Numbers USA, an anti-immigration outfit, is celebrating Earth Day 2014 with an important announcement: Immigrants are to blame for the destruction of farm land and natural habitats.
In a post that went up on the eve of Earth Day, Roy Beck, the group’s founder and president, claimed that “about 70% of all the open-space destruction around our urban areas in the last decade was related to population growth” and that “new immigrants and births to immigrants in the last decade have been the equivalent of about 70% of U.S. population growth.”
This Malthusian notion is, of course, consistent with the group’s mission. As the New York Times has reported, Numbers USA was among several anti-immigration groups “nurtured” by Dr. John Tanton, who “urged liberal colleagues in groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club to seek immigration restraints…”
Politics, I suppose, makes strange bedfellows.
UPDATE: As one of the commenters notes, Beck founded Numbers USA, while Tanton “nurtured” it — and similar groups. (I have updated this post to reflect the NYT update.)