The Case Against Immigration

Journalist Roy Beck vividly portrays the damaging effects of mass immigration on American workers and local communities.

See the disastrous consequences of immigration not only for the coastal cities but for interior towns such as Storm Lake, Iowa, and Ashland, Alabama, and Garden City, Kansas, and Lexington, Nebraska.

The 500% increase in immigration numbers has played an integral part in destroying middle-class occupations and turning them into minimum-wage jobs. The book describes many occupations where this has happened. It gives special attention to the way the immigration policy of Congress has reduced economic opportunity for black Americans, deepened the poverty of farm workers, destroyed the health of poultry plant employees and turned many construction, manufacturing and service jobs into "work Americans won't do."

Especially shocking is the detailed story of how immigration was used at the turn-of-the-last century to create the working conditions in the meatpacking industry described by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle — how the curtailment of immigration from 1925 to 1965 allowed those same jobs to become one of the safest and best-paid occupations in America — and how the new mass immigration has driven working conditions and wages right back to the Jungle level.

Using numerous, recent little-known studies published in top academic journals, the book shows the role of immigration in the 20-year decline in non-supervisory wages, the widening of income disparity and the squeezing of the middle class. And it provides a review of immigration history that shows that these have been the destructive effects of immigration every time in American history when the numbers have surged.

This is a book that changes people's minds and convinces the apathetic of the urgency for action.

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If you find yourself debating immigration issues with friends, colleagues or in public arenas such as radio call-in shows, this book is made for you. Scattered throughout the book are 120 boxes, each with an argument that pro-immigrationists offer for why it would be wrong for the United States to begin to stabilize its population like the other advanced nations. Following each box are a couple of sound-bite retorts to those arguments. Then, background material is provided. Each paragraph has a citation to an expert who is the source. Arguments to which the book provides rebuttals ranges from globablism, to tradition, to economics, to diversity.

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Since 1970 the majority of population growth in the United States has come from immigrants and their descendants. Demographers predict that this trend will intensify in the new century if federal laws remain unchanged. For a look at a possible American future, consider the fate of a small midwestern city.

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The dramatic results of this report indicate that population growth has been the No. 1 factor in California's relentless urban sprawl. Overall, 95% of the total sprawl in California from 1970-1990 was related to population growth, indicating that most Urbanized Areas in California succeed in stopping increases in per capita land consumption. Yet despite efforts to stop per capita land consumption, sprawl consumed another 1,670 square miles of land during the period studied, primarily because of population growth. "Sprawl in California" was presented at the CAPS 2000 Conference at the University of Southern California on August 13, 2000.

View the full report at SprawlCity.org

Florida's phenomenal population growth has been the No. 1 factor in the state's urban sprawl, according to the results of this study released during Florida OverPopulation Awareness Week (October 29 - November 4, 2000). In fact, in most Urbanized Areas of Florida, the amount of land per resident did not grow at all, indicating that growth in percapita consumption was not a factor in any of the sprawl in those cities. Rather, the volatile growth of Florida's population outweighed the sprawl effect of all other factors combined suggesting that antisprawl efforts in Florida must also try to limit population growth in order to be effective.

View the full report at SprawlCity.org

This journal article appeared in Volume 12, No.1, 2000 of the Journal of Policy History out of Penn State University. Part of a special issue of the Journal dedicated to Environmental Politics and Policy, the article details the way in which population stabilization has moved from center-stage within the American environmental movement to virtual obscurity in just two decades. Many compelling suggestions as to why the environmental movement has retreated from advancing population stabilization as a goal are put forth by the authors who, admittedly not historians, provide an engaging review of the modern American environmental movement along the way.

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At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1970, environmentalists heartily embraced stabilization of America's population as a core objective of their movement, without which they believed no amount of legislation or spending could stop and reverse the harm being done to the natural world. But as of Earth Day 2001, no national environmental group works for an end to U.S. population growth. This despite the fact that the 2000 census showed that the 1990s saw the largest population growth in American history, larger even than the peak of the postwar Baby Boom. What happened? This monograph analyzes a series of developments that led to the environmental movement's retreat from population advocacy.

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Forging a sustainable energy policy is one of America’s greatest challenges in the new century. A sustainable energy policy will also look at the demand, and not just the supply, side of the equation. This study examines what portion of America’s growing energy consumption can be linked to a growing population, that is, an increase in the number of energy consumers in the United States, and what portion can be linked to rising per capita energy consumption reflecting our passion for a plethora of consumer products that use, in total, a prodigious amount of energy. Using a standard mathematical apportioning procedure (explained in the study), the analysis assigns percentages of our rising consumption of total energy, petroleum, and electricity and our output of carbon (that is, carbon dioxide), the major greenhouse gas, to population growth, and by implication, to growth in per capita consumption.

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Immigration Action Guide

A companion to Roy Beck's Immigration by the Numbers video, this guide is designed for distribution to audiences where immigration has been the topic and especially where the video has been part of the program. It describes five steps each citizen can take to bring down the legal immigration numbers. It includes many details about (1) contacting members of Congress effectively, (2) using the world wide web to keep communication with Congress up-to-date, (3) showing the video in many different settings, (4) joining a national group, and (5) becoming better informed.

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In recent years, many local governments, states, and non-profit groups have adopted initiatives to save rural land from sprawl. Most anti-sprawl efforts have focused on "Smart Growth," which emphasizes better planning to create more efficient land use. A new study from the Center for Immigration Studies finds that this approach will have limited success in saving rural land because it fails to address a key reason for sprawl -- population growth. Click here to read more.

This report coauthored by Roy Beck, Executive Director of NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation, and Steven Camarota, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, finds compelling evidence that an enormous gap exists between the American people and opinion leaders on the issue of immigration — a gap that seems to be increasing.

The CIS Backgrounder, "Elite vs. Public Opinion: An Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration," is the first to examine in detail the differences between public and elite opinion on the issue of immigration. The report is based on data from a recent survey on foreign policy issues conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. The survey, taken in May through July of this year, was based on 2,800 interviews of ordinary Americans and a cross-section of 400 "opinion leaders," including members of Congress, the administration, church leaders, business executives, union leaders, journalists, academics, and leaders of major interest groups.

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