NumbersUSA Calculations Don’t Add Up

From Walter Ewing of Immigration Impact:

The anti-immigration group NumbersUSA blames immigrants for just about every environmental and economic ill to befall the United States, from air pollution and urban sprawl to unemployment and high taxes. But, as the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) explains in a new fact sheet entitled Fuzzy Math, NumbersUSA bases its immigrant-bashing on an overly simplistic and fundamentally flawed arithmetic of “over-population” in which “more people” is automatically (and incorrectly) equated with more pollution, more competition for scarce jobs, and higher taxes. In reality, “over-population” is not the main cause of the environmental or economic problems confronting the United States, so trying to impose arbitrary limits on immigration that are divorced from reality will not create a better environment or a stronger economy.

The NumbersUSA notion that more people necessarily produce more pollution is readily dispelled by comparing the United States with the 15 nations of the European Union (E.U.)-15, which have standards of living comparable to that of the United States. According to data from the World Resources Institute, the United States is home to 23% fewer people than the E.U.-15, yet produced 70% more greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, as of 2000. This illustrates a basic fact over-looked by NumbersUSA: a few people can pollute a lot, or a lot of people can pollute a little. How much pollution a society produces depends on the degree to which that society relies upon fossil fuels, utilizes pollution-reduction technologies, develops mass transit, recycles recyclable materials, controls agricultural run-off into waterways, etc.

Similarly, “urban sprawl” can not be blamed primarily on numbers of people—be they immigrants or native-born. Numerous public-policy decisions made over the course of decades drove the creation of enormous tracts of dispersed, suburban houses with two-car garages and no mass transit. Immigration has little to do with the fact that urban planners in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s used a development model which has proven to be environmentally and economically unsustainable in the modern world. Click here for the rest of the piece and more links.

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