TV Ad Says Immigration Exacerbates Global Warming
An ad campaign by Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) points out that when immigrants settle in the United States, their energy use quickly becomes Americanized. As a result, their carbon emissions skyrocket. The result is a quadrupling of immigrants' carbon footprints compared to the amount of carbon emissions they produced in their home countries.
CAPS' campaign comes at a time when America faces the largest population increase in its history. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau projections, U.S. population will jump from 305 million today to more than 400 million by 2040. That's a 33 percent increase yielding an additional 100 million more people in just the next 30 years. It's an increase equivalent to adding another entire Western half of the country. According to Pew Research, 82 percent of that growth will be a result of immigration and births to immigrants.
Diana Hull, CAPS president, commented, "Cutting immigration to the U.S. isn't the only thing we should do to solve the global warming problem, but stopping mass immigration, especially from low-carbon-use nations will go a long way toward a solution because it is a significant contributor to the problems we face."
The TV spot is based on a recent Center for Immigrations Studies (CIS) report about U.S. immigration and carbon emissions.
Currently, immigrants produce an estimated 637 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually or the same amount of carbon emissions currently produced by Great Britain and Sweden, combined.