Citizen Staff Writer
DENOGEAN COLUMN
Illegal immigrants have become the nation’s favorite whipping boy, blamed for everything from causing the collapse of the medical system to botching our orders at the fast food drive-through because of their poor English skills.
One popular pundit even charges illegal immigrants with threatening the health of Americans by bringing leprosy into the country.
But who knew that immigrants – both legal and illegal – are responsible for accelerating the demise of all mankind?
I thought I’d heard it all until I received a report earlier this month essentially blaming all immigrants to the United States for global warming.
This gem came from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which describes itself as an “independent research institute,” but is actually dedicated to proving that immigration, sanctioned or not, is bad for the U.S.
I was unable to reach the report’s co-authors, Steven Camarota and Leon Kolankiewicz, on Thursday.
But their report argues that immigration to the U.S. significantly increases worldwide carbon dioxide emissions (which causes global warming) by moving populations from lower-polluting parts of the world to the higher-polluting U.S.
You see, these tired and huddled masses have the audacity to come to our country to make better lives for themselves. Those better lives includes modern conveniences that increase the total carbon dioxide emissions attributable to one person, such as traveling by car or bus, cooking with electricity or gas, dining on imported food and starting the day with a hot shower.
The Center for Immigration Studies was careful to say in its news release that “it’s certainly not our intention to imply that immigrants are responsible for global warming,” before twisting its own research to do just that.
According to the report, the estimated carbon emission of the average immigrant, legal or illegal, in the United States is actually 18 percent less than that of the average native-born American.
“However,” the center concluded, “immigrants in the United States produce an estimated four times more carbon dioxide in the United States as they would have in their countries of origin.”
U.S. immigrants produce an estimated 637 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emission yearly, 482 million tons more than they would have produced had they remained in their home countries, the center said.
Worse, the higher the income these immigrants achieve, the greater their emissions. And these figures, according to the center, don’t include the impact of the children born to immigrants in the U.S. (also known as Americans).
“If they were included, the impact would be much higher,” the center said.
In other words, if these immigrants would just stay where they belong in their unheated huts in the jungles of deepest Africa or their tiny farms in rural Mexico and live out their lives in the poverty that God clearly intended for them, it would be better not only for the U.S., but for the whole world.
It would be the humanitarian thing for them to do.
Instead, they selfishly persist in their pursuit of the American dream.
Don’t they know that America – and our divine right to exploit as much of the Earth’s natural resources as we like – is only for “real” Americans?
Anne T. Denogean can be reached at 573-4582 and adenogean@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. Her columns run Tuesdays and Fridays.