On Earth Day, environmentalists must not link arms with anti-immigrant forces

On Earth Day, the environmental movement in the United States must reject bigotry. It should not join hands with anti-immigrant groups.

These groups are trying to infiltrate the environmental movement and coopt its message.

Under innocuous sounding names such as the America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning, anti-immigrant organizations, many with ties to political extremists, are running full-page ads in progressive magazines such as The Nation, Mother Jones and Harper’s and in newspapers such as the New York Times.

The goal of these anti-immigrant groups is to lure the environmental community into an America First-style immigration policy.

That won’t solve anything, and it denies the increasing economic and environmental interconnectivity of the planet.

Many recent immigrants have come to the United States because the free-market policies that Washington forced on Latin America have backfired. Subsistence farmers couldn’t compete against U.S. agribusiness, and millions had to abandon the countryside. U.S. manufacturers opened up shop and then just as quickly closed up shop, leaving millions more without jobs.

It’s unfair to blame immigrants who came to the United States because they couldn’t eke out a living at home due to Washington’s policies.

What’s more, climate change is going to cause more people to emigrate from southern countries and from low-lying coastal areas, which will become all but uninhabitable.

These immigrants aren’t the cause of the environmental crisis. They are merely an effect of it, and they should not be blamed.

On Earth Day of all days, the environmental movement can’t let anti-immigrant groups divert us into a narrow ideological cause that reflects neither realism nor inclusiveness.

And environmental organizations cannot afford to remain silent in the face of a few anti-immigrant leaders who attempt to speak on their behalf.

Instead, as environmentalists, on Earth Day and every day, we should uphold a vision of sustainability characterized by cooperation, opportunity and equity.

, the national field director for the Center for New Community, writes for the Web site Imagine 2050 and is a member of the Sierra Club. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.