Fears Of Immigration's Impact On The Environment Are Unfounded

The evidence is pretty strong that if we want more job and business creation in this country to help pull us out of this recession, more immigration is a great way to get there. But paradoxically, the recession is creating political pressure to block immigration reform, as my colleague Bonnie Erbe rightly points out.  Quite different from me, Erbe sees this as a positive development.

I come to my opposition to massive legal and illegal immigration from an environmental perspective. We're never going to cut down on smog, overdevelopment, traffic jams, yes, even traffic jams (and oh, don't forget, global warming) without first getting population growth under control.

The problem is that the evidence seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion: if you want less environmental degradation worldwide, demand more immigration.

How can that be? One simple reason: poor countries pollute more than rich countries. Economic growth is not the enemy of the environment, as many people assume.

Here's just one study showing that as a country develops and improves per capita income, there is also less pollution in that country:

Using data assembled by the Global Environmental Monitoring System we examine the reduced-form relationship between various environmental indicators and the level of a country's per capita income. Our study covers four types of indicators: concentrations of urban air pollution; measures of the state of the oxygen regime in river basins; concentrations of fecal contaminants in river basins; and concentrations of heavy metals in river basins. We find no evidence that environmental quality deteriorates steadily with economic growth. Rather, for most indicators, economic growth brings an initial phase of deterioration followed by a subsequent phase of improvement. The turning points for the different pollutants vary, but in most cases they come before a country reaches a per capita income of $8,000.

Immigration means people leave less-developed countries that produce a lot of pollution, and instead live in more-developed countries that pollute relatively less. Immigration also helps those poor countries develop (and thus, decrease pollution), because immigrants use their higher wages to send money back home, and also trade information and ideas with people in their native countries.

But what about global warming? The Krueger/Grossman study does not look at CO2 emissions. It also is true that CO2 emissions are different than air pollution in that rich countries actually produce more CO2 than poor countries. So wouldn't more immigration mean more harmful CO2 emissions?

It's quite possible, but think about why that would be true: if immigration creates more emissions, it's because it increases economic growth and makes people richer, thus causing them to emit more CO2.  Certainly we should find ways to deal with the problem of global warming. But fighting ways to make us richer in order to deal with the problem is cutting off the nose to spite the face. Under that logic, we should also end the fight against global poverty.  Don't pull people out of poverty--they'll just drive cars and worsen global warming!!

More wealth also gives us more resources to figure out ways to combat the ill effects of global warming. Creating a new path to legalized immigration would mean more money to pay for Obama's cap-and-trade plan, for example.

If you care about the environment, mourn the fact that immigration reform is stalling.