Trip to DC: Summary

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Greetings,

 

Please note that I am directing any population/environment correspondence to my Yahoo address:  mjp...@yahoo.com.

 

 

Please find pasted below a summary of my trip last month to D.C. for a series of population-group meetings.

 

 

Thanks for supporting this trip through your organizational budgets.

 

Mark

 

 

 

 

 

October 2011, Population meetings in Washington, D.C.

 

 

I attended a series of population-related meetings on October 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th of 2011.  The first meeting was held by the Social Contract Press and had a sharp focus on immigration, and especially on illegal immigration. Several of the speakers were citizen activists and politicians who described their efforts to pressure the appropriate authorities in their jurisdictions to enforce existing laws regarding illegal immigrants.  The Social Contract Press meeting also included a number of presentations about media campaigns and social media strategies.  I found these segments informative, but overall I felt a little uncomfortable at the Social Contract Press event because of the focus on illegals, which in my mind put too much energy into the premise that illegal immigrants are inherently bad people and should be feared.  I feel that this is not an effective strategy with which to engage the American public.  In contrast, there was relatively little discussion of the overall impact of U.S. population growth and its social and environmental impacts.

 

The second day’s meeting, hosted by the Population Media Center, seemed much more in line with my own views. It emphasized the concerns about population growth around the globe, but did not shy away from addressing the impacts of U.S. population growth, of which immigration, legal and illegal combined,  is the largest component. While some of the discussion addressed illegal immigration, this was far less of a focus than it had been at the Social Contract Meeting.  The first presentation at the PMC event had a global focus.  A graduate student from the University of Hawaii shared insights from his multi-year effort to determine the effectiveness of internationally recognized marine sanctuaries in achieving their stated goals of protecting significant portions of the marine environments. He found that the effectiveness of such programs were greatly hampered by lack of enforcement and an inability of national governments or international organizations to provide adequate resources to truly protect these “sanctuaries.”  Clearly, this was a very important study, and it provided a strong rationale for all governments to support programs aimed at slowing global population growth.

A series of speakers and presenters followed.  A panel of young Americans spoke of their interests in population matters and attempted to convey to the group a sense of how best to engage the interests and energies of their generation in addressing both global and domestic population growth. It was clear that these young people were exceptions among their peers, and that there remains a very challenging battle ahead if we ever hope to get younger Americans to take stand on population growth, especially the U.S. growth that is so largely driven by immigration.

Another speaker addressed the efforts by some on the left to characterize any efforts to reduce population growth, and most notably efforts aimed at reducing U.S. immigration, as inherently racist. He took particular issue with the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based organization that has attacked some key figures, most notably John Tanton, and tried to argue that because of this one individual’s modest role in the efforts of many population groups, their arguments are all invalid and driven exclusively by racial bigotry. 

 

After lunch, I introduced the seven minute version of my video challenging the Census Bureau’s misleading characterizations of U.S. population as a “slowing of growth.”  This served as a seque into a discussion of the 1969 Environmental Protection Act (NEPA).  In the panel that discussed this topic, one woman from Florida described her efforts to require the federal government to prepare, in keeping with NEPA, an environmental impact statement for U.S. immigration policy.  This was a fascinating discussion, and one that offers a germ of hope that current policies might soon be facing a much more rigorous challenge than anything we have seen thus far. 

By this time, I had come under the influence of a bad cold, and I had to skip out of the last two segments of this meeting and also the screening of “Mother,”  a film about the global population’s imminent arrival at 7 billion people.

On the following morning, I was well enough to return to the Kaiser Family Foundation building for a meeting of Progressives for Immigration Reform.  This was a more targeted group than the PMC meeting hosted, but it was clearly more population-focused than the Social Contract meeting had been. Compared to the Social Contract meeting this group evidenced a higher respect for immigrants as people and focused less on illegal immigration and more on immigration’s overall impact on population growth.  I was most inspired by Mr. Frank Morris, a former Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus.  Here was a very stately and dignified African American speaking without inhibition of the impact of the U.S. immigration policy on the millions of low-skilled, low-income blacks throughout our country.  I found it truly compelling to see how strongly he was willing to state the truth, that the overabundance of foreign workers in our country was having a devastating impact on native-born African Americans. This is a man, and a message, that more progressive Americans need to hear.

 

 

Submitted by Mark Powell

George
True sustainability will only be achieved with population stabilization.
www.vspop.org
http://groups.google.com/group/vermonters-for-sustainable-population

George
True sustainability will only be achieved with population stabilization.
www.vspop.org
http://groups.google.com/group/vermonters-for-sustainable-population