Evironment

A green haze

by Ben Geman

Admit it. You've been blaming environmental problems on easy targets: incinerators, gas-guzzling SUVs, pesticides, filthy power plants, clear-cutting, even nuclear waste.

Well, it's time to get with the program. The real environmental threat comes from the Mexicans streaming over the border, claims the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform.

FAIR, which also blames newcomers for everything from low wages to racial tension to terrorism, is now trying to get environmentalists to do its dirty work. It's placed ads in Mother Jones and the environmental magazine E touting its new publication, "The Environmentalist's Guide to a Sensible Immigration Policy," which argues that countryside-destroying urban sprawl -- Al Gore's favorite issue -- is driven in large part by immigration.

"The Environmentalist's Guide" is a slick and cynical piece of work designed to push buttons with people who seem an unlikely audience for the group's conservative views. In one section, for example, it claims that "immigration harms the poor more than anyone." Sprinkled throughout the slim volume are photographs of waterfalls and farmland (presumably protected by adequate border security) and, not so subtly, shots of dark-skinned men cutting down trees.

FAIR's environmental logic is rather dubious. Citing examples such as Washington, DC, it claims that residents of cities and inner suburbs are moving into formerly rural areas to escape congestion, bad schools, and other urban problems that FAIR blames on immigration. The group has placed op-ed pieces in Texas, Arizona, and Rhode Island newspapers making the same claims.

And this is only the latest of FAIR's attempts to forge ties between xenophobes and greens. Last year, FAIR backed a Sierra Club members' initiative to reverse the environmental group's official neutrality on immigration. That effort was voted down, but it did spur an intense and sometimes angry debate -- and backers of the plan made real headway before they eventually lost.

That willingness to give xenophobia a hearing disturbs many environmentalists. James McCaffrey, executive director of the Massachusetts Sierra Club, says that rather than attacking immigration, the green-minded should push for things such as worldwide family planning to help curb population growth. "You have to go to the root of the problem, or else you're just putting a Band-Aid on things," he says. "Population is a global issue, and while there are clear impacts within borders, until we have a global strategy to deal with worldwide population issues, dealing with a microcosm of it . . . will not solve the problem."