An immigration reform activist organization is trying to increase pressure on national environmental organizations to do something few have been wont to do: take a position on immigration as part of the population/environment debate.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Washington, D.C-based nonprofit, tried to use Earth Day, April 22, to get environmental groups to "join us in open, honest public debate about immigration's impact on growth and the environment," according to a news report. But there aren't many signs that the group succeeded in this effort any more than others groups have in the past to get environmental activists to lend their weight to the immigration issues.

News Analysis

FAIR -- with a board of directors including former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm and an advisory board including Anne H. Ehrlich, Ph.D., and Paul R. Ehrlich, Ph.D, former New York City Mayor John Lindsay, and former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy -- this time went one step further than it has in the past in its efforts to turn up the heat on advocacy organizations: it published a matrix of 20 leading environmental organizations' positions -- or nonpositions -- on immigration (see table, Source: FAIR).

"We scrutinized official publications, board resolutions, web sites, position papers, and in some cases spoke directly with organizations' staff," FAIR said in a pre-Earth Day release. "Of the 20 organizations examined, 13 talked about overpopulation and six addressed it as a problem in the United States ... but most shied away from advocating immigration reduction as a solution."

The group pointed to a litany of reasons -- perhaps excuses, from FAIR's perspective -- on why environmental organizations shy away from immigration issues:

• Many want to avoid the controversy that comes from tackling immigration reform.
• Some want to avoid offending major foundations that also fund open borders groups.
• Plenty simply don't want to get in the middle of a thorny, heated debate." (One more thorny, heated debate, environmentalists might say.)

The group pointed to a concern many in the environmental community have long acknowledged, at least privately: they fear that taking a position on immigration as part of the population/environment issue will open them to charges of being "anti-immigrant" and, therefore, racist. "No one wants to have opposition to mass immigration mislabeled as opposition to immigrants themselves," FAIR said. The group said that reticence on the part of environmental activists, in effect, "leaves the rest of us, and our environment, hanging out to dry."

Environmental organizations' reluctance to go front-and-center on the immigration issue is long-standing. Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope is not alone among environmental activists in pointing to "overpopulation" as a major factor in global environmental problems. But he has defended the Sierra Club's reticence on the immigration issue out of concern that they would be perceived as helping those whose motivations are racist." Population activist and Sierra Club member Alan Kuper, Cleveland, Ohio, characterizes the national organizations' silence as "a form of denial."

Those who wish progressive environmental organizations and other political activists would address the immigration issue, point out the danger of this issue and a point made by columnist Froma Harrop who writes about this issue in The Providence Journal. "Cheap labor conservatives, for example, will do most anything to beat down wages by keeping up the inflow of low-skilled immigrants," she wrote, while at the same time denying them welfare benefits that are available to other taxpayers.

Don't look for FAIR's nudging of environmental organizations to have a major impact any time soon. Those organizations clearly have their hands full battling a Bush Administration which is seen as hostile to their agenda and fighting public opinion polls which continue to show the public unenthusiastic (and media?) about the environment. Nonetheless, the report provides practical insights into the complexity of the issues and the oblique approaches some environmental activists take on population and immigration as part of the puzzle to addressing environmental and pollution issues.