Fall 2010 Newsletter
Published on October 19th, 2010
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TIES THAT BIND: POPULATION,WATER, ENERGY AND FOOD
What happens when a seemingly unstoppable force hurtles headlong into a truly immovable object? As their already enormous populations continue to grow recklessly, heedless of any and all looming limits, 39 million Californians and 310 million Americans are about to learn the answer to this ancient riddle.
CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE: CAPS NEW CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
'BIRTH TOURISM' CONTINUES IN U.S.
The good news is that American citizenship continues to be valued worldwide. The bad news is that millions of foreign women have traveled to the U.S. over the last 30 years with the express purpose of gaming the system to give birth to an “American” baby.
EXPANDED FINGERPRINT PROGRAM WILL HELP ID ILLEGAL ALIENS
Since 2007, more than 20 states have implemented “Secure Communities,” a federal program that uses arrest fingerprints to identify illegal aliens. U.S. Immigration customs & Enforcement (ICE) plans to expand the program to every U.S. jail by 2013,
according to an AP report.
CAN STATES WITH EVER-GROWING DEFICITS CONTINUE EDUCATING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS?
Although kids are back in school this fall, many of their teachers are sidelined because of deep state budget deficits. Layoffs are causing the most severe Classroom overcrowding in decades, which means kids will be getting an education that’s drastically reduced in quality.
GROWING L.A. POPULATION MEANS MORE TRASH THAN CITY CAN PROCESS
Los Angeles will produce so much trash due to projected population increases in the next 10 years that the county won’t be able to handle it. This comes from the Los Angeles County Civil Grand Jury (CGJ) report released in June.
DEPORTATION IS POSSIBLE
Open Borders activists often claim that some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens is one of the answers to our ongoing immigration controversies. They claim that it is not practical to deport all of the illegal aliens in the U.S. History shows otherwise. There were several successful mass deportations and exclusions in the U.S. in the last century.
What happens when a seemingly unstoppable force hurtles headlong into a truly immovable object? As their already enormous populations continue to grow recklessly, heedless of any and all looming limits, 39 million Californians and 310 million Americans are about to learn the answer to this ancient riddle.
In what will be a genuine “Teachable Moment,” we will learn the hard way, painfully, that something has to give in such a collision. And it won’t be the implacable natural limits into which we’ve slammed.
A case in point concerns the ties that bind between population, water, energy and food. Simply put—and one needn’t be a math whiz to grasp this concept—a growing population consumes more fresh water and more energy— at a time when supplies of both are being exhausted. Supplies are dwindling due precisely to this very same rising human consumption. Scarcity happens less from a shortage of supply than a “longage” of demand, as the late ecologist Garrett Hardin described it.
There are ever more of us demanding ever more gallons of water and oil even as Earth has ever less to give because we’ve already taken so much.
Yet the relationship between overpopulation, water, energy and food is even tighter and more tangled than at first blush, because it takes water to get energy, and it takes energy to get water. And it takes both energy and water to produce food. Increasingly, these entanglements are becoming a source of intensifying competition and conflict between energy and water users and food producers/consumers— that is to say, between all of us. We all use energy; we all depend on clean, fresh water; and we all eat food.
Conservationist Raymond Dasmann wrote in the 1965 book, The Destruction of California, that “the waves of the future break first on the rocky California coast.” It’s become a cliché that every trend hits California first.
Yet when it comes to environmental matters, it’s often true. Limits to growth are being felt most acutely in California not only because it is by far the nation’s most populous state, but because its multiplying millions have squeezed into a place of unsurpassed natural beauty and diversity.
This singular state boasts the tallest tree in the world (coast redwood), the biggest tree in the world (giant sequoia), the oldest tree in the world (bristlecone pine), the tallest mountain in the contiguous 48 states (Mt. Whitney) and the lowest point in North America (Badwater in Death Valley). Unfortunately, California must also bear the stigma as the state with the most imperiled wildlife.
It was inevitable that rampant growth and development would trample what some have called paradise. “You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye,” sang Don Henley in “The Last Resort” from the 1976 Eagles album, Hotel California.
While the Central Valley may not be the same Paradise Lost the Eagles lamented, it is the richest and one of the most vital agricultural areas in America. In the throes of yet another punishing drought, farmers in Kern County (in the southern portion of the Central Valley known as the San Joaquin Valley) are having to make do with less than half the water they normally receive from the federal and state water projects to irrigate their crops.
Agriculture is very water-intensive, and juicy fruits especially so. Producing a single orange requires 55 gallons of precious fresh water; each peach, 142 gallons. As a result of the drought, Circle of Blue (an international network of journalists and scientists covering water issues) reports that tens of thousands of acres of farmland have been idled in Kern County alone.
Kern County’s $15 billion oil and gas industry is also very water-intensive. The heavy oil it extracts can be coaxed upward only by injecting enormous quantities of water and steam: 320 gallons for every barrel pumped to the surface.
And that’s just the start. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the life cycle requirement of extracting, transporting and refining each barrel of oil is 1,850 gallons of water.
Much of the water used by the oil industry in Kern County comes from the very same source that supplies farmers—California’s sprawling network of aqueducts and canals that transports and delivers water captured from Sierra Nevada streams and snowmelt.
According to Circle of Blue, even as pinched agricultural and environmental interests squabble over diminishing water allocations in the San Joaquin Valley, the oil industry receives as much water as it needs, enough to irrigate 8,000 to 9,000 acres of orchards, row crops and vineyards.
This competition for scarce water resources is spreading across the country. The energy, agricultural and municipal sectors all thirst for ever more water.
Why? Because our population is growing rapidly with no end in sight. From 310 million today, under current immigration and fertility trends, America is projected by the Census Bureau to reach 440 million by 2050 and still be growing even faster than today. This trend is utterly unsustainable.
Yet this growth is such a sacred cow that not even environmentalists dare challenge it. To do so means confronting the notoriously prickly politics of immigration and family planning—as well as powerful business boosters and politicians who crave ever more consumers and ever more voters.
Environmental groups like the Sierra Club see this as a no-win situation, so they avoid it like the plague. Instead, they dabble and dither with more politically palatable projects, while avoiding this monumentally inconvenient truth. Our business, political and environmental elites are guilty of dereliction of duty. Ordinary citizens will somehow have to muster the resolve to redirect America from the current collision course between population and resources. Otherwise, we will be left picking up the pieces from a long-predicted impact that could have been avoided with a little more collective wisdom and individual self-restraint.
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CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE: CAPS NEW CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
As the new volunteer chairman of the board for CAPS, I am honored to take up the good work of the organization that Diana Hull, Ph.D., as President, directed for the last ten years. Diana devoted a tremendous amount of energy to making CAPS the premier organization in the Western United States working to educate about the negative impacts of population growth.We heartily thank her for her dedication and contribution.
I strongly believe in the mission of CAPS, and working with the organization is a natural extension of my long-term commitment to addressing issues of overpopulation and the environment. My activism and conversion to a “populationist” (someone concerned about overpopulation and interested in stabilizing population) began in the 1970s when I served two years on the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.My interest only grew as I saw unfavorable changes in my beloved hometown of Los Angeles that were driven by too many people.
Working with girls and young women to reduce the number of unwanted children was particularly gratifying and led me to serve on the Population Crisis Committee for 23 years, as well as to work with Population Communications International and to create the Population Education Committee, among other activities.
Because of the efforts of all these and many other population organizations, such as the United Nations Population Fund, birthrates fell in many parts of the world. But the world population still is growing by an unsustainable 83 million people annually. World population now is 6.9 billion and is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Clearly, the outreach and educational work to draw awareness to the problem and to reduce birthrates is ongoing—and increasingly difficult.
It was politically correct to talk about the problems created by overpopulation on the first Earth Day. In fact, overpopulation was a big factor leading to the creation of Earth Day. Now, a frightening shift in political discourse and polite conversation makes it politically incorrect to talk about overpopulation—the elephant in the room. In this sensitive environment, fundraising for this issue often is against all odds—despite overpopulation being at the root of most environmental issues both in the United States and throughout the world.
Many of our American and Californian ills are because we have passed the optimum population size which experts concur was approximately 250 million people. Current U.S. population is 310 million and is increasing rapidly by way of both legal and illegal immigration, and 20 years of poor federal government choices. So if discussing overpopulation, generally, is increasingly challenging, adding immigration to the debate has been the equivalent of burning white phosphorus at the scene of public debate.
That said, the heated environment has created a lot of energy in our camp among activists. Arizona’s decision to take a stand on illegal immigration has empowered other states to follow suit, and people are demanding real solutions. The high level of drug cartel violence south of the U.S. border also is fueling the demand that our borders be secured.
So in the months ahead, CAPS has a full plate. We are getting out support on the issues mentioned above; we are encouraging our membership to work to defeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plans to add the DREAM Act to the Department of Defense bill (which would allow at least 2 million people to qualify for amnesty);we are continuing to educate about the impacts of an ever-looming amnesty for potentially as many as 38 million people and, lastly, we are advocating for a U.S. population policy.
There’s never been a better time to actively get involved! Thank you for your continuing support of CAPS.
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The good news is that American citizenship continues to be valued worldwide. The bad news is that millions of foreign women have traveled to the U.S. over the last 30 years with the express purpose of gaming the system to give birth to an “American” baby.
Currently, if a pregnant woman—not a U.S. citizen—delivers a baby on U.S. soil, that baby automatically has U.S. citizenship, a situation that is completely absurd on the face of it. This unbalanced reality that has been winding up for years now defies logic and contradicts the original intentions of the 14th Amendment.
Affluent women from China, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey and other countries come every year as “birth tourists,” according to numerous news reports. Businesses have appeared in cities including Los Angeles, New York and Seattle to support this industry that has been evolving in recent years. For a package deal costing between $20,000 and $50,000, expectant moms may receive airfare, city shopping and sightseeing, pre- and post-natal medical services, meals, maid and personal services, and English lessons. They return home with an American baby.
Foreign parents who choose this path may be looking down the line to give their children the advantage of attending American schools and other benefits. Some of the Chinese couples may be choosing to give birth in the U.S. to sidestep their country’s one-child policy.
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Since 2007, more than 20 states have implemented “Secure Communities,” a federal program that uses arrest fingerprints to identify illegal aliens. U.S. Immigration customs & Enforcement (ICE) plans to expand the program to every U.S. jail by 2013,
according to an AP report.
With the program, fingerprints of anyone booked into a jail are run against Department of Homeland Security immigration data and FBI criminal records to match for illegal aliens and determine any previous arrest data.
The AP reported that the program screened nearly 2.6 million people between late October 2008 and May 2010. From these screens, some 35,000 illegal aliens previously arrested or convicted for serious crimes, including murder and rape, were identified. Additionally, more than 205,000 illegal aliens with arrest records for less serious offenses were identified through the program.
Many members of law enforcement and citizens who support enforcement of U.S. immigration laws are pleased to see the program expansion. Not surprisingly, open borders advocates are opposed to Secure Communities. San Francisco, a so-called “Sanctuary City,” did not want the program, and the city council in Washington, D.C. put forth a bill that would disallow the sharing of arrest data with ICE.
In Colorado, officials reportedly became interested in Secure Communities after a Guatemalan illegal alien with a long criminal record was accused of causing a car crash in Denver which killed two women and a threeyear- old child. Authorities said the illegal alien had used 12 aliases and two different birth dates.
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By Joe Guzzardi, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
Although kids are back in school this fall, many of their teachers are sidelined because of deep state budget deficits. Layoffs are causing the most severe Classroom overcrowding in decades, which means kids will be getting an education that’s drastically reduced in quality.
Unmanageable school population—expected to be even higher ten years from now—is the indirect but inevitable result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that boxed American education into a corner: public schools must educate all newcomers.
California, for example, with its nearly $20 billion deficit, is at the breaking point.
According to the California Department of Education’s Demographic Unit, total K-12 enrollment increased by one million students from 1994 to 2009. Today’s 6.3 million students include 1.5 million English language learners.
In addition to the large growth in the student population, the ethnic makeup of California students has changed significantly in this time. In the ’94-’95 school year, white pupils made up 42 percent of the total; Hispanics, 37 percent; African Americans, 9 percent and Asians, 8 percent. In ’08-’09, California’s K-12 enrollment was 49 percent Hispanic, 28 percent white, 8 percent Asian and 7 percent African American.
The dramatic enrollment shift to predominantly foreign-born students prompts the question: How much money should a bankrupt California spend to educate students who may be illegal residents?
Conservative estimates put the current costs of educating these students at $4 billion. Roughly, if 1.5 million California students are non-English speakers, then one-third are likely legal immigrants, one-third are illegal immigrants and one-third are the American-born children of illegal immigrants. At an estimated $7,500 per year to educate one student, the state-funded cost for educating all illegal immigrants is about $4 billion.
Assuming that all of California’s 1.5 million non-English speaking students are the direct result of federal immigration policy, then the aggregate outlay soars to nearly $11 billion. Since Washington, D.C. refuses to enforce immigration law, states must underwrite the services to illegal aliens, making education the largest unfunded federal mandate.
Nationwide, English language learners are the fastest growing student group. Since 1996, the percentage of English learners has increased by 60 percent, with Virginia, Colorado and Arizona experiencing a 200 percent growth.
While California appears unwilling to harness illegal immigrant education costs, some states have taken preliminary steps to limit enrollment to legal residents.
Arizona recently introduced legislation that would require public schools to identify and count students in the state illegally. The bill, S. B. 1097, would require the Arizona Department of Education to determine the costs of educating illegal alien students and to research the “adverse impact.”
In New York, one in five school districts asks parents to either provide immigration documents that prove legal status or request Social Security or unexpired resident alien cards that only lawful applicants could provide.
It’s unclear whether the New York schools’ request for residency proof is administrative oversight, as some districts claim, or a reaction to the costs of educating nearly one million foreign-born K-12 students in the midst of a $9 billion deficit.
Clearly, though, in this era of deep government deficits, knowing the cost to taxpayers of educating illegal immigrants is essential for survival. Once states learn the true costs, then measured, fact-based conclusions on whether they can afford to educate illegal immigrants can be made.
It’s clear too that until enrollment stabilizes through stricter immigration enforcement, classroom conditions will worsen.
In the meantime, the philosophy that America can educate the many in the country illegally without sacrificing its own children in the process stands exposed as wishful thinking.
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GROWING L.A. POPULATION MEANS MORE TRASH THAN CITY CAN PROCESS
Los Angeles will produce so much trash due to projected population increases in the next 10 years that the county won’t be able to handle it. This comes from the Los Angeles County Civil Grand Jury (CGJ) report released in June.
Three “demonstration conversion technology facilities” to turn trash into energy, biofuels and other products are in the works, but will still be insufficient to meet anticipated needs, according to the CGJ.
The CGJ analysis recommended more focus on zero-waste, including educating the public about challenges, noting that this work is overdue.
While producing less waste and recycling more of the waste that is generated are of course strategies that should be employed, a smaller population would make considerable impact in reducing the mounting garbage problem.
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Open Borders activists often claim that some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens is one of the answers to our ongoing immigration controversies. They claim that it is not practical to deport all of the illegal aliens in the U.S. History shows otherwise. There were several successful mass deportations and exclusions in the U.S. in the last century.
During the 1920s, illegal immigration became a hot topic as hundreds of thousands of Mexicans flowed across the border.
Californians complained about the burden of the unrestricted flow of Mexicans on the state’s taxpayers, prisons, hospitals and American workers’ wages. Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt took action ordering the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove illegal aliens from U.S. territory. Nearly 1 million Mexican citizens left the United States between 1929 and 1939 either through deportation, threat of deportation or protracted unemployment.
Illegal immigration became an issue again in 1950 when the Los Angeles Times reported that 21,000 Mexican nationals had “flooded across the Mexican border into the United States during April” and noted “the endless wave of line jumpers…”A Los Angeles employer was quoted using the argument about jobs “Americans won’t do.” Government authorities stressed the need to enforce the law.
During President Eisenhower’s first term, it was estimated that illegal Mexican border crossings had grown to about one million. This illegal workforce hurt the wages of American workers. Eisenhower ordered General Joseph Swing, head of the INS, to take action.
Within a few years, tens of thousands of illegal aliens were located and repatriated. Hundreds of thousands more returned to their homelands voluntarily. The number of illegal aliens present in the U.S. dropped by 95 percent during the decade of the 1950s.
All of these exclusionary acts were completed without any congressional action and were administrative actions initiated by U.S. Presidents and carried out by the INS.
Deportations were clearly not impractical in the past, and could certainly be done humanely now, arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.
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