A Tale of Two Immigrants

A few bruised Granny Smiths roll around the bed of Hugo Morales's 1991 Toyota truck as he tools along California's back roads, past late-spring orchards thick with fruit and bustling with migrant field hands. The apples bounce like pinballs off the cast-iron skillet and Dutch oven that Morales, 55, had taken on a three-day camping trip into the High Sierra.

Joking about the apples, Morales, a Mixtec Indian with flowing white hair and the same compact physique depicted on the temple carvings of southern Mexico where he was born, tunes in to Radio Bilingüe. Tejano music fills the hot San Joaquin Valley air.

Morales, who founded the noncommercial station in 1976, describes the DJ as a grandmother and former farm laborer who struggled for years in the fields of Texas before working her way into a better life. She's now part of a team that, in addition to music, offers news and information-from pesticide awareness to legal advice-to a burgeoning Spanish-speaking population.

"This is a very difficult time for immigrants to the U.S.," Morales says over the accordion soundtrack. His conversation ranges from anti-Irish riots and murders in the early 19th century to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and early 20th-century efforts to restrict the numbers of Italians and Jews entering the country. Morales is impatient with what he considers the current greenwashed, anti-brown argument that immigration-fueled population growth is one of the greatest threats to America's environment.

The U.S. population is 291 million. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 4 million new Americans are born each year, and there is a net immigration of between 324,000 and 1.65 million. About one-quarter of those immigrants are from Mexico. Morales says that Radio Bilingüe tackles environmental hazards too, but from an entirely different perspective. It's the job of the station, he says, to protect its listeners, regardless of where they're from, or whether they have documents.

He relates a recent show about an incident in which pesticides sprayed on a potato field near Bakersfield drifted onto a peach orchard where 19 workers were picking fruit. Several collapsed and 13 were taken to the hospital. The chemical sprayed was methamidophos, which can cause brain and nervous system damage. "It's not that people want to leave their homelands," says Morales. "Why risk your life? They don't do it because they like blue jeans, but because they need jobs. They'd rather stay, but globalization dynamics make border crossing inevitable; it's a phenomenon around the world."

Today, 125 million people are living outside the countries of their birth, propelled, says the United Nations, by factors such as globalization, overcrowding, and the disparity of economic opportunity between the developed and developing world. Twenty-five million of these souls are "environmental refugees"-forced from their homelands by deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, and other slow-motion natural disasters (see "No Place to Call Home," November/December 2000).

As a first-generation immigrant himself, though one who came legally, Morales understands the factors that push individuals and families into the unknown. "Mexico has not been able to keep pace with its population and job demand," he says. "In the last 30 years, an aggressive [family planning] campaign cut Mexico's birthrate in half, but it's still high." He adds that closing the border isn't realistic. "We are dealing with human need," he says.

ANOTHER FIRST-GENERATION IMMIGRANT, Yeh Ling-Ling, sees the whole situation differently. Regardless of why immigrants come to the United States, the fact that they do-and that they have a higher fertility rate-troubles her.

Yeh is petite, barely five feet one, but she carries the weight of this growing world on her back. She doesn't mind telling you that when she looks at babies, cute or not, the first thing she thinks of is diapers. Tons of plastic diapers piling up in landfills. "Whether they're white babies or Chinese babies, it doesn't matter," Yeh, 51, says. "It's hard for me to enjoy life."

Her rich and low but rapid speech and her instantaneous recall of data on immigration-fueled U.S. population growth have a ring of urgency that fills the downtown Oakland, California, office of the Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America, where she is executive director. Founded in 1997, the Diversity Alliance believes that immigration-driven population growth is harming America's environment, workers, infrastructure, and social coherence.

One need only look out Yeh's window to get a sense of the melting pot these days. Oakland is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the nation: 24 percent of its population is foreign-born, and its city center bustles with places like Mexicali Rose, Bay Fung Tong Seafood Tea House, and the African Jamaican Vegan Soul Food and Juice Bar.

In the arithmetic of immigration, what looks like economic and cultural benefit to some is an environmental catastrophe to others. "When are we going to address U.S. population growth?" Yeh asks. "Are we going to wait until it becomes another China? It'll be too late." In an opinion piece for a local paper in March, Yeh worried that "newcomers, like all human beings, pollute, drive, need housing, and consume energy." She furrows her brow when she says, "In many situations mass immigration is exacerbating our fiscal and environmental problems. One cannot have quality and quantity at the same time."

Yeh comes to the immigration debate by a circuitous route. She was born in Vietnam to Chinese immigrants who fled when fighting broke out between the French colonialists and her country. The family of 11 went to Cambodia, where she lived until 1970-when the United States invaded, looking for Viet Cong. Yeh left her family to study in Taiwan, but after the coup d'etat by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, she stopped hearing from them. She thinks her parents and youngest sister as well as many of her cousins, aunts, and uncles were later killed by the Khmer Rouge.

From Taipei, it was on to Paris, but when France refused to give her permanent-resident status, she followed a sister to the United States. It was America, and a "nice Jewish fellow" she met on a Sierra Club hike in Northern California's Redwood State Park, that ended her nomadic life. Yeh Ling-Ling became Suzanne Feinberg, and for 10 years-with time off to have a son, now 18-she worked as a paralegal at firms specializing in immigration law. She helped new arrivals get whatever they required to stay in their adopted homeland.

While fighting a massive development project in Orinda, a bedroom community to which her family moved in 1990, Yeh began to focus on the environmental consequences of unchecked growth. "I love open space. I love nature," says Yeh, who uses her original name in her work with the Diversity Alliance. "But one day it dawned on me: If we keep adding immigrants, they've got to live somewhere." She continues, "Even the poor ones are using more resources here than in their native lands. Go to Costco. Look at those immigrants. What are they buying? Boom boxes, hi-fis, televisions. They drive SUVs. Did they have those goods in their home countries? I doubt it."

"Immigrants are like apples," she adds. "There are good apples and bad apples. Our problem is you simply cannot eat too many apples, even if they're all good ones. They'll make you sick."

MORALES AND YEH REPRESENT opposite ends of the debate on population and immigration within the environmental movement. Everyone agrees that curbing population growth is part of protecting the planet. The question is how to address this challenge.

At 2.1 births per woman, the United States has the highest birthrate in the industrialized world. One way to help stabilize population is to focus on making family planning safe, affordable, and accessible. For example, even with present levels of immigration, if the number of U.S. births was brought down to levels typical of the industrialized world, U.S. population stabilization could be reached.

It's also the case that the United States has the highest rate of consumption in the world. We could concentrate on limiting waste and consumption so that increased population would translate into less environmental overload. Or, we could focus on policies designed to cut the number of new arrivals by clamping down on the border.

Some environmentalists say, "All of the above, and quickly." But the sources of environmental and quality-of-life degradation are manifold, and some of the proposed solutions may do more harm than good. For example, immigration moratoriums (or "time outs," as Yeh calls them) set the stage for xenophobes and racists, and risk tarring the environmental movement. If the goal is to protect the world's natural beauty and bounty, what is the most expeditious and ethical route? The choices we make will determine not only future population levels, but who we are and who we'll be: Gazing out over the rest of humanity, is the American environmental movement prepared to build walls or bridges?

NO NATION IS AN ISLAND, and the notion that walls and restrictions will protect the United States seems less convincing when viewed from a global perspective. Today, world population is 6.2 billion and growing by 77 million a year. Though the rate of growth is slowing-women now have about half as many children as their mothers did-there will still be substantial growth over the next half-century, especially in the world's poorest countries.

Research shows that wherever women are given educational opportunities and are able to determine when and whether they will have children, fertility rates fall. Worldwide, however, 350 million women lack access to contraception-a number that can be expected to grow as populations increase. "And an estimated 125 million women do not want to be pregnant but are not using any type of contraception," warns the World Watch Institute in its 2003 State of the World report.

Alberto Palloni, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, studies deforestation in Brazil. He sees population growth as a factor in environmental destruction, "but the relations are very complex. They are not direct, and are mediated by institutions." For example, he says, Amazon deforestation is driven more by the cattle industry and its cheap hamburger for fast-food customers worldwide than by population pressure. Further, the Brazilian government's policy of giving small-scale farmers pieces of land to which they have no legal entitlement has promoted a slash-and-burn mentality. Farmers exhaust the fertility of a plot and merely move on to the next one.

Government institutions could be setting high standards for sustainable farming and forestry or, for that matter, fuel efficiency and public transportation. In the United States, where consumption is a big part of the environmental problem, government could also help influence consumer choices. Instead, says Palloni, "we encourage people to do what they want, regardless of the consequences for the collective good. We protect individual liberties while essentially curtailing the liberties of future generations."

Contributing to global population and consumer pressures are political decisions made here at home. For instance, one of George W. Bush's first acts as president in 2000 was to restrict U.S. aid to overseas family-planning agencies. Under what opponents call "the Global Gag Rule," funds are now denied to any foreign agency that opts to counsel patients on the full range of reproductive health options, including abortion.

On the home front, we have the highest teen-pregnancy rate of any industrialized nation, accounting for more than 10 percent of all U.S. births. There is a direct correlation between increased education for females and decreased childbearing, but when it comes to sex ed, more than 33 percent of U.S. school-district funds go to programs that teach abstinence as the only appropriate method of birth control. "Among school districts in the South-where birthrates are significantly higher than the national average-that proportion is 55 percent," the Alan Guttmacher Institute reports.

Those hoping to further restrict immigration rarely cite this dismal record of teen pregnancy, emphasizing instead immigration-based population growth that is fueled mostly by Hispanic immigration and birthrate, which is 3.2 births per woman in the United States. They also cite census projections that if the U.S. population continues to grow at its present rate, it will exceed 500 million by 2050 and 1 billion by 2100.

But demographer Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation questions those frightening numbers. "What's really driving those projections is an implicit assumption that Hispanics enjoy no social progress; that they come to the United States and still behave like peasants in their fertility. That's just not happening. California has 500,000 extra spaces in its school system right now because of the decline in fertility among Hispanics in California in the 1990s. Hispanic birthrates dropped by about 10 percent in the 1990s in the United States, due mostly to education and upward mobility."

Though fertility rates in Mexico are declining as well, migration has risen dramatically, particularly in rural areas. The peso crisis, combined with the U.S. economic boom in the 1990s, contributed to the higher numbers. The 1994 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the Sierra Club opposed, also played a role. Despite NAFTA's aim to boost economies and create new employment, Mexico's agricultural sector has lost 1.3 million jobs since 1994. Real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than they were when NAFTA took effect.

While trade policies can drive emigration, some developing nations have policies that reduce it-and are now reaping the benefits. Longman cites Puerto Rico as an example of how declining birthrates in one place have affected immigration rates. "Puerto Rico has a lower standard of living than the United States and has an open border with the mainland, and yet people are staying put," says Longman. He speculates that with birthrates well below replacement levels, Puerto Rico is creating enough jobs to accommodate the rising generation. "Life circumstances aren't pushing them out the door."

In his provocative new book, The Empty Cradle (Perseus), Longman looks at global fertility declines and attendant global aging and argues that the major economic challenge for nations like the United States will be paying for pensions and healthcare for the elderly, not providing resources for immigrants.

True, momentum from the high fertility of the past suggests that even as global fertility decreases, world population could go from 6 billion today to 9 billion before it falls, Longman says. But, like Palloni, he's not convinced that there is a direct correlation between population growth and environmental degradation. Japan, for example, has ten times the population density of the United States but uses half the amount of energy per person, he says. Also, the World Resources Institute points out that despite having 24 percent fewer people than the European Union in 2000, the United States consumed 70.9 percent more fossil fuel and produced 74.2 percent more greenhouse gas.

COMMON SENSE AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE indicate that access to education and family planning, institutional emphasis on sustainability and conservation, and economic opportunity in one's homeland significantly weaken the "push" factors that lead to emigration. That's not good enough for Yeh Ling-Ling. "These policies take too long, and immigration policy is the quickest," she says.

But for one man who has actually tried to hammer out a workable and reasonable policy, the response to Yeh is: not so fast. Rick Swartz has witnessed the ebb and flow of immigrants — and sentiments toward them — since the 1970s, when war in Southeast Asia sent hundreds of thousands of refugees to American shores. After that it was the Haitians, then the survivors of Central American wars.

A lawyer and activist, Swartz observed that as the demographics of immigration were changing and growing, institutions-from government and churches to schools, ethnic and environmental organizations, and labor unions-weren't changing quickly enough to meet new needs. He founded the National Immigration Forum in 1982, bringing these disparate groups to the table. "There was a real need for interaction on an advocacy level on behalf of the immigrants and refugees," says Swartz. "We are talking about the dispossessed."

The Forum fought for the rights of these new arrivals and against groups like the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration organization, and others who blamed immigrants for everything from rising crime rates and traffic congestion to pollution and overcrowded schools. In fact, several of the Forum's founding members, who came from the group Zero Population Growth, were worried that ZPG had become tainted, and therefore made ineffective, by an infusion of anti-immigration zealots.

"They recognized at the time, and it's true today, that if your goal is public education on the importance of family planning, you need to have good relationships with the organizations that are in communication with the people having the most kids," says Swartz. "If somebody feels you're treating them like dogs, are they going to be receptive to your family-planning brochures? No way."

Swartz, whose group backed the controversial Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 that included sanctions against employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers, says: "We think immigration is a good thing if you do it right and reasonably. The Forum would have broken up a long time ago if it was an open-borders, olly-olly-in-free deal." But, he says, it's important to face reality. "Population and the movement of people are extraordinarily important ecologically, but human beings are not flotsam. Immigrants are risk-taking souls with will and hope and aspiration."

THOUGH THESE SOULS get a lot of bad press from immigration restrictionists, there is evidence that immigrants could be a politically potent force in helping solve environmental problems. According to a 2002 poll, these new residents, especially Hispanics, are more concerned about certain environmental issues than the general population. Cosponsored by the California Wild Heritage Campaign and the National Hispanic Environmental Council (NHEC), the poll found that 81 percent of Hispanic respondents supported establishing more wilderness in California-a higher percentage than any other population group surveyed, including Anglos.

"No national or regional environmental organization in places where there are large numbers of Latinos can afford to say [Latino views] don't matter," says Roger Rivera, 46, head of the 5,000-member NHEC. Nor can political parties. The number of Hispanic voters grew by 54 percent between 1990 and 1998, with more than 7 million registered in the 2000 election.

Rivera has closely followed the immigration debate within the mainstream environmental movement, particularly last spring's push for control of the Sierra Club's board of directors by candidates advocating stronger restrictions (these candidates were defeated by a 10-to-1 margin in the membership vote). Rivera fights to control his anger as he lays out the stakes of the debate. "When you distill the immigration argument, it's clear who is being discussed: our community.

Those who argue that high birthrates coupled with high immigration rates are an environmental problem are essentially saying Latinos are an environmental problem. Believe me, that is so hugely offensive, so deeply insulting, that the pushback is enormous." By "pushback" Rivera means a refusal to have anything to do with what he calls "mainstream green groups," i.e., mostly white environmental organizations. As to whether this cold shoulder matters to environmental groups' chances of future success, Rivera says, "You do the math."

HUGO MORALES HAS done that political calculus. "The environmental movement should realize that Latinos as a whole do care about the environment, and this is increasing with time," he says as we pass the largely Latino agricultural town of Parlier, most of whose wells have been contaminated with pesticides. He adds that the concept of environmental health, from his perch in California's farm country, is complex-like an ecosystem-and includes not just the fight against toxics but struggles for educational access and economic security for the poor.

"Latinos still have the highest incidence of teen pregnancy in California, but look at the hot spots: San Joaquin Valley, Imperial Valley, patches around Salinas," he says-all areas with high farmworker populations. "That's where the poverty is. This is the common factor, and education is the key to getting out of poverty."

Morales understands their plight. He was only nine when he left Mexico with his mother and three siblings in 1958. His father, a farmworker in Healdsburg, California, had entered illegally but after six years had obtained a green card and sent for his family. Morales grew up in a tent in a farm labor camp, picking prunes, apples, and other fruits. He labored in the fields with his family, doing "underpaid, dirty, dangerous" work.

His parents, believers in education, also sent their children to school. Morales went on to Harvard and then Harvard Law School. After graduation he wanted to be an organizer for the United Farm Workers Union but they refused to hire him, saying he was wasting his degree. In 1975, he had a brief stint with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board in Fresno, until growers organized to have the office shut down. It was then he began to dream about building a community radio station that would benefit immigrants. Morales won an Edgar R. Murrow award for his work in 1999 and a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1994.

"It was important for me that Radio Bilingüe be a vehicle of reliable information for Latinos in the United States," says Morales as we drive in 100-degree weather past orange, grape, peach, and olive groves alive with activity. "I also wanted it to be a forum of ideas among immigrants so they can improve their lives."

This summer, for example, Radio Bilingüe aired gavel-to-gavel coverage, in Spanish, of both the Republican and Democratic conventions. "We need to have an informed citizenry. Not enough Latinos are voting," Morales says. "This election is critical to our people. Issues involving immigration, the environment and economy, allocation of resources, and appointments to the Supreme Court are all at stake."

In the battle to protect America's natural bounty, some in the environmental movement will persist in building walls. For starters, Yeh Ling-Ling advocates increased militarization of the U.S. border and argues that "we must assure that illegals can't work in the United States, that their children can't go to school." (See "Lines in the Sand," page 38.)

Others have concluded that taking a position on immigration is not the way to address the population dilemma here or abroad. They focus instead on the root causes of both population growth and forced migration (see "On Immigration," page 40), and on supporting domestic efforts like those of Hugo Morales and Radio Bilingüe to help people. "Our community has had the idea that environmentalists only care about streams and animals," says Morales. "I see opportunities to redefine what the environmental agenda is and should be."