Politico
By Darren Samuelson
June 2, 2013
Environmentalists are getting off the sidelines and backing immigration reform — but it wasn’t easy.
During the Senate’s last go round on the issue in 2007, greens stayed silent to avoid airing their dirty laundry — an internal dispute that some in the movement feared would be seen as racist.
Their family feud was so rough that it twice nearly ruptured the Sierra Club when a vocal faction — including some of the movement’s leading luminaries — argued too many new immigrants living the American dream could spell doom for the planet.
Fast forward to 2013, and the Sierra Club, BlueGreen Alliance and Greenpeace are among those out publicly in support of the kinds of comprehensive immigration reform measures pursued by President Barack Obama and the Senate’s Gang of Eight.
Atop their list of reasons why: the prospect of 11 million new green-minded voters.
Just like Republicans who see political gain in courting a new generation of Latino voters, greens count Hispanics, Asians and other potential new Americans as friendly to their causes, even more so in some instances than whites.
“The Sierra Club has thrived because of the ability for our members to engage with the full tools of democracy,” Michael Brune, the group’s executive director, told POLITICO.
“Right now, there are 11 million people who don’t have the tools, who can’t act without fear. They can’t vote. They can’t engage in the public process. They can’t advocate for clean energy without the threat of deportation,” Brune added. “Nobody should live under those circumstances.”
And if Congress paves the way for undocumented workers to become new citizens with full voting rights, they reason that it’d also be good news for their cause in electing lawmakers who will speak up for the EPA, clean energy and aggressive climate change policies.
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer welcomed the greens’ entry to the debate, noting that illegal immigrants often live and work in places that are more vulnerable than the general population to higher levels of air, water and soil pollution. But they can’t speak up now for fear of deportation.
“Where somebody is going to put the most polluting industry in a very poor neighborhood, if people are afraid to come forward because they’re not even documented, their voice isn’t heard,” the California Democrat said in an interview.
It could also be good news for the bill itself.
Sen. Marco Rubio told POLITICO that the Gang of Eight think so. “Obviously, I can’t recall the last time I’ve been aligned with” the Sierra Club or other green groups, the Florida Republican said. “But on this issue, I think by and large there’s a growing consensus across the country that we need to deal with immigration reform once and for all.”
Environmentalists say their work on the immigration issue also gives them solid ground to stand on as they engage on issues intertwined in this legislative fight.
Several progressive and green groups pulled their ads off of Facebook in early May to protest pro-oil, anti-Obamacare ads sponsored by a subsidiary of Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform campaign.
Greens also claimed a minor victory last month when Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy added an amendment to the Gang of Eight bill watering down language that would have allowed the Homeland Security Department to bypass all environmental laws before doing major infrastructure and security work at the borders. The waiver remains, though it does sunset once the border is deemed “secure” and federal land managers now would get more say in what types of projects get built.
Several environmental group leaders advocating for immigration reform said they didn’t hear from the White House before registering support. But they said their new stance emerged after talks with the Service Employees International Union and other labor groups, civil rights activists and other like-minded liberal causes who they’ve partnered with on other issues.
Still, it hasn’t been easy getting here.
While environmentalists have fought together for decades against industry on pollution issues, they’ve also sparred among themselves over immigration – and whether the U.S. could ever end up with too many people for its own good.
In 1997-98, the Sierra Club faced a mutiny from within its own ranks over whether to end a long-standing position of neutrality on immigration. The question: whether to back a new stance favoring “an end to U.S. population growth at the earliest possible time through reduction in natural increase (births minus deaths)” and “through reduction in net immigration.”
Several environmental heavyweights, including former Kennedy and Johnson administration Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, Earth Day founder and former Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and Earth First co-founder Dave Foreman, spoke up for the ballot initiative.
But it went down by a 60 percent to 40 percent margin.
Some greens tried again in 2004, this time by pushing a slate of anti-immigrant candidates, including former Colorado Democratic Gov. Richard Lamm, to serve on the Sierra Club’s board of directors. After more heated debate, Lamm and his allies were rejected in one of the largest turnouts for board voting in the club’s more than 100-year old history.
Both votes raised difficult questions about race. The Los Angeles Times reported before the final 1998 vote that some greens worried that the Sierra Club taking an anti-immigration position “would expose the club to charges of racism and elitism and alienate politicians who have been friends on such issues as logging and wetlands protection.”
“Concerns about perception were well founded,” explained a former Sierra Club official active in the 2004 fight. “And I think they still haunt the organization.”
The Sierra Club’s critics say the environmental group has skirted population issues because it doesn’t want to anger some of its largest donors. They say the group now is just shilling to win more Democratic voters.
“I believe they have morphed from environmentalist into politicians,” Lamm said in an email, noting that population remains “an indispensable part of any environment program.”
“Whatever the Sierra Club and other groups are fighting for, it will be lost by mass immigration. How is doubling our population consistent with any environmental goals?” he said.
“This is political quackery. The Sierra Club has got its head up its you know what,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a conservative group founded by a former Sierra Club activist that’s now leading opposition to the Senate’s immigration bill.
An environmentalist not connected to the Sierra Club said the group’s new position favoring immigration reform helps in “exorcising” itself from its past battles. “Internally, it’s been viewed as an embarrassment,” the source said.
Boxer said she doesn’t care where the Sierra Club and other environmentalists once were on immigration. “That was years ago,” she said. “They’re changing. The country does move forward. One thing if you look at any part of American history is that as the years go by, we get more inclusive and they have embraced this. I think it’s a good step for them.”
“I think it has shown a maturity with the groups. That’s my assessment anyway,” said Sen. Tom Udall, the New Mexico Democrat whose late father Stewart often spoke publicly about the connection between immigration and population issues. After Stewart Udall left the Johnson Cabinet, he cut an ad for free for Planned Parenthood.
“He was just very interested in seeing that we got some control on population,” Tom Udall said. “He got a little bit of ribbing because he had six kids.”
Tom Udall, who is in favor of the Senate moving an immigration reform package, said his father’s perspective still deserves to be part of the debate. “I think we should have a discussion about where we’re headed on population because every single one of the pressing issues we face has a population component,” he said.
Asked about the group’s history battling over immigration, Brune insisted that the group had changed with the times. He pointed to Rubio’s involvement in the Gang of Eight, plus statements supporting reform from Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. The Sierra Club’s stance is just “one more indication of how popular public opinion has shifted dramatically on immigration,” he said.
“This is an important piece of legislation that has significant consequences for the environment,” Brune said. “We felt it was important to have our position be made very clear.”
Former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called the Sierra Club’s stance “an awesome statement” that can sway lawmakers because the group is echoing the stance of business interests, civil rights groups and religious organizations including the Catholic Church.
“What we’re seeing manifest itself here is the coming together of a very united coalition that says we need to get comprehensive immigration reform done,” Salazar said in an interview. “The greater the unity in the message to Congress the better. In that way, the Sierra Club statement is a very helpful one.”
The former Colorado Democratic senator also took issue with Sierra Club critics like Lamm by noting that U.S. population has grown over the last 30 years while still making big strides on the environment.
“The important thing is that as the U.S. grows that it grows in a way that is smart, that protects the environment and the places that have the ecological value that is important,” Salazar said.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, is among the big names in the green brigade who once pushed population issues in tandem with immigration. But in a March op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote that he no longer viewed the two issues in the same prism like he did in the late 1990s, when he wrote a book urging Americans to have only one child.
With climate change now among the world’s most pressing environmental problems, he said it doesn’t matter where people live when it comes to curbing greenhouse gas emissions. He also cited a Pew Research Center report showing lower birthrates in the U.S. among Mexican American women and women immigrants from Mexico.
“But there’s a higher math that matters much more here,” McKibben wrote, noting the struggle in Congress to move a climate bill. “And that’s precisely where white America has fallen short. Election after election, native-born and long-standing citizens pull the lever for climate deniers, for people who want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, for the politicians who take huge quantities of cash from the Koch brothers and other oil barons.”
Give illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship, he said, and they’re likely to be green voters. Here, he cited a 2012 survey from the Sierra Club and the National Council of La Raza showing 77 percent of Latino voters think climate change is already happening, versus 52 percent of the general population.
“[I]mmigrants, by definition, are full of hope,” McKibben wrote. “They’ve come to a new place determined to make a new life, risking much for opportunity. They’re confident that new kinds of prosperity are possible. The future beckons them, and so changes of the kind we’ll need to deal with climate change are easier to conceive.”
Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford said his group endorsed comprehensive immigration reform after hearing from a friend who believed environmentalists were opposed to the issue. “Which was surprising to me,” he said. He said he met with the SEIU, Center for Community Change, National Domestic Workers Alliance and also connected with several other environmental groups trying to bring them on board.
“We thought we needed to make a statement to show that many people who care about the environment are in solidarity with the demand for a path to citizenship in our democracy,” he said.
The BlueGreen Alliance, a labor-environmental coalition that includes the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation and Union of Concerned Scientists, released a statement last month backing immigration reform. NRDC’s board also met separately to discuss the issue last week , according to a source familiar with its plans.
Still more groups have been involved by targeting the border provisions in the Gang of Eight bill, arguing the bill dismantles existing environmental, public health and safety laws. Defenders of Wildlife, the League of Conservation Voters, Center for Biological Diversity and The Wilderness Society sent a letter in April to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging it drop the language.
Marty Hayden, vice president of policy and legislation at Earthjustice, said his group backed immigration reform because of its work with long-standing clients like the United Farm Workers and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. Often, they are the ones fighting the hardest against exposure to toxic pollution and pesticides.
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