…Immigrants come specifically to increase their carbon footprint. And I don’t mean [anybody’s] saying, ‘Boy, I’m gonna increase my carbon footprint.’ What they’re doing is they want to come and have a decent house, and maybe be able to own a car and have a more prosperous life, which translates inevitably into increasing their carbon footprint.
If you’re a peasant farmer in Honduras, you’re not having much of an impact on the environment. If you’re living in a modern society, even as a lower-middle-class working stiff, you’re having a hugely greater impact on the environment.
That was not controversial in the past, when the population issue was mainly a matter of domestic fertility—in other words, when most population growth was driven by Americans having kids, then it was okay to be concerned about population growth on the Left, because that was, in a sense, a way of being anti-American.
