satisfy the demands of immigrants, particularly their demands to re-create their countries in Canada. Instead of this approach, why are Canada's politicians not asking these people two questions: If cultural, economic and environmental conditions were so wonderful where you came from (particularly in China and India), why are you here? Is there a good chance that your demands will re-create the same dysfunctionality in Canada that existed in your home countries?

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(2) The Liberals : Liberal Leader Stephane Dion has indicated that he too thinks immigrants are an issue, but again mostly because of their votes. He also went to Richmond where he tried to outbid Mr. Harper by promising that his party would spend about $800 million to overhaul the current immigration system in the following ways : increase the number of immigrants; repeal the powers recently given to the Immigration Minister so that immigrants have "due process" ; spend $400 million to modernize information-gathering and otherwise streamline procedures for immigrant and refugee applicants; spend about $200 million over four years on improved language training for newcomers, and another $200 million over four years for internships, mentorship and work-placement opportunities.

Here are some questions:

A. Mr. Dion is saying that he will increase high immigration inflows and make more funding available for immigrant settlement. Is he also saying that in these uncertain economic times, he too thinks that immigrants and their interests (particularly their desire to increase the size of their ethnic groups) should take precedence over the interests of long-term Canadians?

B. By saying that he will repeal powers given to the Immigration Minister, is he saying that he will return Canada's immigration system to the days when the associated Canadian immigration industry sabotaged all efforts to control immigration?

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(3) The New Democratic Party : Jack Layton has said that he will try to protect Canadian workers from losing their jobs to other countries by stopping tax cuts to Canadian companies that close Canadian factories and then outsource jobs to cheap-labour countries. He will target investments instead to stimulate innovation ; invest in low-emission vehicle production ; train new and displaced workers through a Green Collar Jobs Fund ; create a Jobs Commissioner to investigate shutdowns ; and develop sector-based industrial strategies. According to an NDP policy statement, New Democrats will commit an average of $2 billion a year to this program, aiming to directly create 40,000 new manufacturing jobs and thousands of spin-off jobs while protecting many more.

Here are a few questions for the NDP and Mr. Layton :

A. From the 1920's to 1990, when Canadians were losing jobs because factories were closing, it was standard federal government practice to reduce immigration levels so that unemployed Canadians would not have to compete with foreign workers. Why is Mr. Layton not recommending that Canada re-institute this strategy now?

B. At the same time as Mr. Layton is courageously recommending that the federal government protect Canadian workers, why is Olivia Chow, the NDP's immigration critic, saying that Canada needs more workers? Why is she saying that Canada's high immigration intake should continue? It is estimated that Ontario and Quebec have recently lost several hundred thousand jobs. How is bringing in 250,000+ immigrants every year supposed to help unemployed Canadian workers?

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(4) The Greens : Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, has downplayed the environmental impact of immigration on Canada and said that the Alberta Tar Sands is a much more serious environmental issue. Since high immigration levels began in 1990, Canada has taken over 4 million immigrants and its population has increased by around 6 million. In a CBC radio programme on Sunday, September 15, Ms. May stated that immigration of the kind Canada has had since 1990 has produced economic benefits and created diversity.

Here are some questions for Ms. May :

A. Ms. May says that the problem of environmental degradation in Canada's major immigrant-receiving areas (especially Southern Ontario and Metro Vancouver) can be solved by sending those immigrants to rural Canada. The big problem with this approach is that it is naive. Many people have left rural Canada because there are no economic opportunities there. So why send immigrants there if they too will soon have to leave? In fact, why bring most of them to Canada in the first place?

B. Does Ms. May know that the Economic Council of Canada and individuals/research groups in other countries have concluded that immigration produces almost no significant economic benefits to host countries? In fact, is she aware that the Economic Council of Canada stated that if a country were looking for an economic stimulus, it should not look to immigration? Why is she saying immigration produces economic benefits?

C. Since Ms. May knows that several hundred thousand workers in Ontario and Quebec have lost their jobs, why is she not standing up for those workers by advocating a traditional significant cut in Canadian immigration levels? Is she saying that the creation of diversity takes precedence over the protection of Canadian workers?

D. At this time, all environmental organizations are advocating measures to minimize human impact in order to offset climate change. Why then is she, the leader of an environmental party, not advocating a population stabilization/immigration reduction policy for Canada? Wouldn't this kind of "Think Globally. Act Locally or Nationally." help Canada to minimize its environmental impact? Or are the environmental effects of 4 to 5 million recent immigrants a trivial matter? How about another 4 to 5 million? Is she saying there is no limit?

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(5) The Bloc Quebecois: The BQ is the only federal political party to express concern about immigration and its effects. Last May, the BQ asked in the House of Commons that Canada's multiculturalism policy not be applied to Quebec. The BQ has also made clear in its brief to Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor Commission on Reasonable Accommodation that multiculturalism is a negative for Quebec. (In fact , about 83% of all presenters (the BQ included) to the B-T commission said they disapproved of religious accommodation.) The BQ sees that federal high immigration levels , multiculturalism and the Charter of Rights have been responsible for religious accommodation demands in Quebec. Since March 2007, many polls have said that roughly 80% of all Quebec residents said that they did not want to make religious accommodations.

Here are 2 questions for the Bloc Quebecois :

(A) When during the current election campaign will the Bloc Quebecois raise the immigration and multiculturalism issue?

See also: "Truth and immigration" by James Bissett former Head of Canadian immigration Service in the Ottowa Citizen of 18 Sep 08.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ The first two sentences of the introductory paragraph above were originally as follows:

Australian public intellectual Phillip Adams has said, on his ABC program, Late night live, that he considers the bi-partisan support for high immigration, which ensures that it is rarely questioned in Parliament or in the news, a 'strength' of Australian democracy. As it happens, Canadian democracy shares this 'strength'.

What I wrote was in accord to my own recollection of what I heard on Late Night Live earlier in the year and also with other things I have heard or read from Phillip Adams on matters directly or indirectly related to population and immigration. However, Phillip Adams e-mailed me today to say:

I've never said that! I have said that a long history of bi-partisan support on immigration issues has sometimes been good....and sometimes very bad - as with White Australia and the refugee scandal.....BUT I'm no supporter of increasing the Oz population by either immigration or an increased birth-rate...for the obvious environmental reasons....

So, if I formed the wrong impression, then I apologise to Philip Admas, but however I may have formed the impression that led me to write what I wrote in the introductory paragraph, this is very welcome news. I look forward to Phillip Adams joining with the likes of Greens Senator Bob Brown in order to challenge the official ideology in support of population growth which is threatening to destroy this country's future.

My Thanks to Ilan Goldman who posted the extracts from the Australian Senate Hansard on 17 Spetember 2008 to the Yahoo PublicPopForum mailing and to Gloria O'Conner who drew Ilan's attention to this. - JS

The Senate Hansard from which the following were extracted can be downloaded in a 795K pdf file at http://www.aph.gov.au/HANSARD/senate/dailys/ds160908.pdf. The initial #question">question can be found on pages 32-33 of the PDF document, which are actually numbered as pages 18-19. Senator Brown's subsequent #speech">speech can be found on pages 41-42 of the PDF document, which are numbered as pages 27-28

Detail of "Overpopulation" by John Piltre at http://www.progressiveart.com/pitre_page2.htm

#question" id="question">Population Policy (question without notice)

Tuesday,16 September 2008

Senator BOB BROWN (2.33 pm)---My question without notice is to Senator Evans, representing the Prime Minister. Does the government have a population policy? Can the minister tell the Senate whether population growth is essential for economic growth, or is that assumption just plain wrong? If population growth is inevitably needed, is that not an ultimate recipe for planetary breakdown?

Senator CHRIS EVANS---I thank Senator Brown for the question. I think population policy is an important issue confronting Australia and we actually need to have a mature debate over the next couple of years about the development of population policy.

Senator Abetz---I'd say you need to have one.

Senator CHRIS EVANS---Senator Abetz, you keep on interjecting---

Senator Abetz interjecting---

The PRESIDENT---Order! Senator Abetz, we can do without your interjections during question time.

Senator CHRIS EVANS---I actually think it is a serious issue. It was discussed at the 2020 conference and raised by lot of the delegates and it is an issue that the government has been engaging on, particularly in relation to the Treasurer's role, the housing minister's role and of course the environment and climate change ministers' roles. We are working together to try and bring together a broader policy approach in this area.

In terms of my own area, on coming to office I found that the previous government set the immigration planning levels on an annual basis. They just picked a figure annually and there was no context to the selection of the figure and no longer term planning. In our first budget this year the cabinet agreed to my bringing forward next year a longer term planning framework for immigration to this country, which is in part an attempt to deal with that broader population question. We think we need a longer planning cycle. We think we need to deal with those broader considerations. At the moment we have a skills shortage in this country as a result of the previous government's failure to invest in education and training and we are looking to build our capacity by training our own people, but in the short term we do have a need for labour and we are trying to address that.

One of the things I would point to is the changing demographics of the nation. We know that over the period 2010 to 2020 more people will retire than will join the workforce. If you like, 2010 marks the tipping point in the retirement of the baby boomers, and that will exceed the numbers of young people entering the workforce. That is not a temporary thing; this is a longterm demographic shift. It will not rectify itself. We will have a shrinking native-born labour force to supply a growing economy and an ageing population. So there are big challenges in the demographics area, and part of the solution to that will be an increase in migration and, I think, an increase in the overall population, because we will need more workers to support the population and we will need more workers to provide services to those ageing as the cohort of those ageing increases. But there are issues about environmental sustainability that need to be taken into account and there are issues about housing that need to be taken into account.

I suppose your question, Senator Brown, implied that somehow we should respond in a negative way. I think the way to respond is to say that we have a climate change problem and we have to address that problem. Whatever the size of the population, we will have a climate change problem. This government is immediately trying to tackle that climate change problem. We are trying to tackle the problem of water. All of those things need to be taken head-on. Those problems are not fixed by reducing our population or ending immigration to this country. We are serious about housing, we are serious about climate change and we are serious about the environment, but we face other challenges about the workforce and about our demographics. What we are trying to do is bring all that together so that the government has a broad view about these challenges and how we respond. I think we are making good progress on that, and certainly in my portfolio we are very much focusing on those broader issues.

Senator BOB BROWN---Mr President, I have a supplementary question. I thank the minister for the seriousness with which he answered that question. I return again to core question that I asked: is economic growth predicated upon population growth or is that a myth?

Senator CHRIS EVANS---That is a pretty big question to answer in one minute. What I would say to you is that I think economic growth is vital to Australia's future. I think that in the medium term we will need a larger population than we currently have. I think we will have to run an immigration program to deal with the demographic shift and the drop in the workforce. But we also need to tackle those pressing environmental and other problems. The Greens keep raising with me, for instance, the question of climate change refugees and what we are doing to accommodate them. To accommodate them we would have to increase our immigration program. All these things are clearly linked. We are very much focused on the broader population policy issues, but I think we will need continuing economic growth, and I think we will see a continuing modest increase in our population levels over coming years.

#speech" id="speech">Population Policy (speech in response to Senator Evans' answer)

Tuesday,16 September 2008

Senator BOB BROWN (Tasmania---Leader of the Australian Greens) (3.30 pm)---I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (Senator Evans) to a question without notice asked by Senator Bob Brown today relating to economic and population growth.

I am grateful to Senator Evans for responding to a question that is very rarely raised in this parliament let alone taken on and answered at some length---and that is the question of the role of population in our future. The former Treasurer, Peter Costello, said that population is destiny. I would agree with that, although I think I am coming from a different point of view.

We are on a planet in which there are now 6½ thousand million people, whereas when I was a lad it was half that amount. At the change from the 19th century to the 20th century there were 2,000 million people, which is less than a third of today's population. And we know that by mid-century the population is going to be 9,000 million to 10,000 million people. The world advice is that that simply cannot be sustained. We are now looking at rapidly deteriorating food stores on the planet. We are down to fewer than 50 days of flow-on food availability to meet any great emergency, and the number of people facing starvation around the planet right now is in the millions and increasing rapidly, particularly in Africa but also in parts of Asia, like North Korea.

Because energy drives agriculture, and with the onrush of climate change, the very slow growth in pro -ductivity compared to population, and peak oil, we will be facing a mammoth, chaotic social outcome of too many people with too few resources on the planet in the lifetime of some of us here and certainly in the lifetime of our children. We are obliged to look at this. That is why I asked the government whether it had a population policy, and I do not believe it does. I do not believe the opposition does. The Greens have one which is very general.

I think it is incumbent upon us all to say what we think about the fundamental supposition that the economy needs a growing population if it is to be sustainable. I think that is a fundamental error but it drives all economic policymaking at government level around the world at the moment. If you take the idea that you must have a growing population to have a healthy economy then the planet will implode because the logic of that is that, if the numbers of humans on the planet keep increasing---and we are the biggest, most marauding group of mammals there has ever been on the planet---to just bring other people up to our level of consumption our current population projections say that we will need not one but three or four planets with the resource base of the earth to sustain human population by mid-century. I am talking about 40 years away. It is simply not sustainable.

We as responsible politicians and representatives of the interests of the future of this nation, if not the planet, have to debate this matter. I believe we have to come to the conclusion that we have to devise economic growth that is not predicated on population growth. If not, we have to state at what level we will stop growing the economy because there are too many people. That is an inevitable outcome of the theory that you must have population growth if you are going to have economic wellbeing. It is a fundamental part of the political discourse and yet it is missing from public debate.

One of my major reasons for raising this question is that I get asked about it all over the country. It does not matter what you are talking about, when you go into any size audience somebody will come up and say, 'What about population growth?' So here I am asking that question in the Senate because so many Australians want it debated.

Question agreed to.

What you can do:

Contact Senator Bob Brown to congratulate him for having raised this critical issue in the Senate. His contact details are:
e: ebony.bennett[AT]aph gov au www.bobbrown.org.au
m: 0409 164 603 | p: (02) 6277 3170 | f: (02) 6277 3185

Immigration: How Much is Enough for Canada?

Original article published on 6 March 2008. The standard of much of the discussion that ensued was very high.
See #OtherDiscussions">below for links to other online discussions.

How many immigrants should Canada accept each year? What population can Canada support - and how to determine that number? And how many do we want?

These are difficult questions, and it is a sensitive issue. My grandparents immigrated to Canada when my father was eight years old. My wife and stepdaughter are currently permanent residents, and we have sponsored my wife's mother. My business partner and his family are immigrants. I am well aware of the value that immigrants bring to Canada, and the conditions in developing countries. And "Isn't the real problem overpopulation?" is one of the most frequent questions I receive during my Inconvenient Truth presentations.

Having revealed all this, I believe:

• We should allow immigration at levels that stabilise our current population
• We should conduct a 'sustainability audit' that determines how many people Canada can realistically support
• We should determine what kind of population density we want, from sparse to Singapore levels
• We must stop using population growth to postpone problems like a funded Canada Pension Plan, or to drive continuous economic growth
• We must build in a buffer to account for climate change

This is difficult stuff. First, how many people can Canada support sustainably? We must be capable of sustainably producing all our own necessities, including food, shelter, clothing, energy, mobility, and communication. That means we can't count our coal mines or the tar sands for energy. It means that importing food from China doesn't count toward a sustainable food supply for Canada. It also means we have to leave space for the natural world; humans are not living sustainably if other species are going extinct by the bucketload.

Second, once we know how many people the country could support, we must determine how closely we want to live together. It is one thing to say "Canada has lots of space and could hold more people." It is another when you start telling people they must live up north, or that Montreal is going to have the population of Beijing.

Trying to force people to live in sparsely populated areas of Canada has never worked for long. Most immigrants migrate to the big cities for a reason - for many reasons, in fact, and they are generally the same reasons most of us end up in the cities.

I also think we grossly overestimate how many people Canada can and should "hold." Yes, we have vast unpopulated areas. It is also true that many of these areas are inhospitable to humans, and most necessities would have to be shipped in from other regions.

In addition, these unpopulated areas act as buffers for human activity. Paving our vast forests so Canada can accept "her share" of the world's population makes as much sense as razing Brazil's rainforests to cram in more people there. Europe once had vast tracts of forest, but they are all gone, and the Europeans are working toward reforesting - exceptionally difficult, because there are people everywhere.

Finally, we need to get over ourselves. We are not the only beings on this planet. We are not the Supreme Beings, though we certainly have the power to destroy life, including our own. We must learn to live with Nature, as we are Nature and Nature is us.

Brian Gordon
Nominated Candidate, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca
Green Party of Canada

Trained Presenter
An Inconvenient Truth

People - Planet - Prosperity
The New Green Economy

#OtherDiscussions" id="OtherDiscussions">Other online discussions on immigration and population

Is it reactionary to oppose immigration? of 19 Dec 07 on webdiary.com.au.

Is there intelligent life on Planet Green? of 9 Sep 08,

#comment-470700">Will "the great immigration debate" take place? of 21 May 08 on larvatusprodeo.net.

Have the Greens lost the plot on immigration? of 11 Jul 08 on Online Opinion.

There once was a Canadian couple who lived in denial. They believed they could live the Californian dream with a Green conscience too, retro-fitted with snug windows and thick insulation and equipped with solar panels and air conditioners positioned at high settings. He was a developer, but a “progressive” developer if you must know. He had learned that he could push through almost any development if he tacked the word “sustainable” on the end of it. So he was closing deals all the time. Attending meetings all the time. Meeting with local and regional politicians all the time. So it was important to make a good impression. To be smart, he must look smart. That is where his “suit” fetish came in. He made a habit of buying a new suit almost every day. Soon the closets of home filled up with suits so that there was no space left over for anything else but his suits. What was his wife’s response? As a member of the Sierra Club, it was congenitally impossible for her to tell him to simply stop growing his wardrobe. Growth is inevitable. Her philosophy was “growth management”. So she went out and bought closet organizers. Again and again. She would buy them to compress the inventory of her husband’s suits, and then weeks later, more compression was called for, and the cycle would be repeated. Voila! Smart growth. Alas, it was evident her strategy would not work ad infinitum. Her stress level was rising. Eventually she was ripping out the R50 insulation, sending it to the dump and replacing it with some of her husband’s suits. Sensing her frustration, her husband proposed that they buy a bigger house in a better neigbourhood. One with more closet space. She countered that as an environmentalist, she would have no part of it. The energy problems we have today, she argued, issued out of the fact that very large homes were being occupied by too few people. So she was going to proceed with her plans of having a third and fourth child. After all, as far as the environment is concerned, it is as Ontario Green Party leader Frank de Jong said, “population is a red herring”, because as his federal leader, Elizabeth May remarked, it is not how many people that live in Canada that is important, “but whether they live like Bill Gates or Ghandhi.” So just keep them comin’. More and more suits. More and more babies, more and more immigrants, lets just find smarter ways to pack them all in like the men with white gloves who push commuters into Japanese subway trains. Green living habits of conserve, recycle and reduce feed the obsessive compulsive disorders of those who feel the need to fixate on the trivial in order to avoid the facing the truly lethal dangers of over-population in our society. This neurotic wife of the pack rat forms the template for urban planners across the continent.

A report in Melbourne's "The Age" newspaper August 25th 2008 tells how Mr Ted Baillieu the rather affable, reasonable sounding leader of the Opposition in Victoria howled down members from his Sandringham branch of his party who voiced a concern about Melbourne's massive population growth - about 1,500 people per week The Age quotes Mr. Baillieu as saying to a meeting of 700 . "Be very careful when you discuss these things. Don't allow anyone to say we are opposed to population growth, or that we are going to point fingers at migration. If we put out the stop sign then we are sending the wrong messages, and this economy will suffer long-term." He went on to say that Melbourne's problems with train services and the lack of water resources was due to lack of planning by the current state government. of greater Melbourne." (Melbourne's dams are are at a lower level than were this time last year despite recent rain and of course we have about 60,000 more people!)

According to The Age - the amended resolution, that council "recognises a deteriorating quality of life inherent in the ongoing increase in the population" was then passed. Mr Baillieu accused the Premier of poor planning and scapegoating immigrants after Mr Brumby this month warned of the stresses on services caused by Melbourne's high rate of population growth.

The following letter by me was published in The Age on the 26th August:

It's about people, not politics, Mr Baillieu

HOW disappointing to read the Victorian Opposition Leader, Ted Baillieu's, reaction to sensible policy proposals from the Sandringham branch of the Liberal Party and also to a recent responsible warning from Premier John Brumby regarding the high rate of Victoria's population growth ("Blame it on Labor, not migration: Baillieu", The Age, 25/8). Mr Baillieu seems to carry a child-like belief that correct planning can cope with any level of population growth.

Just as some sanity is emerging in his own party and from our Labor Premier, the Liberal leader panics and silences his party members, who are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes - we cannot keep growing at this rate and maintain our quality of life. It seems Ted scolded the naughty children and silenced their well-founded concerns.

In fact, Victoria's population cannot keep growing at any rate and be compatible with long-term survival - but I was not at the Liberal Party meeting and I'm not sure if anyone pointed this out.

See also: Blame it on Labor, not migration: Baillieu by Paul Austin in the Melbourne Age of 25 Aug 08, City of 8 million 'unliveable' by Cameron Houston and Royce Millar in the Age of 5 Sep 08

A copy of the article One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks was included in the Naomi Klein newsletter (www.naomiklein.org/contact-naomi-klein) which I received today. There was almost complete silence from the right wing think-tanks exposed in The Shock Doctrine for many months following its publication. In Australia, I nearly always encountered total silence from the ideological co-thinkers of Milton Friedman in online discussions, that is, until very recently when, in an Online Opinion forum discussion Winning the War In Iraq , I encountered posts, the content of which seemed to originate from a paper The Klein Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Polemics published by The Cato Institute on 14 May. Klein's article is a response to this and to a similar article Dead Left by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic of 30 July 08.

This article exposes conclusively how these articles employ various dishonest debating including doing precisely what the accuse Klein herself of doing, that is taking quotes "out of context". As Klein writes she doesn't have time to comprehensively refute every falsehood in these articles. Her "full rebuttal is the book itself."

However, there is one other criticism that Klein has yet to respond to, that is her failure to take a stance against high immigration and her implicit depiction of all groups opposed to high immigration as reactionary anti-humanitarian and xenophobic. I have sent three e-mails so to either Naomi Klein or Debra Levy (debra [AT] naomiklein org) her chief researcher on this and have yet to receive a response. These concerns are also discussed in the article Why is Naomi Klein uncritical of mass immigration to the First World? of 27 July 08 by Sheila Newman.

However, in spite of this serious blemish, The Shock Doctrine remains a groundbreaking and indispensable work and her ongoing journalistic activism remains an immense service to humanity. - James Sinnamon

See also: Online Opinion discussions in which The Shock Doctrine is discussed: NSW power without pride and Winning the war in Iraq.

One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks

By Naomi Klein, 2 September 2008, orignal article at www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks.

Contents: #FriedmanSupportedTheWar" id="FriedmanSupportedTheWar">Sorry Boys, Milton Friedman Supported The War, #AttackTheAuthor" id="AttackTheAuthor">Ignore the Reporting, Attack the Author, #GraspingStraws" id="GraspingStraws">Grasping at Straws, #StrawMenMassacre" id="StrawMenMassacre">A Massacre of Straw Men, #GoToTheSource" id="GoToTheSource">Go to the Source

Exactly one year ago, I set off on a book tour to promote The Shock Doctrine. The plan was for it to last three months, quite long by publishing standards. Twelve months later, it is still going http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi/tour-dates . But this has been no ordinary book tour. Everywhere I have traveled- from Calgary, Alberta to Cochabamba, Bolivia - I have heard more stories about how shock strategies have been used to impose unwanted pro-corporate policies. I have also been part of stimulating debates and discussions about how the current round of crises - oil, food, financial markets, heavy weather -- can be transformed into opportunities for progressive change.

And there have been other kinds of responses too. The Shock Doctrine is a direct attack on the intellectuals and institutions that have disseminated corporatist ideology around the world. When I wrote the book, I fully expected to get hit back. Yet for eight months following publication, there was an eerie silence from the 'free-market' ideologues. Sure, a few dismissive reviews appeared in the business press (www.naomiklein.org/articles/2007/10/business-press-unrequited-love) . But not a word from the Washington think tanks that I name in the book. Nothing from the University of Chicago economics department. Even The Economist magazine, which used to attack me gleefully and with great regularity, never mentioned the book in print. An American television producer, who was trying to find an opponent to debate me on-air, confided that she had never been turned down so consistently. "They seem to think if they ignore you, you'll go away."

Well, the silence from the right has certainly been broken. In recent months, several articles and reports have come out claiming to debunk my thesis. The most prominent are a 'background paper' (www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp102.pdf (663K), www.cato.org/pubs/bp/html/bp102/bp102index.html) published by The Cato Institute, extended into a full length book in Swedish (!), and a lengthy essay www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b in The New Republic by senior editor Jonathan Chait.

Several readers have written to this site (www.shockdoctrine.com) asking me to respond to these attacks, if only to help them defend the book more effectively. I resisted at first (clinging to my summer vacation) but I appreciate the feedback and several points do need correcting. Since the reports by Cato and The New Republic - though purporting to come from radically different points on the political spectrum - share some marked similarities, I've decided to tackle them together. Here goes.

#FriedmanSupportedTheWar" id="FriedmanSupportedTheWar">Sorry Boys, Milton Friedman Supported The War

Both Jonathan Chait and The Cato Institute claim that the late economist Milton Friedman was a staunch opponent of the invasion of Iraq. The Cato paper states of me that, 'She claims that Friedman was a 'neoconservative' and thus in favor of an aggressive American foreign policy, and she argues that Iraq was invaded so that Chicago-style policies could be implemented there%. but nowhere does she mention Friedman's actual views about the war. Friedman himself said: 'I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.' And this was not just one war that he happened to oppose. In 1995, he described his foreign policy position as 'anti-interventionist.''

Similarly, Chait accuses me of not knowing the difference between libertarians and neo-cons and chides me for never mentioning -- 'not once, not anywhere' -- that Friedman 'argued against the Iraq war from the beginning.' Apparently Friedman's anti-war stance should be 'morbidly embarrassing' to me.

I am not the one who should be embarrassed. Despite his later protestations, Milton Friedman openly supported the war when it was being waged. In April 2003, Friedman told the German magazine Focus that 'President Bush only wanted war because anything else would have threatened the freedom and the prosperity of the USA.' Asked about increased tensions between the U.S. and Europe, Friedman replied: 'the end justifies the means. As soon as we're rid of Saddam, the political differences will also disappear.' [Read the whole interview in German (www.focus.de/finanzen/news/wirtschaft-lasst-erhard-auferstehen_aid_196501.html) and our translation (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/milton-friedman-war-iraq).] Clearly this was not the voice of anti-intervention. Even in July 2006, when Friedman claimed to have opposed the war from the beginning, he remained hawkish. Now that the U.S. was in Iraq, Friedman told The Wall Street Journal, 'it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.'

All of this has nothing to do with my book, however. In The Shock Doctrine, I describe the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the culmination of Friedman's ideological crusade because he was America's leading intellectual favoring the privatization of the state - not because he personally supported the war, which is irrelevant. For more than five years Iraq has been the vanguard of this radical privatization project. Private contractors now outnumber U.S. soldiers and corporations have taken on such core state functions as prisoner interrogation.

Furthermore, I never said Friedman was a 'neo-conservative' and I discuss, at length, how difficult it is to find terms to describe the corporatist project that are acceptable to all readers. On page 17 (all page numbers refer to the Picador paperback) I write:

'In the attempt to relate the history of the ideological crusade that has culminated in the radical privatization of war and disaster, one problem recurs: the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities. Friedman called himself a 'liberal,' but his U.S. followers, who associated liberals with high taxes and hippies, tended to identify as 'conservatives,' 'classical economists,' 'free marketers' and, later, as believers in 'Reaganomics' or 'laissez-faire.' In most of the world, their orthodoxy is known as 'neo-liberalism,' but it is often called 'free trade' or simply 'globalization.' Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think tanks with which Friedman had long associations-Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute-called itself 'neo-conservative,' a world view that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.'

The significance of the 'neo-con' label gaining currency in the mid-nineties is that it was then that the Republicans, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and backed by the think tanks I mentioned, swept Congress promising a 'Contract With America.' At this point, the label 'neo-conservatives' was not a reference primarily to hawkish foreign policy positions but to harsh economic ones. Back in the mid-nineties, many of the people most associated with the neo-con label today - David Frum and William Kristol and much of the Weekly Standard crowd - were squarely focused on demanding Friedmanite cut-backs and privatizations inside the United States. Frum, for example, first made his name in the U.S. with Dead Right,, his 1994 book exhorting the conservative movement to return to its free market economic roots. After Bill Clinton embraced much of this economic agenda, several of the key neo-con warriors narrowed their focus to American dominance on the world stage, a fact that has allowed their keen interests in Friedmanite economic ideas to be largely overlooked.

#AttackTheAuthor" id="AttackTheAuthor">Ignore the Reporting, Attack the Author

Both Chait's essay and the Cato paper are marked by a stubborn refusal to wrestle with the evidence quoted in my book. For instance, Chait dismisses out of hand my suggestion that there were economic interests behind the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo (though he grudingly admits I never claim that economics was the sole motivator). I do write that there were other factors motivating the war besides Slobodan Milosevic's egregious human rights violations. I base this claim on the post-war analysis provided by Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under U.S. President Bill Clinton and the lead U.S. negotiator during the Kosovo war. In a 2005 essay (quoted on page 415), Talbott wrote:

'As nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform-not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians-that best explains NATO's war.'

Instead of explaining how the words of a top-level U.S. official could so clearly coincide with my argument, Chait chooses to completely ignore the Talbott quote. Again and again, readers of The New Republic are left with the distinct impression that The Shock Doctrine is a work of opinion journalism, rather than a thesis based on research and reporting.

When Chait and the Cato Institute do acknowledge my reliance on facts, they accuse me of manipulating them to fit my thesis. Interestingly, the first time Chait quotes my work, he does just that. To explain to his readers what kind of an extremist he is dealing with, he quotes my first book, No Logo. In it, I allegedly described the world as a 'fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests.' If he had let the quote continue for one more sentence, his readers would have known that I went on to dismiss this worldview as overly caricatured. The next sentences read: 'there is good reason for alarm. But a word of caution: we may be able to see a not-so-brave new world on the horizon, but that doesn't mean we are already living in Huxley's nightmare... Instead of an airtight formula, is a steady trend... but riddled with exceptions.'

This is just the first of countless instances in which Chait twists my words to fit his thesis. When manipulation fails, he simply takes my points and passes them off as his own, without attribution. (I am well aware, for instance, that both Marxists and Keynesians have exploited crisis and disaster, which is why I explore left-wing disaster opportunism on pages 21-25, 65-70, 283, 316-317.)

#GraspingStraws" id="GraspingStraws">Grasping at Straws

The Cato paper does, at times, acknowledge that there are facts in my book, but faults me for failing to provide sources for my statistics. This is a bold charge to make against a book with 74 pages of endnotes. The one example mentioned is the statistic 'that between 25 and 60 percent of the population is discarded or becomes a permanent underclass in countries that liberalize their economies.' I did not provide a source for this stat because it is an amalgamation of stats I had already cited and for which I had already provided multiple sources. This is standard practice: once a statistic has been sourced, it can repeated (for the sake of brevity) without repeating the source. So here are those stats on which the 25-60 per cent amalgamation is based, with their sources, straight out of The Shock Doctrine endnotes:

• Unemployment in Bolivia was between 25% and 30% in 1987 (page 186. Source: Mike Reid, 'Sitting Out the Bolivian Miracle,' Guardian (London), May 9, 1987.)
• 25% of Russians lived in desperate poverty in 1996 (page 300. Source: Russian Economic Trends 5, no. 1 (1996): 56-57 cited in Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 47.)
• Unemployment for black South Africans more than doubled from 23% in 1991 to 48% in 2002 (page 272. Sources: 'South Africa: The Statistics,' Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2006; Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere, 'Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa,' New York Times, April 26, 2004.)
• Unemployment in Poland was at 25% in some areas in 1993 (page 241. Source: Mark Kramer, 'Polish Workers and the Post-Communist Transition, 1989-93,' Europe-Asia Studies, June 1995)
• 40% of young workers were unemployed in Poland in 2006 (page 241. Source: Andrew Curry, 'The Case Against Poland's New President,' New Republic, November 17, 2005)
• 59% of Poles had fallen below the poverty line in 2003 (pages 241-242. Source: Przemyslaw Wielgosz, '25 Years of Solidarity,' August 2005.)

Elsewhere, the Cato paper claims that, 'Klein never provides the reader with any data over a longer period. She% never once admits that Chile is the social and economic success story of Latin America and has virtually abolished extreme poverty.' In fact my economic analysis of Chile covers a 34-year span and I provide facts and data that directly challenge the claim that the country is a free market success story. Here is a relevant passage (pages 104-105):

'The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile's export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state still had a steady source of funds%. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world-out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the eighth most unequal country on the list.'

#StrawMenMassacre" id="StrawMenMassacre">A Massacre of Straw Men

Most of the attacks on The Shock Doctrine involve manufacturing claims, falsely attributing them to me, then handily tearing them down. For example, Jonathan Chait telescopes my point about Donald Rumsfeld's holdings in the Disaster Capitalism Complex like this: 'Donald Rumsfeld maintained his stock in Gilead Sciences, which holds the patent for Tamiflu, even while serving as defense secretary. Get it? Rumsfeld would stand to profit from a flu pandemic. But surely you don't have to be an admirer of Rumsfeld to doubt that he would engineer an outbreak of a deadly virus in order to fatten his stock portfolio.'

Actually, that is the plot of the movie V for Vendetta; it has absolutely nothing do with my book. What I do write about is how the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld's leadership, stockpiled Tamiflu and Rumsfeld stood to profit as the value of the stock increased by 807 per cent. On pages 394-395 I write:

'For the six years that he held office, Rumsfeld had to leave the room whenever talk turned to the possibility of avian flu treatment and the purchase of drugs for it. According to the letter outlining the arrangement that allowed him to hold on to his stocks, he had to stay out of decisions that 'may directly and predictably affect Gilead.' His colleagues, however, took good care of his interests. In July 2005, the Pentagon purchased $58 million worth of Tamiflu, and the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would order up to $1 billion worth of the drug a few months later.'

There are many more straw men propped up in the Cato Institute paper. Most involve vastly inflating the role I attribute to Milton Friedman. And no little wonder. Other than the University of Chicago economics department, Cato is the institution most intimately aligned and associated with Milton Friedman's radical theories. Among other tributes, every two years, Cato hands out the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, worth half a million dollars. (This year it went to a 23-year-old Venezuelan student activist to further his opposition to the government of Hugo Chavez). Since Friedman continues to serve as Cato's patron saint, it has much to lose from a diminishing of Friedman's reputation, as well as a direct interest in exonerating him of all crimes, real or imagined.

Here are a few more examples. The Cato paper claims that I put the entire blame for Pinochet's economic policies on the shoulders of Milton Friedman - then 'proves' that his direct involvement was minimal. Once again, I make no such claim. I do devote considerable space - roughly 60 pages -- to describing the impact of a U.S. State Department program that brought more than one hundred Chilean students to the University of Chicago as part of a deliberate effort to export free-market economic ideas to Chile. This is the program that gave birth to the infamous 'Chicago Boys' of Chile, several of whom were actively involved in planning the Chilean dictatorship's economic program before the 1973 coup even took place. Amazingly, the Cato paper makes absolutely no mention of this academic program in its effort to exonerate Friedman personally. The writer either missed 60 pages of my book, or deliberately chose to ignore them.

The greatest challenge in responding to the Cato paper is the scope if its dishonesty. Consider this one passage:

'Klein also blames Friedman and Chicago economics for the actions of the International Monetary Fund during the Asian financial crisis and the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of the land of fishing families to build luxury hotels after the tsunami. Yet the fact is that Friedman thought that the IMF shouldn't be involved in Asia, and he held that governments should be forbidden from expropriating property to give it to private developers. Of course, Klein could argue that Friedman was in some sense a source of inspiration for those policies, even though he was opposed to them. But she doesn't do that. She pretends that he agreed with them, and that that is what he and other Chicago economists wanted all along.'

Absolutely everything in this passage is wrong. I never say Friedman favored the IMF bailout in Asia, quite the opposite. On pages 335-336, I report that, 'Milton Friedman himself, now in his mid-eighties, made a rare appearance on CNN to tell the news anchor Lou Dobbs that he opposed any kind of bailout and that the market should be left to correct itself.' In what way could this constitute 'pretending' that Friedman supported the bailout?

I also freely acknowledge the fact that Friedman opposed the IMF on principle. However, as with Pinochet's government in the seventies, I also document that the IMF, at the time of the bailout, was packed with ideological Chicago Boys - a very different point than claiming the IMF was taking orders from Friedman. On page 202, I directly address this apparent contradiction:

'Philosophically, Milton Friedman did not believe in the IMF or the World Bank: they were classic examples of big government interfering with the delicate signals of the free market. So it was ironic that there was a virtual conveyor belt delivering Chicago Boys to the two institutions' hulking headquarters on Nineteenth Street in Washington, D.C., where they took up many of the top positions.'

The Shock Doctrine has room for this kind of complexity because it is not - despite what Cato claims - a book about the actions of one man. It is about a multifaceted ideological trend that has successfully served the most powerful corporate interests in society for half a century.

Furthermore, I never wrote, as Cato claims in that same passage, that Friedman had anything to do with 'the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of the land of fishing families to build luxury hotels after the tsunami.' His name does not appear once in my 25-page chapter on the tsunami. Once again, to write that I 'pretend' that Friedman is advocating these policies is pure fabrication. Furthermore, all of these inventions and misrepresentations appear in a single paragraph. The Cato background paper is 20 pages long and is comprised of dozens and dozens of equally dishonest paragraphs. Subjecting them all to this kind of rebuttal is simply too time consuming; my full rebuttal is the book itself.

#GoToTheSource" id="GoToTheSource">Go to the Source

Thanks to a fantastic team of researchers, especially my incredible research assistant Debra Levy, The Shock Doctrine has withstood a year's worth of intense media scrutiny in dozens of countries. It is not unscathed, but it has emerged in better shape than I dared hope. When errors are discovered, we immediately correct them in future editions and post a correction (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/corrections-clarifications) and an explanation on the book's website. So far there has been only one significant error discovered, related to the profits earned from Dick Cheney's Halliburton stocks. It was immediately corrected. Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that this is but one of many examples that make the same point about conflicts of interest in the Bush Administration; indeed I devote an entire chapter to the topic. And this is the benefit of a methodology that is grounded not in anecdotes but in thousands of sourced facts and figures: the thesis does not rise or fall on any single example.

As to my critics' charge that I am selective in my use of quotations, that's a danger for any writer. It is also why Debra and I launched the 'resources' section (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/chapter-resources) of the book's website. On this page, readers can access dozens of original reports, letters and studies that make up some of the key source material for the book. If you are concerned that I am exaggerating Friedman's support for the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, read a letter Friedman wrote to Pinochet http://wwww.naomiklein.org/files/resources/pdfs/friedman-pinochet-letters.pdf . If you are suspicious that I am making disaster capitalism seem more conspiratorial than it is, read the minutes www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part7/chapter20/pro-market-ideas-katrina from a meeting that took place at the Heritage Foundation just two weeks after the levees broke in New Orleans. It lays out 32 'free market solutions' for Hurricane Katrina and high gas prices, many of which have been championed by the Bush Administration.

The thesis of The Shock Doctrine was not born of whimsy but of four years of research. Debra and I put these documents online because we want educators, students and general readers to move beyond an admittedly subjective version of history - as all histories are -- and go straight to the source. We invite you to explore these documents, send us ones we missed, and come to your own conclusions.

Lou Dobbs interview on US population explosion

The following transcript is instructive for its revelation of the globalist mentality of mainstream environmentalism. In this case represented by Robert Engelman of Worldwatch Institute (www.worldwatch.org). Engelman, the good environmentalist that he is, takes the safe, easy way out. He opposes population growth alright. On a global front. The Worldwatch Institute says it's a bad thing and Engelman has written a book saying all the politically correct things. You know, "Women don't want more children, they want more for their children", so let's empower women. Fine.

It's when you start talking about population growth at home that environmentalists get nervous. And as soon as you mention "immigration", they get more than nervous, they get a panic attack. They start thinking about losing their donor base, especially that donor whose initials are D.G. and who gives $100 million every year on condition you don't take a stand on immigration. If you press them too hard and win the argument, well then you are a racist and the discussion is over.

What do folks like Engelman do? As you will see in the transcript, he blames the population increase on more people having babies. Environmentalists are very comfortable about discussing a "woman's right to choose" but apparently not a whole people's right choose how many shall become citizens. What Engelman doesn't want to face up to is that the fertility boom America is experiencing is driven by immigrants. And even if it wasn't, isn't there something perverse about an environmental movement that a)ignores population growth as an agency of environmental degradation and b) ignores immigration as an agency of population growth when in Canada and the US it accounts for 70% of such growth, irrespective of the children of immigrants?

The environmental movement can be likened to a police force that sets up a road block to arrest drunk drivers but allows the drug impaired to drive on through. It is prepared to arrest unwanted pregnancies but mass and illegal immigration can just drive on through.

The transcript was circulated by Bill Ryerson. I highlighted the juicy parts and inserted some annoying comments. Tim Murray

This is the transcript from Lou Dobbs' CNN program segment on U.S. population growth broadcast on August 21, 2008. For the entire program, see transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0808/21/ldt.01.html. Be sure to send Lou Dobbs your comments on the program and encourage him to do more programs on population issues at loudobbs [AT] cnn com .

Dobbs: The population of this country is expected to grow, get ready, by 135 million people in just the next 40 years. That growth is driven principally by immigration, both legal and illegal, and not by birth. There are serious concerns whether this country's national resources can keep up with and support such an outright explosion in our population.

Joining me now are three experts on population growth. From Washington, D.C., Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute (www.aei.org). Norm, great to have you with us. Norm is co-author of "The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track."

Robert Engelman is vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute. Good to have you with us. Robert is the author of "More: Population, Nature and What Women Want."

And that is one of my favorite titles. And here in New York is Jane Delung, president emeritus of the Population Resource Center (www.prcdc.org). Great to have you with us.

Let's begin. We're talking about an outright explosion. Almost 50 percent increase in our population over the course of the next four or five decades. That's crazy.

Jane Delung, President Emeritus, Population Resource Center: It is an explosion. For every two people that are in the United States today, there will be a third person. And this explosion is occurring both because of immigration and descendants to immigration. All respective experts say that it's between 60 and 75 percent of that growth will be driven by immigration. No one talks about this.

This is the hidden elephant in the room in the United States. We will have immigration reform discussions and debates next year. And it is beyond me why the American public is not willing to talk about what size do we want to be and how fast are we going to get there? We're growing from 300 million people to almost 450 million people in 40 years. Three million additional people a year.

Dobbs: That's incredible. To put that in some context, that growth rate is in excess of 10, 15 percent greater number than the entire number of people living in this country in 1940. That's nuts.

Delung: It's double the population in the 1960s. We hit 200 million in 1967. We're going to hit 450 million in 2040. It's an extraordinary growth rate.

Dobbs: Robert, let me ask you this. The environmental impact -- at a time when this country is being criticized for consuming so much of the world's resources. At a time when we are finding ourselves running into limits in terms of this country's resources whether it be for building, for the production and manufacture of products and goods, whatever it may be, what is the environmental impact?

Robert Engelman, Worldwatch Institute: Well, first of all, it's probably worth pointing out that these projections sometimes change. This is actually an increase in what the census was projecting just a few years ago. Probably more because of increases in births than actual increases in immigration. (Nonsense! What Engelman fails to note is that much of the current baby boom is attributable to illegal Hispanics exploiting the 14th amendment that allows citizenship to anyone born in the country. "Anchor babies". Hispanics in the US are having more children than they did in their home country. Population growth is driven by immigration. Other factors are peripheral.-Tim)

But let's assume the number is more or less accurate, it's going to be fairly close to that. It's interesting that this discussion is occurring at a time when everyone from President Bush on down has recognized that one of the reasons Americans are paying more for gasoline, more for food, is increases in demand. Demand matters and we're starting to lose confidence that I think we used to have that we can always produce more, we can always find more of everything we might need, so it doesn't matter how many people are consuming.

It clearly does matter and what we're seeing in America is a high consuming country that will need to consume about 50 percent more of the energy of housing. Whether it's John McCain's numbers or our own individual houses. We're going to be consuming more living space and more transportation. All of these things that we're worried about right now will need to find a lot more of.

Dobbs: So where is - where are the environmentalists on this? The impact is tremendous on the environment, on water supplies, on air. It's extraordinary and we're not hearing any discussion at all of what is a critically important issue from the environmental sector. (They have been bought out my friend. Google David Gelbaum. $100 million will make the "P" in the "IPAT" equation go away. Then all of America's environmental problems become ones of our sinful over-consumption.-Tim)

Engelman: I think the whole topic of population has become very sensitive. It's scary, it's very difficult for the environmental movement as a movement to take on. And it's one of the difficulties with a lot of things we face.

Dobbs: Sensitive and scary. Why should any American in any quarter ever be scared?

Engelman: People like to have safe conversations at least when they're not on television.

Dobbs: On this broadcast, we would like to have honest conversations. We want to tell everybody in this country who watches the broadcast, it's OK talk straight. We don't have to be politically correct. We don't have to be bound up with some silly orthodoxy on the left or right, some partisan nonsense. And it is all nonsense, coming from the right or left in this country. Feel free.

Engelman: Fine, I do. But for those who are trying to raise funding, for those who are trying to gain members, when you're looking at a phenomena that's basically about births and immigration, it has a lot to do with sex. It has a lot to do with contraception, touches on abortion.

Dobbs: You mean life itself?

Engelman: Yes, it can sometimes be sensitive and that's one of the difficulties of population. It's not like technology in just saying if we put up enough windmills, we'll be OK.

Dobbs: Let me put this in an expression of one of my daughters. Is the environmental sector about ready to man up on this issue?

Engelman: I don't know if I would put it that way. But I think we're going be forced more and more to examine where we're going demographically, because it is so important. At some point, we're going to have to decide whether we're going to cap our greenhouse gas emissions. Then it will get very interesting as our population keeps growing.

Dobbs: To me, it's already interesting, Robert, to be honest, and troubling. Let me turn to you, Norm. The idea as Jane just pointed out that we're not having a conversation. We don't hear from John McCain or Barack Obama, despite all of their nonsense on the campaign trail, we're not hearing from either of them about what the country will look like, how should our country function. What should we be thinking about in terms of the resources we will demand for the population one or two generations out? We're talking about finances on some levels at the margin. But we're not talking in any real terms about population growth, environmental impact, scarce resources, all of the tough issues.

Norm Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute: You know, it's almost inevitable in a political campaign that you look at short-term driving things. Right now, it's $4 a gallon gasoline. You mentioned the word that I think is an absolutely critical one, Lou, which is water. There will be an international water shortage. Safe potable drinking water, for other purposes that will make the oil crisis look pale by comparison.

And we really need to have a discussion of this. It's not going to happen in a political campaign, I'm afraid. We're going have to have a discussion about transportation. As more and more people move to exports, how are we going to afford to or find the vehicles or ways to get them around? And it's certainly great to have this conversation now.

You know, I might add one other thing, though. Keep in mind that as we look at our projections, in Europe the projections are exactly the opposite. They're going dramatically falling birth rates. They're actually going to have fewer people. They're going to have a whole lot more older people with very few young people to pay for the services that they've grown used to having. There's going to be crises in a lot of different ways and a lot of places, Lou.

Dobbs: We're going to don't talk about just exactly that when we continue with our panel here. Stay with us, we'll be right back. We're going talk about how in the world is the planet going to support over 9 billion people in the next four decades. Stay with us.

(Commercial break)

Dobbs: Jane, let me turn to you first quickly. The projections here for population growth. Do you believe that we're going to be growing faster than the rest of the world? Is it possible that it would even be growing even faster than these projections?

Delung: I do not think we're going to be growing faster than the rest of the world. But as Bob said, there's a real possibility that we will actually grow faster than these projections. I believe we will. The last population projections were in the mid-1990s. These projections have us with 45 million more people than they did in the mid-1990s.

Dobbs: So we continue to underestimate.

Delung: The growth has accelerated. We are underestimating the population that we're going have.

Dobbs: That's even more troubling. Robert, the environmental impact here, the political correctness issue, the sensitivity if you will as you described it here, there's a point of which, when we look at the issues of clean water, the energy demand that is resulting, natural resource demand. Why in the world would the environmental groups not now coalesce around this issue and start dealing with political issues that are going to have to be made in this society?

Engelman: Well I think one of the things that we need to communicate better is there are reasonable choices to make. One of the big factors in this that doesn't get talked about is the high level of unintended pregnancy in this country. If we had universal health care, and I might say if we had health care that was accessible to people who are not documented here as well as people who are undocumented here so that everyone, whether you're legally here or not, could at least get access to good family planning service, we could eliminate a large proportion of the pregnancies and thus the births that are occurring in this country. That's something we don't tend to talk about, environmentalists.

Dobbs: So it's politically incorrect to discuss illegal immigration, but it's politically correct to talk about substituting the national birthrate for immigration.

Engelman: I'm not sure which is politically correct.

Dobbs: We'll have that debate later. I want to turn to Norm very quickly. Norm, the choices that are here. We're talking about political choices. How do we get the political choices involved with exploding population growth on the national agenda?

Ornstein: You know, we're going to have to among other things hope that we can have more than three structured presidential debates. Have a different way to focus on all of the policy implications that flow from larger population. Some are positive. We're going have young people who at least can pay into a social security system and perhaps provide some of the resources to pay for health care for the elderly population and a whole lot of others that aren't.
(Unbelievable. The old Population Pyramid Scam. And who will pay for their health care when they reach old age, another billion immigrants? Young people cost more to care for than the elderly.-Tim)

Dobbs: You make them sound like social security slaves that we can bring in for the great entitlement plantation.

Ornstein: For our age, that's something we've got to think about, Lou.

Dobbs: Well, I didn't dismiss it out of head. Norm, thank you very much. Robert, thank you. Jane, thank you. So much, all three of you for being here to help us examine this. Come back soon, please.

Tonight's poll results: 98 percent of you say the Rhode Island bishop would be better served by calling upon the Mexican government to exercise morality in providing for its own citizens rather than encouraging them to break the law and enter the United States.

We thank you for being with us tonight. Please join us tomorrow. For all of us here, thank you for watching. Good night from New York. "THE ELECTION CENTER" with John King begins now -- John?

OPT for a sustainable planet
www.optimumpopulation.org

On Thursday, August 21, a spokesperson for the Optimum Population Trust, (OPT), stated that continuing large-scale population growth threatens Britain’s future security.

(The stream of immigrants fleeing the crowded British Isles is also exacerbating overpopulation in other countries, such as Australia.)

Record immigration, emigration and rising birth rate
Commenting on the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, which showed UK population growth running at 0.6 per cent (388,000) in 2007, along with record immigration and emigration and rising numbers of births, David Nicholson-Lord, OPT policy director, said: “In an era of growing food and energy shortages, population growth of this magnitude is simply storing up trouble for the future. The UK is already one of the world’s most overpopulated countries, relying on imports for more than two-thirds of its total needs. The more overpopulated we are, the greater our environmental and food insecurity and the more vulnerable we shall be to price rises and disruptions in supply.

UK far from self-sufficient in global competition for diminishing resources
“OPT calculations suggest that even if we comprehensively greened our lifestyles, the UK could only support 27 million people – less than half its present population – from its own resources. It’s tempting to think we can always buy our way out of trouble but apart from being grossly unfair to poorer people in developing countries, this would be an exceptionally high-risk strategy in a world of growing hunger and increasing resource nationalism.”

What is OPT?

The OPT, a think-tank and campaign group, was founded in 1991 by the late David Willey. Its main aims are to promote and co-ordinate research into criteria that will allow the sustainable or optimum population of a region to be determined. Its patrons include Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey professor of economics at Cambridge University; Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies, Stanford University; Jane Goodall, founder, the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace; John Guillebaud, emeritus professor of family planning and reproductive health, University College, London; Susan Hampshire, actor; Aubrey Manning, broadcaster and professor of natural history, University of Edinburgh; Professor Norman Myers, visiting fellow, Green College, Oxford; Sara Parkin, founder director and trustee, Forum for the Future; Sir Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission; and Sir Crispin Tickell, director of the Policy Foresight Programme, James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation, Oxford University.

For more information, See www.optimumpopulation.org, or contact 07 976 370221

Source: OPT
Optimum Population Trust, News Release, August 21 2008
Tel: 07976-370221 www.optimumpopulation.org info[at]optimumpopulation.org
Registered charity No: 1114109 Company limited by guarantee No: 3019081

With oil prices soaring and the effects of CO2 emissions apparent to all but the most myopic or dishonest observers, you'd think that the promise of a clean sustainable energy alternative would generate some interest. Some excitement, even. And - in some quarters - it does. In science and tech circles there's increasing interest in the work of the UNSW's Centre for Materials Research in Energy Conversion. More specifically; in the work that the Centre's doing on using titanium dioxide to harness solar power for the production of solar hydrogen. Last year UNSW hosted a public lecture by Professor Helmut Tributsch about the urgent need to invest in new technologies that can convert the sun’s power into usable energies, such as hydrogen fuel. “Hydrogen is all around us and is the cleanest and most efficient fuel for powering everything from vehicles to furnaces and air-conditioning, if only we can find an affordable way to harness it,” said Professor Tributsch, who is a Director of the Solar-Energy Department at the Hahn-Meitner-Institut and a Professor at the Free University, Berlin. According to UNSW’s Dr Leigh Sheppard, once the process becomes efficient enough it could be exploited to provide essentially limitless amounts of clean energy, using three resources that Australia has in abundance - sunlight, titanium and seawater. “The process has no harmful by-products: indeed, it has the additional advantage that it works best in sea-water and the by-product would be fresh water - a resource in scarce supply in Australia. Put simply, solar hydrogen is the cleanest, greenest energy option for a sustainable economy. The potential market for hydrogen energy is huge, equal to the combined markets for coal, natural gas and oil.” Their enthusiasm for renewable energy and solar hydrogen in particular is undeniable, but is it shared by Australian governments and industry? Not so much, it seems. While universities such as UNSW have long had programs in renewable energy, many Australian renewable energy graduates have left to go overseas where there is greater funding and a more favourable regulatory environment for renewable energy. Famously, Dr Shi Zhengrong graduated from the UNSW's school of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering in 1991 and then left to develop a solar company in China, Suntech Power. Danish company Vestas walked away from its Portland blade factory last August, saying its investment was not viable as market conditions in the country did not support the wind energy industry. Australia's potential as a leader in the field of sustainable energy is promising and the longer term benefits are significant. So why aren't our industries and Government throwing money at renewable energy? Perhaps because the pay-off is seen as too long term to be of political benefit to anyone. Maybe because the investment climate in Australia favours short term investments, like currency speculation. Or more ‘reliable’ investments, like property. Perhaps it’s just because in an economy that’s bound to grow on the back of population growth, technical investment’s just too hard. The time for short term thinking is over. What’s needed now is direct public funding, supplemented by increased investment incentives for sustainable energy research. . Some background information on solar hydrogen, reproduced from a 2004 UNSW media release: . 1.6 million individual households equipped with 10m x 10m solar hydrogen panels would meet all of Australia's energy needs. . Hydrogen generated from water using solar energy constitutes a clean source of energy as neither its production nor its combustion process produces greenhouse or pollutant gases. Hydrogen produced by existing conventional methods emits carbon dioxide at the production stage. . When this technology matures it would allow Australia to be a leader in solar technology, becoming part of an OPEC of the future. Australia is ideally placed to commercialise this technology as it has abundant sunlight. . This technology ultimately will reduce Australia's total reliance on coal, gasoline and natural gas, providing energy security. . Titanium dioxide is plentiful and cheap. Titania ceramics also have many other applications, including water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads. . As sources of fossil fuels disappear, the race is on to be the world's leading provider of hydrogen. The US Government committed an extra US$1.2 billion to hydrogen research several years ago. Japan has launched a 20-year research program that is sending satellites into space in the hope that it can harvest solar energy and send it back to the earth by laser onto cells of titania (TiO2). The European Commission has instituted an intense R&D program in pursuit of solar hydrogen. . Iceland aims to be the world's first hydrogen economy.

Ageist ABC baby-boomer bashing - incites blame against older people for housing crisis.

See also: Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 Jun 08

The article "Baby Boomers Hog Housing Market" on ABC News and quoted on ABC local radio 15.8.08 runs the serious risk of engendering intergenerational resentment. In the report, "Baby Boomers" (people born between 1945 and 1960) are bagged for using the equity in their first homes to buy subsequent investment properties, thus driving up the cost of housing and depriving later generations of being able to afford a roof over their heads.

The article is sparked by information reported by the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.

It seems the blame for declining housing affordability is being laid on a whole generation (easily identifiable by their appearance as most of them are in their 50s) whereas one would be more justified in laying the blame on those who have successfully lobbied governments for very high population growth - mainly through immigration.

It is well accepted that high immigration and housing construction lagging behind the added demand that comes from immigration, is the main reason for declining housing affordability. Real estate pundits and governments admit this readily. Who would plunge themselves into debt to purchase an investment residential property and deal with the hassle of maintenance and tenants, if one did not think it would be financially worth while? The prices were already rising because there are more people needing them ! Far easier to buy some easily liquidated shares and not have the hassle!

"Working families" in their fifties who have 2 or 3 mortgaged investment properties are, as I would see it, defensively taking the crumbs they can afford in order to fund their retirement and to bequeath something to their children.

It is quite possible that many of those who lobby for population growth are in the "baby boomer" category. To blame, however, all the ordinary people in that age bracket who need to invest wisely for their retirement, not to mention those many baby-boomers without homes or superannuation, is to blame the victims. They are certainly not the main beneficiaries of rising property prices.

Coincidentally there are reported serious concerns that many people of this BB generation will have insufficient means to fund their winter years.

An article also on ABC News 4.8.08 by business editor Peter Ryan and headed "Survey reveals baby-boomers' retirement cash fears," makes one wish that more of them were able to provide adequately for themselves. Seems they are damned if they do and damned if they don't!

The August 15th article is mischievous and its conclusion is spurious. It concludes that one generation is to blame for the fact that declining housing affordability affects those who don't yet own a house and who are generally in a younger age group.

This is simplistic and sensationalist.

If the blame was laid at the feet of a particular religion or ethnic group, rather than an identifyable age group, there would be outrage and complaints to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission.

See also: Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 Jun 08