THE Sierra Club is the oldest, largest and most influential environmental group in the US. It is not known for xenophobia. So how should we interpret the attempt last week by some of its members to pass a motion supporting a cut in the number of immigrants allowed into the US? Americans pollute more and inflict greater stress on the planet than citizens of any other nation. Thus, these Sierra Club members argue, for the sake of the planet we should stop people becoming Americans (see 鈥淲here will they go when the sea series?鈥�).
The motion was defeated, and it would be tempting to dismiss its backers as radical extremists. Yet the idea that environmental degradation and immigration should be spoken of in the same breath is, in one form or another, increasingly widely held. In Australia, concern over the depletion of natural resources has sparked a fierce debate about population growth and, inevitably, calls for fewer immigrants.
Such proposals may well arise from genuine concern for the planet. But their underlying message is that so long as we limit the number of people living in industrialised countries, it鈥檚 OK for them to continue polluting at the rate they do. Well, it鈥檚 not OK. Population control must not be allowed to become a proxy for pollution control. Western nations are by far the greater polluters, and if they want to save the planet they will have to either reduce their consumption or use technology to lessen the damage it causes. There is no get-out clause.
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There are other reasons why linking pollution with immigration is dangerous. In the UK and elsewhere, immigration is a sensitive political issue. Invoking the environment in this debate can only play into the hands of those who are happy to seize on immigration as a way of fuelling hostility to ethnic minorities.
There are risks too in the seemingly benign suggestion that the west should take responsibility for its contribution to climate change by granting citizenship to environmental refugees from countries engulfed by rising sea levels. Some will infer from this that we should be obliged to take only those immigrants whose plight we are directly responsible for. But we should be seeking to help refugees wherever we can, not just those for whose suffering we are to blame. If, as some scientists have suggested, the Pacific island nation Tuvalu is disappearing beneath the waves because of sinking coral rather than rising sea levels, is the rich world under any less of an obligation to help?
The effects of climate change are already unjust. It is the poor nations that are suffering the most from damage done mainly by the rich. In holding immigrants hostage to how we tackle it, we risk creating further injustices and avoiding the core issue 鈥� which is that polluting western lifestyles have to change.
