As we’ve mentioned many, many times, there’s growing momentum for real immigration reform. Over the past couple days, we’ve added some new allies from the environmental community.
Yesterday, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and one of the leading voices in the environmental movement, issued a powerful call for real immigration reform:
For environmentalists, population has long been a problem. Many of the things we do wouldn’t cause so much trouble if there weren’t so many of us. It’s why I wrote a book some years ago called “Maybe One: An Argument for Smaller Families.” Heck, it’s why I had only one child.
And many of us, I think, long viewed immigration through the lens of population; it was another part of the math problem. I’ve always thought we could afford historical levels of immigration, but I understood why some other environmentalists wanted tougher restrictions. More Americans would mean more people making use of the same piece of land, a piece that was already pretty hard-used.
In recent years, though, the math problem has come to look very different to me. It’s one reason I feel it’s urgent that we get real immigration reform, allowing millions to step out of the shadows and on to a broad path toward citizenship. It will help, not hurt, our environmental efforts, and potentially in deep and powerful ways.
And Philip Radford from Greenpeace also offered support for reform with an article at Huffington Post titled, “The Environmental Case for a Path to Citizenship“:
Greenpeace believes everyone is born with equal rights. As Americans, we believe all people should be treated fairly, no matter the color of their skin or the country of a their birth. This means that everyone has an equal right to protection from corporate polluters, and that no one should be forced into a vulnerable shadow class simply because of paperwork. These are the standards of our founders, and to meet these standards, we have a moral imperative to modernize and humanize our immigration policies so all Americans have equal protection from polluters under the law.
Undocumented workers are among the most vulnerable workers in our society, from their exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals in agricultural work and manufacturing, to their isolation in pollution-choked neighborhoods caring for vulnerable families and children. Every human being deserves the dignity and right to stand up to polluters in the workplace and at home without fear of being deported and taken from their families. Without a path to citizenship, undocumented immigrants are left at the mercy of corporate polluters.
