Three hundred million Americans may well signal the end of quality of life for average citizens, as our beautiful country is increasingly paved over to make way for growth on steroids. In the future, mainly the rich will be able to afford privacy, quiet, and open space. The Blade Runner scenario is a far cry from the uncrowded country into which many boomers were born, where the 1950 population was a sustainable 150 million. Now America’s population has doubled in just over 50 years, at a rate that should embarrass a first-world nation.

It didn’t have to be. In the 1970s, environ-mentalism convinced many Americans that ecological responsibility meant having smaller families. But Washington decided around that time that borders should be opened to all the world, and it is still coming. Today we see immigrant families with many children, and the press tells us diversity is good. Apparently multiculturalist beliefs trump environmentalist values, at least in America’s editorial offices.

After the immigration floodgates were opened by the 1965 legislation, business discovered that immigrants, legal and illegal, could be exploited to drive down the cost of labor if there were enough of them. More recently, politicians noticed that an ongoing population explosion caused the GNP to increase while individual incomes shrunk, and the press willingly cheered fake prosperity.
Environmentalists should have been first in demanding immigration diminish, but the green elites failed the common good just as badly as the Washington suits. Rather than representing Americans of all political stripes who want the earth protected, environmentalist groups have moved to the far left in recent years. As “progressives,” they cannot therefore enrage open-borders Hispanics whom they wrongly imagine to care about conservation issues. And leftist environmentalists dare not ask how transferring millions of immigrants to the high-consuming USA can be considered ecologically benign.

Immigration and Overpopulation

The flagship organization, the Sierra Club, had long espoused an America with a sustainable population, consistently calling for an end to population growth “first of the United States and then of the world.” But Club management was easily persuaded in the 1990s to embrace the far-left diversity ideology, with the help of a $100 million “donation” from an anti-borders investor.
As a result, the American people have become less literate about how immigration acts as a force-multiplier on domestic overpopulation, creating too rapid use of slowly replenishing natural resources, like soil, forests, fisheries, and aquifers.

Overpopulation means we are withdrawing our resources principal rather than living environmentally off the interest. This behavior cannot be considered morally acceptable toward future generations.
Do-gooders of all sorts must realize that on the six-billion-person planet, immigration cannot solve the economic distress for the five billion who live in countries with GDPs less than Mexico’s. The numbers are simply prohibitive. Instead, those so concerned should employ proven strategies like microloans to improve people’s lives in their home countries. Microlending is a program that has actually been effective in economic improvement across many cultures, plus espousing values of women’s empowerment, democracy and environmentalism.

In addition, the purely numerical problems of unconstrained immigration are multiplied still further by the millions of so-called immigrants, many illegal, who are actively hostile to this country. An overcrowded nation of culturally compatible people could be expected to muddle through in a polite fashion, but welcoming enemies from La Raza to the Muslim Brotherhood is a recipe for civil breakdown, balkanization, and violence.
The well known explainer of growth mathematics, University of Colorado Professor Albert Bartlett has remarked, “We’re told over and over that we must conserve. And I would be happy to do this. But why should I if the water I save is going to be sold to a new subdivision.”

Many Americans feel similarly when environmental values rub against lawlessness, often with the reaction, “Why should I conserve so that illegal aliens like Julio and his eight kids can have enough?” In such small increments does a unified national culture dissolve into chaos and conflict.
Most ordinary Mexicans do indeed come for jobs, rather than as La Raza shock troops for Aztlan. But they often settle in areas of America already Mexicanized, with established Spanish newspapers, television and radio, as well as possibly Mexican-American politicians who may not represent the interests of the United States at all. In their ethnic enclaves, relocated Mexicans hear Spanish media preach the victim message, that the American southwest was stolen and belongs to them (which 58 percent of Mexicans believe, according to a 2002 Zogby poll). They become wrongly convinced that American immigration (the world’s most generous) is racist and unfair, and are exhorted to hate and conquer America.

It was no surprise then, that last May Day saw hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and their supporters demanding the rights of citizens even as they arrogantly waved Mexican flags. True to the communist roots of May Day, Che flags were common, with signs reading “The Workers Struggle Has No Border.”

The bad situation of open borders is made worse by immigration’s companion ideology, multiculturalism which posits the fantasy that all cultures are morally equal. The existence of cruel traditions like female genital mutilation and other forms of brutality, particularly against women, make such a belief reprehensible. Nevertheless, the press has been in full propaganda mode for years in pushing the bankrupt idea, which is at odds with human nature. It’s only the media’s daily dose of multiculturalism propaganda that makes some citizens surprised when humans act normally in solidarity with their tribal group. An honest look at history shows that our little planet has been awash in wars and conflict based on just those differences we are urged to celebrate—race, religion, ethnicity, language, and culture. The politically correct ideology of peace, love, and diversity quickly comes unglued un-der stress, as people fall back into instinctual, rather than learned, behavior. But it’s only our tribal roots showing.

Compli-cating the increasing push factors from a planet of 6.5 billion people, many American elites have lost their appreciation for the nation-state. Today’s modern elite (dubbed “Davos man” by Prof. Sam Huntington) sees the post-national European Union as a more properly globalized form of governance, protected from the demanding public by its undemocratic bureaucracy. Like NAFTA, the EU started out as a trade association. But elites found that trade was a useful Trojan horse to diminish representative government by undermining sovereignty. As Czech President Vaclav Klaus once wisely observed, “You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.”
Indeed, many in Washington , including President Bush, are working quietly toward a similar arrangement, called the North American Union, which would politically unify Canada , Mexico and the United States . At least the European Union was presented to the people in a relatively straight-forward way with at least a little voter input—for example, the EU Constitution was voted down by France and the Netherlands .

In this country, the shotgun marriage with Mexico and Canada has been developed in stealth, and disguised with open borders and permissive immigration. Even the most clueless leaders understand that the American people would never give up the nation which many thousands in uniform died to preserve, so the unification scheme proceeds behind closed doors. The borders remain uncon-scionably porous to serve an unwanted political agenda, even though Islamic jihadists around the world seem invigorated. Government is less representative than it has ever been, even to the basic needs of national security. The business elites that control Washington apparently regard the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an acceptable cost of doing business in order to maintain their slave-light labor force provided by open borders.

We begin the century with 300 million Americans and many problems of our own making. History may well have brewed a perfect storm, powered by wrong ideas, misremembered history, and irresponsible political leadership. Whether the American people can regain control of the country from corrupt elites remains to be seen, but it must be done if the U.S. is to be at all recognizable by century’s end.