Senate immigration bill (S. 744) would set U.S. population soaring; Earth’s population soaring too

What’s wrong with this picture?  America’s and Earth’s populations are soaring even as America’s and Earth’s resources are shrinking. This is the very essence of unsustainability. And it will end badly for all earthlings – human and non-human alike.

Yet instead of “manning up” like mature adults, and facing the reality of the limits to growth that nature imposes, both America and the world are making reckless choices that guarantee even more population growth. We are stacking still more straws on the struggling camel’s back.

Imagine a patient told by his doctor that his obesity, smoking habit, high blood pressure and cholesterol will kill him unless he changes course. Instead he binges – overeating, gaining weight, and smoking as if there were no tomorrow – a self-fulfilling outcome made much more likely, if not inevitable, by his own self-destructive, hedonistic behavior.

Here in the United States, attention has been focused on the amnesty the Senate’s comprehensive immigration “reform” bill, S. 744, would grant to 11 or more million undeserving illegal immigrants. Yet the real demographic debacle, and one to which so-called environmentalists have given short shrift (or no shrift at all!), are the long-term impacts of increases in legal immigration that would be unleashed by the misbegotten monstrosity that is S. 744.

As a recent news release of the group Apply the Brakes puts it:

     …the Senate's bill doubles legal immigration levels, putting America on track to add hundreds of millions more people to our population in the coming decades.

According to the latest Census Bureau projections, the U.S. population, which is now 315 million, will rise to 400 million by 2050. If the Senate bill passes U.S. population will likely reach 445 million by 2050, adding some 130 million people in less than 40 years.

The news release goes on to state that such growth would aggravate “virtually every environmental and biodiversity challenge we face,” including air and water pollution, sprawl, habitat loss, extinction of endangered species, and global climate change.

Researcher Steven Camarota has released demographic projections showing that under S. 744, within just 20 years, the U.S. population would balloon by an additional 16 million – 381 vs. 365 million in 2033. Over time this disparity would widen ever further.

This grim prognosis for America’s environment, resources, sustainability and quality of life from self-induced population overload mirrors ominous changes in global trends. The U.N. Population Division recently revised upward its projections for the global population in 2050.

Writing in Yale University’s Environment 360, Robert Engleman, president of the Worldwatch Institute observes:

     Only 10 years ago, based on then-current childbearing trends, the UN Population Division was projecting that there would be no more than 8.9 billion people alive in 2050. That number just jumped by 700 million people — an increase nearly as large as the population of Europe.

Engleman explains that demographers now realize they have been underestimating fertility in many Asian and African countries. Elsewhere, fertility has not declined as quickly as hoped; in some places, it has actually risen. The understated Engleman notes:

     In a world of changing climate, shrinking farm plots, dwindling fresh water supplies and growing social stress, these larger assessments of family size in fast-growing, low-income countries can hardly be good news.

There has been a collective failure to furnish women around the world with safe and effective birth control. Humanity has also failed to overcome obsolete, but deeply entrenched, religious and cultural objections to women’s rights and opportunities.

Approaching the abyss, we accelerate when we should be braking – conduct unbecoming a creature that likes to fancy itself the world’s smartest.