07
Apr

The real drought in California: A dearth of discussion on immigration

Published on April 7th, 2015

Paul Mulshine
April 7, 2015
As seen in:
The Star-Ledger

The news is full of reports about the drought in California. The Sunday New York Times, for example, had an extensive article headlined “California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth.”

The writers made a lot of good points about how Californians demand to live in a lush tropical environment when they really live in a desert. They addressed every aspect of the issue – except for the key driving factor behind that growth.

Ben Zuckerman knows why. Zuckerman, 71, is a professor of astronomy at UCLA who used to serve on the board of directors of the Sierra Club. In 2005 he spearheaded a move to have the club take a position against the practice driving net population growth in California. That’s immigration.

The movement failed and Zuckerman got called a lot of nasty names by his fellow environmentalists. He’s got a name for them as well.

“I like to say they’re not environmentalists,” he told me when I called him the other day. “They’re environmental-ish.”

The problem, he said, is that environmental organizations’ big donors tend to be people who love liberalism more than they love the environment.

“I have given up trying to figure these people out,” he said. “It’s part of the liberal personality that they have to have open arms for all people who want to come here.”

Those immigrants may be nice people, but they’re competing for water resources that were stressed even when Zuckerman first got to California in 1971. The stress will only get stronger as California’s population grows, he said.

“I tell my students that when they are about my age they’ll be living in a state more densely populated than China,” said Zuckerman, who’s no longer on the Sierra board but is vice president of Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS).

That group features on its website a quote about Western water resources often attributed to Mark Twain: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.”

The current fight is over such issues as whether the scarce water resources should go to farms or to cities. But that’s a “lose-lose issue” for environmentalists, said Zuckerman.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to wipe out California agriculture,” he said.
“California agriculture is very important for feeding not just California but the United States as a whole.”

He likes to point out that Los Angeles was the No. 1 agriculture county in the United States as late as the 1940s. Adjacent Orange County had half a million of the trees for which it’s named. Now it’s got just a orange few groves left.

Though Zuckerman qualifies as a liberal tree-hugger in every respect, the need to curb mass immigration is one on which he has a lot in common with conservatives, at least the rank-and-file ones.

Such groups as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum also oppose mass immigration, both legal and illegal. But when it comes to the Republican Party elite, they sound suspiciously like the liberal Democrats on immigration.

Jon Feere, an analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said some of the biggest boosters of mass immigration are business interests looking for low-wage workers as well as economic growth.

“I like to say they’re not environmentalists. They’re environmental-ish” – Ben Zuckerman on open-borders enviros

“Big business spends millions of dollars on political campaigns encourage more immigration, to encourage amnesty and to encourage keeping the border open,” he said.

And water scarcity is just one of many drawbacks. Perhaps worse is the traffic. Zuckerman recalls that when he first came to Los Angeles in the 1970s, the traffic wasn’t that big of a deal.

Traffic jam
If you think Jersey traffic jams are bad, imagine what it’s like in Los Angeles.File photo 
“There were a million less people in L.A. back then and a lot less traffic,” he said. “People weren’t afraid to drive from one side of L.A. to the other. Now my wife and only drive to Pasadena on weekends when the traffic is not so bad.”

Other enviros like to talk about building mass transit to handle all that volume. But that’s a dodge as well, said Zuckerman.

“Now at the cost of a gazillion dollars there may be a subway?” he said.

Here in the East we already have the infrastructure for mass transit. But building it up from scratch is too expensive.

“Our traffic congestion is horrendous,” he said.

That and every other aspect of life is only going to get worse unless the federal government finally restricts mass immigration. But you won’t hear that from either the liberal environmentalists or the business interests.

In boxing terms, that’s a left-right combination that leads to a knockout.

And California’s on the canvas.

ADD: Here’s a good piece from the CIS on the immigration situation in California. Interestingly, most of the immigrants there are not illegals. For some strange reason, the Beltway crowd thinks it’s a good idea to import millions of new workers at a time of high unemployment.

Can you guess why? Cheap labor for business. Cheap votes for the Democrats. That’s my guess.

Some excerpts:

Between 1970 and 2008 the share of California’s population comprised of immigrants (legal and illegal) tripled, growing from 9 percent to 27 percent. This Memorandum examines some of the ways California has changed over the last four decades. Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.

The overwhelming majority of immigrants in California are in the country legally. In a 2007 study we estimated that 28 percent of California’s total foreign-born population in the CPS was comprised of illegal immigrants. Estimates by the Department of Homeland Security for January 2009 also indicate that about one-fourth of the state’s total immigrant population in the ACS was in the country illegally.

AND CHECK THIS interactive chart sent by a reader showing state-to-state migration. You’ll see than California is losing more than 70,000 people a year to other states. Meanwhile the population growth there comes from other countries.

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