As attention turns to the post-Gustav RNC, I want to put in a word for ProJo op-ed contributor Froma Harrop's work out of the DNC in Denver, in part since I took a poke at her here.
Why isn’t the population boom being discussed at the party conventions? Because its main driver is immigration — both the number of newcomers and their high birth rates. (The region is also trying to accommodate people relocating from other parts of the country, many of them trying to escape the congestion in California.)
Promoters of open borders like to drag race into any discussion of immigration, so that even those who focus on numbers, not skin color, fear to speak. The Sierra Club has gone into total hiding on the matter. Even when you limit the subject to illegal immigration, they’re under the bed.
In 2004, [Colorado Governor Dick] Lamm and two other environmentalists wanting to address population pressures ran for the Sierra Club’s board. They all lost after the club’s executive director, Carl Pope, announced that “they are clearly being supported by racists.” (One of them, Frank Morris, had been director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.)
The full story can be found at a Web site, www.susps.org. SUSPS used to call itself Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization. Fred Elbel, a former director and Denver resident, describes himself as liberal Democrat who left the party in frustration over its failure to confront the demographic realities of immigration.
“It’s called the third rail,” Elbel told me, “But immigration and urban population growth will be the defining issue for our country in this century.” The parties do talk about immigration, he adds, but never its environmental implications.
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