Immigration Deluge Will Drain Water Resources
Published on June 1st, 2013
Bonnie Erbe/Commentary
Santa Barbara NewsPress
June 1, 2013
As the Obama administration attempts to press its version of immigration reform through Congress, here are three relevant issues unlikely to be considered in the debate.
First, you probably won’t hear a thing about droughts, either present or future. Yet according to the Science World Report website, 2013 has the potential to outdo the record drought of 2012:
”Farmland across the country experienced a devastating combination of high temperatures and low precipitation, leading to the worst harvest yields in nearly two decades. At its peak, nearly two-thirds of the country experienced drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Worse still, instead of an anomalous year of bad weather, 2012 may have provided an alarming preview of how climate change will impact the future of agriculture."
Second, you’ll hear no mention of the fact that the Colorado River — which serves the needs of 40 million people living in the Southwest and irrigates 4 million acres of farmland growing 15 percent of the nation’s food — is drying up.
According to the Los Angeles Times this week: "As a regional drought tightens its grip on the Colorado River, water agency officials, environmentalists, farmers and Indian tribal leaders from the seven states that depend on the river for survival" are gathering for a "meeting called by federal officials. Last year was dry; this year is even worse, officials said. In December, the federal government released the results of a three-year study warning that drought, climate change and population growth are fast outstripping the water supply from the Colorado River."
Third, don’t expect to hear about how our rapidly growing population is depleting groundwater resources. As Robert Glennon, author of "Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It," said in a recent commentary for "Marketplace" radio program:
"It used to be that only Western farmers pumped groundwater to irrigate crops. Now, it’s happening across the country. The cumulative effect of this change has profound implications for the country’s water supplies because irrigation uses more water than anything else. Defenders of unrestricted groundwater pumping insist that landowners have a property right to the groundwater beneath their land. But adjoining landowners share the same ‘right.’ Unlimited pumping is like a circular firing squad. It guarantees mutually assured destruction. Or in this case, mutually assured depletion of a precious resource."
What does immigration reform have to do with water shortages? Plenty.
The vast majority of U.S. population growth since the 1970s has been fueled by massive legal and illegal immigration and the children of new immigrants. The fertility rate of U.S.-born American women has been at replacement level since that time.
There’s irrefutable evidence that the U.S. is on the verge of a major water shortage.
There are things we can do to conserve water — above and beyond limiting showers and lawn watering. The most effective reform would be to limit crop irrigation, which consumes the lion’s share of water resources. But then we face the possibility of food shortages. Do we really want to go there?
Wouldn’t it be easier to have a national conversation about the environmental impact of mass immigration and to make a rational decision about the number of immigrants we might comfortably accommodate?
We are destroying the American dream by opening it up to too many people. Mother Nature is warning us of the dangers and we are not listening.
(Bonnie Erbe, host of PBS’ "To the Contrary," writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. Email [email protected] Distributed by SHNS; see www.shns.com.)
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