Three most frequent objections to immigration reduction I encounter...

1) We are a nation of immigrants..... My grandparents came here as immigrants....

2) Yes, Florida is experiencing too much growth but it is not due to immigrants, it is folks moving down from the North -- we cannot build a wall across the border

3) I am an ardent environmentalist but I cannot agree with immigration limitation because of the Holocaust

My reply to the first objection about, "What if my grandparents could not come," is to point out the THEN & NOW. When my own grandparents emigrated in 1905 there were a little over 76 million people in the U.S. Today there are 298 million. So I ask, " Do we need more people now as we did then when the country was relatively empty? What problems facing us now will be improved by the additional three million a year that the U.S. population grew in the 1990s? At the risk of being too rhetorical, I also ask, "Will your family be better off when the present rate of growth raises the crowding to 420 million in the next forty-five years?" (Schools, traffic, water supply, landfill, costs)

I particularly like Otis Graham's answer to the sentiment that we are a nation of immigrants in his new book, "Unguarded Gates"...He states that we are a nation of the native-born. Being a nation of immigrants applied only in first few decades of the 17th century in the British Colonies. After that we were predominantly a native-born population.

The second objection to the need for immigration reduction I encounter when I talk to Floridians is a refusal to accept Census Bureau statistics regarding the component of immigrants in Florida....We are now well over 17 million in population and 31% of us are immigrants and the children of immigrants. Of the three million people that were added from 1990-2000, one million were from foreign immigration and we now have 2.7 million immigrants as part of our make-up. In addition, the Migration Policy Institute estimates 700,000 illegal aliens are living in Florida.

Whether or not this information makes a dent probably varies with the assessment of the speaker as believable .

With a 4.7% rate of growth, Florida's population is going to double in 15 years, which is one net every fourteen seconds. Very few Floridians need to be convinced that we are suffering from too much sprawl but there is that gap between what pushes sprawl and the figures I just quoted, which, by the way are easily accessed state by state on the FAIR web site. Another great tool that we have on the web site of Floridians for a Sustainable Population is the Census Bureau's Pop Clock. The clock gives a daily population figure estimate for the U.S., and the basic stats of births, deaths, net international immigrants into the country and net gain per second, which is one net every ten seconds.

The third frequently stated objection to immigration reduction comes from the Jewish community.....They remember with pain the 1939 shipload of German-Jewish refugees that were denied entry into the U.S. in their effort to escape the Nazi Holocaust. This is a very important community of citizens that we need to persuade that Jews have the most to lose with the current social reorganization taking place in America today.

For a detailed analysis of why Jews have the most to lose with the increasing number of Muslims in the U.S. and their growing power to impact our policies on Israel, I recommend the CIS April 2004 Backgrounder by Dr. Stephen Steinlight.

A couple of salient points from that Backgrounder--- Muslims have larger families and, with chain migration access, their numbers and voting strength could soon surpass that of Jews. Also, under the Lautenberg Amendment hundreds of thousands of Jews entered the U.S. ahead of thousands of other refugees. Note that they are not immigrants but refugees from religious persecution and there is now a State of Israel in existence.

I think our message to the undecided needs to be very, very simple. Sound bites, if you will. As an environmentalist embracing the urgent need for population limits in the U.S. and the world, this "greening of hate" slur that was launched by an article in the Natural Resources Defense Counsel's "On Earth" magazine, makes me livid.

It is one thing to be attacked by the corporate greed community but to be maligned by a leading environmental organization is a really painful jibe. How to answer that and the other slurs of racism and nativism may need to be adjusted according to your local situation and audience. I am still searching for a good sound bite for a rejoinder. "RUBBISH" perhaps? A positive response might say that anyone protecting our access to safe drinking water, clean air and a civil society with a common language, is protecting their children and their grandchildren from a breakdown in our country. History tells us that all great civilizations commit suicide and our 200-year experiment in democracy is not immune to going down that road.

As far as the "moral challenge" of pulling up the gangplank, we just have to say it again and again.....We are advocating for a return to traditional levels of immigration...Whatever assistance we can provide to help other countries to help themselves to become independently sustainable is a better investment than the anti-ballistic missile shield we are presently pouring billions of dollars into.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich in his 1978 book, "The Population Bomb", said that we should give time-limited aid to those countries that have a chance of becoming self-sustaining and let the others drift. Harsh, perhaps, but realistic.

Otis Graham points out in "Unguarded Gates" that it took forty years from the recognition of the need for limits on immigration before Congress began enacting the first immigration laws in the late 1880's. Next year marks forty years from the 1965 immigration policy changes that initiated the Second Tidal Wave of immigration. Maybe we are getting close to some successes.

Joyce Tarnow, President (tarnowj@bellsouth.net)
Floridians for a Sustainable Population