The late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), a fierce environmentalist and the founder of Earth Day, championed reducing overall immigration to the United States to protect America’s wildlife sanctuaries, farmland, and quality of life.
While a Senator, Nelson founded Earth Day on April 22, 1970, to advocate for the conservation of the environment in the United States. Today, Earth Day is celebrated across the globe.
Nelson, a left-wing Democrat who also served as governor of Wisconsin before being elected to the Senate, was a champion for eliminating illegal immigration to the United States as well as reducing legal immigration levels.
Current national immigration policy — where a million legal immigrants are added to the United States population annually, as well as hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of illegal aliens — is driving about 80 percent of all population growth, according to the Census Bureau.
The latest Census Bureau estimates predict that without immigration reductions, the United States population will hit nearly 400 million by the year 2060 — an unprecedented level never seen before in American history.
“With twice the population, will there be any wilderness left? Any quiet place? Any habitat for songbirds? Waterfalls? Other wild creatures? Not much,” Nelson said at least two decades ago.
In his 2002 autobiography, Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise, Nelson warned that mass immigration to the United States would cripple quality of life for Americans and force the destruction of wildlife sanctuaries.
Nelson wrote:
In 2000 the US population topped 280 million. Not surprisingly, adding population hasn’t improved American society, the economy, or the environment. Yet we are headed at current growth rates, toward having well over 500 million people on the same land resource within the next seventy-five years and 1 billion people within the next century. Does anyone imagine we can grow like that without tremendous cost to the environment and our quality of life? [Emphasis added]
…
In order to bring a halt to exponential growth, the number of legal immigrants entering this country would have to match the number of emigrants leaving it – about 220,000 people per year. Yet, while federal actions have increased the immigration rate dramatically during the last four decades, any suggestion that the rate be decreased to some previously acceptable level is met with charges of “nativism,” “racism,” and the like. Unfortunately, such opposition has silenced much-needed discussion of the issue – recalling the smear tactics of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. The first time around it was “soft on communism.” This time the charge is “racism,” because a significant number of immigrants are of Hispanic descent. Demagogic rhetoric of this sort has succeeded in silencing the environmental and academic communities and has tainted any discussion of population and immigration issues as “politically incorrect.” As frustrating as it is to see the president and members of Congress running for cover on such a monumental issue, it is nothing short of astonishing to see the great American free press, with its raft of syndicated columnists, frightened into silence by political correctness. [Emphasis added]
The issue is not racism, nativism, or any other “ism,” however. The real issue: numbers of people and the implications for freedom of choice and sustainability as our numbers continue to grow. Population stabilization will be a major determinant of our future, how we live and in what conditions; talk of it should not be muzzled by McCarthyism or any other demagogic contrivance. Rather, the issue must be brought forth and explored in public hearings and discussions precisely because it is a subject of great consequence.
[Emphasis added]
In a 2001 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Nelson seemingly blasted left-wing politicians for claiming to care about the environment while ignoring the impact that mass immigration has on issues of sustainability.
“… in this country, it’s phony to say ‘I’m for the environment but not for limiting immigration.’ It’s just a fact that we can’t take all the people who want to come here,” Nelson said. “… the subject has been driven out of public discussion because everybody is afraid of being called racist if they say they want any limits on immigration.”
Indeed, discussion of sky-high immigration levels has been largely removed from the national environmental debate. Instead, environmentalists have embraced mass immigration.
The Sierra Club, for instance, once advocated for immigration reductions to stabilize population growth in the United States. As left-wing, high-dollar donors to the environmental group became increasingly favorable to mass immigration, so did the Sierra Club, which switched its position in the late 1990s.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Claims No Amnesty Ensures Midterm Defeat for Democrats
NEIL MUNROThe Facebook-funded FWD.us investor advocacy group is touting the claim that Democrat turnout will drop in 2022 if the party cannot pass an amnesty through Congress.
But that claim is toothless, in large part because recent polls show that many Americans of Latino ancestry are increasingly voting for the GOP, precisely because GOP leaders oppose the amnesty-amplified wave of cheap labor into their communities.
The claim is being made by pro-migration groups, including the leaders of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) which denounced the Senate’s parliamentarian’s decision to exclude the parole amnesty for 6.5 million illegals from the draft Build Back Better spending plan.
NDLON declared Thursday night:
Democrats’ excuses for their failure, for their incompetence, and for their insincerity will be the ammunition used by xenophobes in the Republican Party to retake control of the federal government in upcoming elections. Inaction on immigration legalization risks further propelling Trumpism in every possible way … No more excuses. Where there is a will, there is a way.
The NDLON group represents illegal migrants, most of whom work for very low wages, and none of whom can vote in U.S. elections.
Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) is making the same claim, according to Bloomberg, which reported that he “warned that Democrats would face wrath from voters in the 2022 elections if they don’t secure a citizenship path”
But the NDLON claim is being echoed by the politically powerful investor class, who use imported workers, consumers, and renters to spike the value of their Wall Street investments.
Todd Schulte is the president of the FWD.us advocacy group for investors, which gets about $30 million a year from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to push for more migration. On Thursday night, he tweeted:
Schulte’s deputy also pushed a hard line:
Unsurprisingly, FWD.us has a hidden agenda in the amnesty debate.
The establishment media extensively cover the proposed parole amnesty for 6.5 million illegal migrants. But the media largely ignores two other proposed changes to immigration laws that would deliver huge benefits to West Coast investors who created the FWD.us advocacy group in 2013.
For example, the BBB legislation would allow the White House to provide green cards to millions of favored migrants, including perhaps three million “chain migrants” selected by recent immigrants. This open-doors policy would provide investors with millions of new profit-generating consumers, renters, and workers.
The BBB legislation would also allow President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies to sell green cards to at least one million migrants who have taken many of the Fortune 500 jobs sought by skilled U.S. college graduates. This change would allow Fortune 500 companies to hire many more foreign graduates with dangled offers of fast-track green cards. These workers are usually imported via the visa worker programs, such as the H-1B and Optional Practical Training program.
But those two benefits for the Fortune 500 investors may be dropped if the Democrat senators cannot also get their amnesty for illegal migrants.
On Friday, an advocacy group for corporate-funded immigration lawyers urged Congress to keep pushing the green card giveaway, even after the amnesty was nixed:
“The corporate guys are riding on perceived sympathy for the illegal alien population in order to get their immigration giveaways,” said Robert Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
The Hispanic population knows immigration is a pocketbook issue for them as well, and mass illegal immigration — plus legal immigration — hurts the economic opportunities of Hispanic Americans or the black community, or any people who typically are competing at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
The Senate’s debate referee has not issued any judgments on the two green card proposals.
Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters. The network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.
FWD.us’also spotlights many family dramas amid the inflow of border migrants. This focus helps keep reporters from recognizing the huge pocketbook impact of the establishment’s economic policy of mass migration. The resulting family-drama coverage also keeps many young progressives from noticing that the extraction migration policy drives up their rents and cuts their salaries.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in the last few months. But copies exist at other sites.
Climate change gets all the attention but Americans are far more worried about inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and the federal deficit.
Results of a Gallup survey released on Monday showed that while Americans are very much aware of the claims of climate alarmists, the share of Americans who say they are very concerned about the issue is relatively small.
“Among the leading issues confronting the nation, the environment ranks as a lesser public concern, with 37 percent saying they worry a great deal about environmental quality,” Gallup reports.
The most pressing concern among the U.S. public is inflation, with 55 percent saying they worry a great deal about it. Crime and violence is a close second at 53 percent, with hunger and homelessness at 52 percent. The economy, healthcare, and federal spending and the budget deficit all score above 50 percent.
Forty-eight percent of Americans say they worry a great deal about illegal immigration.
The environment ranks down near unemployment (33 percent very concerned) and race relations (35 percent). The unemployment rate has been below four percent for the longest period since the Vietnam War, dampening public concern about the issue.
An equal share of the public—37 percent—say they are very concerned about energy prices. Most of the Biden administration’s policies aimed at ameliorating climate change are likely to push up energy prices.
The survey suggests that Biden faces a tough challenge in persuading Americans to reward him with a second presidential term. His signature issues—race relations and the environment—rank low among the priorities of Americans. The issues where he is seen as weak or Democrats are seen as being on the wrong side—inflation, crime, homelessness, the budget deficit—are the top issues.
Healthcare still leans Democrat as an issue but Biden has only a slight lead here. A recent poll by KFF, an independent source for health policy polling, found that while 50 percent of voters say that Biden is better on controlling health care costs, 48 percent say Trump is.
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