Immigration, Wildfires, and Resilience

author Published by Jeremy Beck

The Biden-Harris approach to immigration was to ignore the numbers and focus on making an “orderly” system. Their approach to illegal immigration was to make as much of it “legal” as they could. Even in a large country such as the U.S., that approach was doomed to failure.

“Of course, it’s important to have laws obeyed and all applicants to the US vetted,” says the naturalist Karen Shragg , “but when we are already stressing our infrastructure and ecological limits, that extra paperwork doesn’t add up to a more sustainable country.” 

At the peak of the Biden immigration surge, immigration (legal and illegal) was taking in roughly 3.5 million people a year – seven times what Barbara Jordan recommended! At that pace, we are talking about another California every decade. 

As the devastating wildfires in California continue, there is a renewed national interest in the concept of “resilience” to natural disasters. As with other top issues (the economy, jobs, wages, housing, safety), immigration isn’t the only or most significant factor in our ability to weather fires, hurricanes, floods, and droughts – but immigration is a factor.

Perpetual immigration-driven population growth inevitably leads to more Americans living in what’s called the “wildland-urban interface.” An estimated 16 million people do so today across the American West, including a 40 percent increase in people living in fire-prone parts of California.

“Santa Ana winds have whipped up wildfires in Southern California since before recorded time,” writes Matthew Hennessey in the Wall Street Journal. “What’s new is that 10 million people have settled in Los Angeles County since 1900.”

“Certainly, there is blame to go around,” writes Leighton Woodhouse in Newsweek, “But the fundamental engine for these disasters is the simple, physical reality of California, which prevailed before any of us were born: We built a massive civilization in a place where fire is as much a part of the natural habitat as summer rains are in the east.”

NumbersUSA has been studying urban sprawl, and the role that immigration policy plays in it, for over two decades. Our first study was of California. In some ways, Los Angeles is unique from other cities that typically have “agricultural zones” as a buffer between cities and wildlands. The lead author of our studies, Leon Kolankiewicz explains:

“The major reason much of Los Angeles remained wild and fire-prone, instead of being converted to grazing lands or orange groves and strawberry fields, or urban sprawl, like much of Southern California was in the 20th century, is because of the rugged terrain and topography.  There are the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains, climaxing on the summit of Mt. San Antonio (also called “Mt. Baldy” because it’s above timberline) at 10,064 ft above sea level.  Forty miles to the east, Mt. San Gorgonio in the Transverse Ranges reaches 11,503 ft. 

“When the smog clears because it’s blown out to the Pacific by those same easterly Santa Ana winds blowing down from the desert (as long as there aren’t wildfires producing smoke), you can see the incredible snow-capped peaks of the San Gabriels and the Transverse Ranges, sometimes with tall palm trees in the foreground. It is truly an astonishingly diverse ecosystem and landscape.”

“The idea that America is practically empty and can support nearly unlimited expansion is nonsense,” adds Jim Robb, V.P. of Alliances for NumbersUSA. 

“For the US, there is no plausible high-immigration path to a sustainable population,” writes NumbersUSA board member Philip Cafaro in the abstract of his peer-reviewed research article. “Because larger populations increase human environmental impacts, sustainability advocates in the US and other countries with high net immigration levels have strong prima facie reasons to support immigration reductions.”

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