How Racist Anti-Immigrant Groups Are Trying to Recruit Environmentalists

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Southern Poverty Law Center / By Heidi Beirich

How Racist Anti-Immigrant Groups Are Trying to Recruit Environmentalists
Xenophobes have launched a cynical campaign to recruit environmentalists to their cause by blaming immigrants for urban sprawl and other environmental problems.

July 27, 2010 |


In January 2010, national leaders in ecology, sustainable business, and the larger environmental movement gathered in Washington to grapple with the problem of building "The New Green Economy." Hosted by the government-funded National Council for Science and the Environment, the event was a prestigious one.

But one of the invited speakers was hardly an environmentalist.

Roy Beck, who participated in a panel entitled "Perverse Incentives, Subsidies, and Tax Code Impediments to a Sustainable Economy," is the head of NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration group that was largely responsible for sinking a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007. Beck has spent nearly 20 years relentlessly attacking American immigration policies, even editing tracts like The Immigration Invasion, a book so raw in its nativism that Canadian authorities banned it as hate literature. More to the point, perhaps, purported environmentalist Beck's group not long ago paid nearly half a million dollars to a far-right news service— an outfit that has described global warming as a "religion" that is "impervious to evidence" and has pilloried conservationists as "anti-mankind."

So what was Beck doing talking about "greening the tax code"?

Roy Beck is part of a sweeping, renewed attempt by immigration restrictionists in America to convince environmentalists that they, too, must oppose immigration if they are to save the environment from the ravages of a growing population. Because such efforts typically have been organized by anti-immigration activists whose leading concern is not the environment — men and women who attempt to recruit conservationists and other "progressives" to their cause, sometimes even while simultaneously working with nakedly anti-environmental forces — this strategy has come to be known as "greenwashing." ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/147655/how_racist_anti-immigrant_groups_are_trying_to_recruit_environmentalists/

[NNN0LHI]

1. This reminds me of when Lou Dobbs used to show video of all the garbage immigrants left behind

Only problem the video always showed a big honking La-Z-Boy prominently displayed and dumped in the middle of the desert.

As if some immigrant carried that fucking thing over the boarder on his/her back and left it there.

People were falling for this crap too.

Don

[earthside]

2. It's About Sustainability

The Heidi Beirich article is Glenn Beckian -- guilt by association and throw in every fear and accusation she can find to smear those with a different point of view.

Opposing more immigration into this country, legal and illegal, and opposing continued population growth here are legitimate and reasonable environmental concerns.

It's about sustainability: the population of the United States is already about a 100 million over what is environmentally and economically sustainable -- we simply cannot afford anymore people striving to live the traditional consuming American life style (as we, ourselves, must alter our avaricious behavior). Furthermore, the U.S. should not be the economic refugee safety valve that permits a corrupt government in Mexico City to keep its hold on power.

Progressive Americans should beware not to let themselves succumb to a liberal 'knee-jerk' reaction (as articulated by Heidi Beirich) on the illegal immigration issue. In the light of global climate change and peak oil, the responsible course is that which forthrightly confronts our overpopulation and over-consumption practices.

And ... we should not let the bigoted, right-wing attitude towards this important and controversial issue dominate what could otherwise be reasonable and civil solutions.