Rather than recommending that Americans cut back on their excessive consumer lifestyle, an anti-immigration group has released an advertisement touting controversial research that has claimed immigrants’ carbon footprints quadruple in size after moving to the US.
The group, Californians for Population Stabilization, does not advocate that Americans themselves have fewer children, nor do they promote any other type of change to the American lifestyle. In fact, this is the first time they have mentioned global warming in any of their campaigns.
Brent A. Wilkes, the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, responded to the ad by pointing out that Latin-American immigrants actually drive about half as much as the typical American.
“The ad is utter nonsense,” added Reshma Shamasunder, director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. “It uses information from CIS, which is clearly an anti-immigration group.”
For more information and a clip of the ad, watch this Salinas, CA newscast:
Photo Credit: Swanksalot on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
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Alex Felsinger
Alex is primarily concerned with animal welfare, wildlife conservation, and environmental justice. As a freelance writer in San Francisco, he leads a deliberately simplistic and thrifty lifestyle, yet still can’t help gawking at the newest green gadgets and zero-emission concept cars.
6 Responses to Ad Blames Illegal Immigrants for Global Warming (Video)
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[...] to be actively competing for immigrants. We will need to shift from talking about how to limit immigration to how finding ways to encourage [...]
[...] to be actively competing for immigrants. We will need to shift from talking about how to limit immigration to how finding ways to encourage [...]
[...] Posted by John Hummel on November 3, 2008 This has to the the stupidest thing I’ve seen yet. Of all of the things to blame for global warming – from consumer habits, lack of public transportation, failure to push for higher fuel efficiency – Californians for Population Stabilization blames illegal immigrants as one of the main causes behind…. [...]
has claimed immigrants’ carbon footprints quadruple in size after moving to the US
Sounds plausible, since people immigrate for economic reasons. It’s easy to have a small ecological footprint if you don’t have money to spend on stuff.
Still, it’s a sickening argument that those people over there (but never us!) should avoid opportunities to improve their standard of living for the sake of the environment.
Any model of sustainability that does not provide for social justice in a global society will not be very stable or, in the long run, sustainable.
this is bs, immigrants causing global warming, and what are those people doing, preventing it? Are they going to say, “Oh, we were here first, so the word immigrant does not apply to us.”? Ways to prevent global warming are not to stand in a meaningless rally, but to follow and listen to al gore’s videos on global warming. It would do a lot more good.
The UK Government has warned that one consequence of the “credit crunch” is that we will see an increase in racism vs. Eastern European immigrants.
Good to know that this problem isn’t confined to just the UK/EU