Fall 2013 Newsletter
Published on September 24th, 2013
caps_news_fall_2013_updated.pdf
CAPS Ads Continue to Target Congressional Amnesty Supporters
CAPS ran TV ads for several weeks in various markets in Florida featuring Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of the key players behind the Gang of Eight immigration proliferation plan, urging him to stop pushing plans to increase the flow of foreign job seekers into the U.S. and award amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. We urged him to consider the plan’s implications for U.S. taxpayers, the national debt and jobless Americans.
Teens Faced Another Summer Without Jobs
By Maria Fotopoulos, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
Summer for many teens in another era meant time for “a summer job” and saving for college. But for the fourth consecutive summer, teen unemployment was stuck at record lows.
Water and Energy Demands Collide
By Leon Kolankiewicz, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
The California and U.S. populations are bursting at the seams and so is their insatiable appetite for energy and water. Because narrowminded and shortsighted vested interests block immigration reduction and population stabilization, some 4 to 6 million new energy and water consumers are added each decade in California and 27 to 33 million in the USA.
Jobs Creation Lags Population Increase
By Joe Guzzardi, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
With so many Americans suffering, Congress should be focused on putting them back to work, not making their lives tougher by expanding the labor pool through increased immigration.
Chairman’s Message
This is my first message as Chairman of the CAPS board of directors, so I want to introduce myself briefly to you. I trained as an environmental scientist at U.C. Berkeley, studying the effects of energy production and use on high altitude lakes in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains. Part of my training consisted of studying the results of population growth on the myriad environmental problems facing our country and the planet. It became very clear to me that unless population growth is curbed, these problems can never be solved.
A Tribute to Prof. Al Bartlett
By Fred Elbel, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
In 1944, Bartlett joined the Manhattan Project and worked for two years at Los Alamos, primarily on mass spectrometry of plutonium. There he encountered well-known physicists of the Heroic Generation, including Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr. He subsequently worked on high-speed photography for the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll.
New Studies Link Air Pollution to Autism, Diabetes
We all know air pollution is bad, and can have significant health impacts for people, resulting in asthma, bronchitis, other respiratory problems and heart attacks. But two new studies show the health implications may be greater than we already knew.
Town Halls: CAPS Activists Urge House Reps to Vote NO on Amnesty
Only a few of our elected representatives were accountable to voters by holding Town Halls in their home districts during the Congressional recess. CAPS activists attended many of these meetings and reported back on how the Town Halls unfolded.
New DHS Directive Exempts Yet Another Group From Deportations
By Joe Guzzardi, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
The White House and Congress have little credibility when it comes to enforcing immigration laws. Congress never enforced the laws written into the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act as they pertained to hiring more border and internal agents to check for entering or employed illegal immigrants. After 25 years of looking the other way, few Americans trust that the government will spend the $45 billion allocated
in S.744 for additional security.
CAPS ADS CONTINUE TO TARGET CONGRESSIONAL AMNESTY SUPPORTERS
CAPS ran TV ads for several weeks in various markets in Florida featuring Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of the key players behind the Gang of Eight immigration proliferation plan, urging him to stop pushing plans to increase the flow of foreign job seekers into the U.S. and award amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. We urged him to consider the plan’s implications for U.S. taxpayers, the national debt and jobless Americans.
CAPS spokesperson Joe Guzzardi was quoted reporting on Rubio’s position in the Washington Post, and The Washington Times ran a Q&A with CAPS Executive Director Jo Wideman about the impact on the economy of mass immigration.
We also ran full page ads in Roll Call and the Tampa Tribune asking if Senator Rubio had actually read and understood his own bill which promised amnesty first, border security maybe. The ads showed Sen. Rubio with reading glasses drawn on his face and asked readers to send any extra eyeglasses to help clear things up.
In Washington, D.C. we held a rally near the Capitol, and our volunteers hand delivered reading glasses to Senators’ offices, urging them to please read the 24-pound, 1,100-page Senate bill, S.744 before voting on it.
We also ran TV and radio ads in Bakersfield, Calif., asking why House Majority Whip, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) wants to bring in more immigrant workers when tens of thousands in his own district can’t find jobs.
A second ad asked why McCarthy is talking about legalizing 11 million illegal aliens when legalization is predicted to cost taxpayers more than $6 trillion. We asked if he does not believe in the American worker anymore, or if he simply wants to bring in more cheap foreign labor to satisfy big corporate donors who want to fatten their bottom lines.
CAPS chose Labor Day to conclude this campaign to help underline the devastating effect that increasing immigration would have on American workers, especially the 20 million unemployed or under-employed. We received extensive print, radio and TV coverage of these ads.
TEENS FACED ANOTHER SUMMER WITHOUT JOBS
By Maria Fotopoulos, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
Summer for many teens in another era meant time for “a summer job” and saving for college. But for the fourth consecutive summer, teen unemployment was stuck at a record high. Approximately 52 percent of youth between the ages of 16 and 19 worked a summer job back in what may now look like the halcyon days of 1999. That number dove to 32 percent this year, or only three in 10 teens worked a summer job (the estimated U.S. teen population is 16.8 million). Employment was even worse among particular demographics: only 19.25 percent of African-Americans teens had summer jobs in June and July, and 26.7 percent of Hispanic teens.
“This is a Great Depression for teens,” said the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Older workers are working jobs that teens had in the past, according to one published report. In California, where job growth has slowed, the overall unemployment rate is at 8.7 percent, but among teens, reportedly 36 percent of teens couldn’t find summer jobs, making the Golden State the leader—in teen unemployment by state. Only the District of Columbia came in higher, 51.7 percent.
This is a disturbing trend and one which experts say means trouble for a whole generation. First jobs provide another level of learning, and teens who have work experience do better in a variety of social and economic ways.
While we’re not there—yet—we need only look to some European countries, Egypt, Greece and others where there’s high youth unemployment. Ultimately, this can create a situation for entrenched frustration and social unrest.
WATER AND ENERGY DEMANDS COLLIDE
By Leon Kolankiewicz, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
The California and U.S. populations are bursting at the seams and so is their insatiable appetite for energy and water. Because narrow minded and shortsighted vested interests block immigration reduction and population stabilization, some 4 to 6 million new energy and water consumers are added each decade in California and 27 to 33 million in the USA.
While electricity-gobbling gadgets and gas guzzling SUVs have proliferated in recent decades, overall per capita energy consumption has not increased, due to efficiency and conservation improvements. However, aggregate national energy consumption has risen almost in lockstep with population growth.
Energy consumption and environmental impacts increase as the population of energy consumers increases. Yet by and large, complicit mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club say and do nothing about population. A cynic might say that an environment ever more threatened by population growth is good for their business model.
In order to provide jobs and a comfortable living standard, energy consumers use oil, coal, natural gas, uranium and electricity. Yet these same consumers also use water, and there’s the rub, because these two crucial resources are often in direct conflict. As a recent headline puts it: “Collision Between Water and Energy Is Underway, and Worsening.”
Most Americans are unaware that electricity generation depends heavily on water. For socalled thermal plants (generally coal and nuclear), water is essential for cooling and condensing steam. Indeed, more than 40 percent of all U.S. freshwater withdrawals are to cool thermal power plants. Hydroelectric plants directly use water (and gravity) to produce electricity from the kinetic energy of falling water. The greater the head (fall) and the greater the volume/mass of water, the greater the generation potential.
Hydraulic fracturing (a/k/a “hydrofracking” or just “fracking”) of shale formations to release their tightly held natural gas or oil is also extremely water intensive. Hydro-fracked wells inject and contaminate several million gallons of water on average.
In California’s Central Valley, Kern County’s $15 billion petroleum industry injects eight gallons of water for each gallon of heavy oil it extracts. Every gallon of water the oil industry uses is one less gallon available for agriculture.
As our numbers and needs mount, clashes like these will intensify. Climate change is likely to aggravate the situation by raising temperatures, increasing drought and decreasing available surface water supplies.
U.S. population stabilization is necessary to address this problem, but not sufficient in and of itself. We also need to develop renewable energy sources and continue improving conservation and efficiency for both water and energy. Many environmental groups like the Sierra Club support the latter, but not the former. That’s irresponsible and shortsighted.
JOBS CREATION LAGS POPULATION INCREASE
By Joe Guzzardi, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
With so many Americans suffering, Congress should be focused on putting them back to work, not making their lives tougher by expanding the labor pool through increased immigration.
The jobs data is shocking. According to the U.S. Current Population Survey, nearly 58 million native-born Americans between the ages of 16 and 65 didn’t work during the second quarter of 2013, a figure that has remained steady for three years but has increased by 17 million since the second quarter of 2000. The number of adult natives not working is widespread and includes 25 million with no more than a high school education, 16 million with some education beyond high school and 9 million with at least a bachelor’s degree. Hispanics, blacks, teens, seniors, returning veterans and disabled Americans have very high unemployment levels.
In a recently released report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey found that of the 963,000 jobs created in the past six months, 936,000 (97 percent) of them are part time.
Although Congress tries to distract the nation by suggesting that more immigration would create jobs and stimulate the economy, the opposite is true. Congress’s first action would be to grant legal work authorization to illegal immigrants who are, because of their immigration status, unemployable.
Virtually overnight, the U.S. labor pool would increase by 11 million, the nation’s estimated illegal immigrant population (other credible estimates are as high as 20 to 30 million). Legal status, whether provisional or temporary, would be granted before the federal government builds more fencing, mandates E-Verify or completes an entry-exit system to deter visa holders from overstaying.
American workers benefit from tight labor markets. Immigration loosens markets and makes it harder for Americans to get and keep jobs. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if a bill liberalizing immigration passes, more immigrants with lower skills than with higher skills would be added to the workforce. Consequently, the average American wage would decline.
Further, the CBO calculates that the Senate immigration bill, versions of which the House is considering, would do little to prevent future illegal immigration. Only between 33 percent and 50 percent of future illegal immigrants would be blocked from entering the United States than are under existing laws. Specifically, the CBO predicts that new illegal immigration would add nearly 500,000 illegal residents and their children to the U.S. population each year during the next decade and that nearly 5 million new illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children would be living in the country by 2023.
American unemployment numbers tell the dire story, but Congress isn’t paying attention. Population growth exceeds job creation. Corporate outsourcing and non-immigrant worker visas like the H-1B add to job displacement. Sensible immigration policies, and not the huge amnesty that’s under consideration, would help restrict population growth and limit the number of new workers coming into the labor pool. Fewer available workers tighten employment markets which in turn works to Americans’ benefit.
CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE
This is my first message as Chairman of the CAPS board of directors, so I want to introduce myself briefly to you. I trained as an environmental scientist at U.C. Berkeley, studying the effects of energy production and use on high altitude lakes in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains. Part of my training consisted of studying the results of population growth on the myriad environmental problems facing our country and the planet. It became very clear to me that unless population growth is curbed, these problems can never be solved.
As I continued to study and work to ameliorate what I and many other scientists view as the symptoms of overpopulation, I became a population activist—speaking about the role population growth plays in degrading natural environments and our quality of life, writing elected officials to make birth control readily available and, as immigration became the dominant source of U.S. population growth, urging reductions in immigration so the U.S. population could stabilize. I joined various organizations that focused on population, and CAPS was one of the first because it focused on the causes and effects of overpopulation in my home state of California. I joined the CAPS board 10 years ago and am now proud to take my turn as its chairman.
Clearly, the immediate threat before us is the push for amnesty legislation in Congress. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if Senate bill S.744 were enacted into law it would increase the U.S. population by an additional 10 million by 2023. That is over and above the already projected growth of 24 million for 2023. Adding 34 million people is the equivalent of adding the population of Canada to our overpopulated nation in just a decade, pushing the goal of sustainability ever further out of reach, and with no end in sight.
And the source of that growth clearly is immigration. In May, the U.S. Census Bureau released a series of population projections for the U.S. stating, “International migration is projected to become the primary driver of U.S. population growth for the first time in nearly two centuries.” That was before the consequences of S.744 were analyzed.
For California, the leading destination of international migrants, the situation is even worse. In January, before S.744 was introduced, the Department of Finance released projections showing the state’s population would grow to more than 50 million by 2050, from today’s 38 million. That is growth of 1 million people every three years, a huge increase when we can barely cope with our present population.
But if anything like S.744 were enacted, California’s growth would go up dramatically, and all of the problems besetting our state—water and energy shortages, loss of farmland and open space, increases in traffic congestion, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions—would grow significantly worse.
For these reasons, the efforts of CAPS this year have focused on preventing federal amnesty legislation from becoming law. I am sure that you, our members, are taking the actions you can to help in this momentous battle. I ask you, please, redouble your efforts during this critical time—contact your representatives in Congress, sign up for our action alerts and be as generous as you can with your financial support to make our public outreach as widespread as possible. Together we can defeat the threat of another 100 million people added to our country’s population during the next 38 years.
Dick Schneider
Member and Chairman of the Board of Directors of CAPS
A TRIBUTE TO PROF. AL BARTLETT
By Fred Elbel, CAPS Senior Writing Fellow
Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally or globally? – Prof. Al Bartlett
Long-time populationist and environmentalist Professor Emeritus Al Bartlett (1923-2013) died September 7 at age 90.
In 1944, Bartlett joined the Manhattan Project and worked for two years at Los Alamos, primarily on mass spectrometry of plutonium. There he encountered well-known physicists of the Heroic Generation, including Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr. He subsequently worked on high-speed photography for the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll.
After earning advanced degrees in nuclear physics from Harvard University, Dr. Albert A. Bartlett joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in Boulder as a Professor of Physics in 1950.
A Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Prof. Bartlett was an exceptionally successful teacher and one of the most revered teachers at the university. During his tenure, he taught introductory physics to generations of young scientists and engineers. In 1981 he received the Robert A. Millikan Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers for his outstanding scholarly contributions to physics education.
Equally influential in his community, Bartlett organized citizens’ efforts to preserve open space in Colorado, which led to the formation of Boulder’s Open Space Program and the preservation of thousands of acres of land.
On the idea of “smart growth,” Bartlett said:
Remember that politicians will try to claim that there isn’t a conflict between saving the environment and smart growth. Unfortunately, both smart growth and dumb growth destroy the environment. The only difference is that smart growth destroys the environment with good taste.
He also understood that unconstrained population growth can have a pervasive impact on our sustaining environment:
Carrying capacity is a measure of how many people can be supported indefinitely. Therefore if any fraction of global warming is due to the actions of humans, this alone proves that human populations are larger than the carrying capacity of the earth. Sustainability requires that the size of the population be less than or equal to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the desired standard of living.
Bartlett had an uncanny ability to present mathematical concepts in a manner that was both understandable and interesting to the lay person. Realizing that most people do not understand the ramifications of compounded or exponential growth, he developed what became a well-known lecture, “Arithmetic, Population and Energy,” and subsequently presented it 1,742 times. Every lecture began with the statement:
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
An extraordinary man, Al Bartlett indeed will be missed.
Click here to watch a video tribute to Prof. Al Bartlett created by Fred Elbel.
Visit the CAPS blog for more about Dr. Bartlett from writers Fred Elbel and Leon Kolankiewicz.
We all know air pollution is bad, and can have significant health impacts for people, resulting in asthma, bronchitis, other respiratory problems and heart attacks. But two new studies show the health implications may be greater than we already knew.
Research from the School of Public Health at Harvard University found that pregnant women exposed to high levels of diesel particulates or mercury were twice as likely to have an autistic child compared with peers in low-pollution areas. In the United States, one child in 50 is diagnosed with autism, which can produce mild to severe behaviors marked by social interaction difficulties and repetitive behaviors that may make independent living impossible as the child becomes an adult.
Other research published in the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes found that children growing up in areas with high air pollution have a higher risk of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes.
President Obama recently asked the EPA to develop new standards for power plants and how much carbon pollution can be put in the air.
While there are technological advancements and less air polluting approaches to manufacturing products, meeting energy demands, and building vehicles, homes and buildings, they are only part of the solution.
We need to make the connection between poor air quality and too many people. More people have more wants, needs and demands, which drives more production—and more pollution, even with mitigating processes and technologies. Our current model based on increasing growth and a belief in technological fixes for every problem is showing its flaws.
TOWN HALLS: CAPS ACTIVISTS URGE HOUSE REPS TO VOTE NO ON AMNESTY
Only a few of our elected representatives were accountable to voters by holding Town Halls in their home districts during the Congressional recess. CAPS activists attended many of these meetings and reported back on how the Town Halls unfolded. Here are just a few of the mixed reviews:
I attended Rep. Eric Swalwell’s ‘immigration forum’ on Aug. 17. Swalwell expressed his support for the Senate bill, S.744. When he took questions from the audience, there were a number of angry statements opposing any pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. The mood of the meeting was angry and there was a lot of shouting … I found it encouraging that voters would take off a Saturday morning to express their opinions about immigration. I had expected that open-borders groups would demand more immigration, but the majority of comments were strongly opposed to S.744 … Please keep everyone informed about these town meetings. They provide a good opportunity to push back against more immigration.” – D.Y.
“…I tried to ask ‘if they have to wait 13 years [to apply for citizenship] how are they going to comply? If they are not citizens they are not supposed to be able to get a job, or use our social services, or send their children to our schools.’ The Congressman ignored my question and told the rest of the audience not to be disruptive as they shouted ‘yes, how about that?’” – J.W.
“My husband and I arrived at the Poway Library … and were informed that [Rep.] Scott Peters canceled the Town Hall meeting that was scheduled! According to other irate would-be participants, he had not even announced the cancellation on his website. What a coward. He represents yet another politician who would rather avoid an issue as important as this one than actually hear what his constituents have to say.” – D.B.
“… I was quite disappointed as this meeting was a demonstration of ‘organized chaos.’ Read: ‘disorganized chaos.’ This was my first attempt to become involved in anything political. If what I saw at Mr. Valadao’s ‘Town Hall Meeting’ is any example of what goes on in Washington it is no wonder that we are in a total mess …” – R.S.
“… Thank you for providing both the encouragement and the assistance to speak out. This was my first Town Hall experience, and it won’t be my last.” – M.N.
Thank you for your activism!
The White House and Congress have little credibility when it comes to enforcing immigration laws. Congress never enforced the laws written into the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act as they pertained to hiring more border and internal agents to check for entering or employed illegal immigrants. After 25 years of looking the other way, few Americans trust that the government will spend the $45 billion allocated in S.744 for additional security.
The administration’s well-deserved credibility gap is based too on the bite-size, nonenforcement actions the Department of Homeland Security regularly puts in place. In August, ICE, an agency within DHS, issued a directive advising agents to use “discretion” (don’t deport) with aliens who have minor children.
“The Parental Interests Directive” authorizes immigration authorities not to detain or deport aliens with minor children. If parents are deported, those children would be without care, according to the reasoning. The new DHS directive also allows deported parents to return to the U.S. for custody hearings.
This directive follows President Obama’s 2012 deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) that removed the possibility of deporting those brought to the U.S. as children. Through June 2013, of more than 500,000 DACA applications, 71 percent had been approved. Those approved received legal permission to work in the U.S. and compete with 20 million unemployed Americans for jobs.
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