Executive Summary

Mass immigration, whether through established or extra-legal channels, has by default become the nation’s de facto population policy. Net immigration plus births to immigrants account for about 2.1 million new residents, more than 60 percent of America’s population growth of over 3 million each year. While Washington debates the immigrants’ skills, status and provenance, their environmental impact is the same: they and their children become part of the population base that intensifies the nation’s depletion of resources and environmental stress.

Washington has from time to time looked at the environmental effects of immigration in hearings, two special immigration commissions, and White House studies. But leaders have given them no weight in their ultimate immigration choices. In the first half of 2006 Congress and the President were considering so-called reforms legislation that would at least double annual immigration but, typically, the accompanying study of environmental consequences would come only after enactment.

Current immigration numbers are wildly beyond the levels needed to reach population stability leading to a slow reduction of population to an environmentally sustainable size. NPG believes that these goals can only be met if today’s illegal immigration of half a million yearly is reduced to near zero, and legal immigration is reduced by four-fifths — to about 200,000 yearly. Such reductions cannot be realized without deep cuts in family chain migration. Importation of family members, both immediate and more distant, now accounts for at least three-quarters of all legal entries. The proposed 200,000 ceiling slots would satisfy core national interests in rare and essential skills and in humanitarian relief.

After a five-year transition period away from the current family-centered system, 200,000 immigrants a year thereafter would be allocated among work and business needs (74.5 percent), humanitarian purposes (20 percent), and special immigrants (5.5 percent). Other major sources of unplanned immigration must be curtailed, such as mass asylum and refugee emergencies stemming from natural or foreign policy disasters, and must be averted with bolder action to find alternatives to resettlement in the U.S. Automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in U.S. territory (now over 300,000 yearly) would be ended.

The U.S. has accepted over 90 million immigrants since 1820. Without guilt, the nation can now be generous to the world in new ways: by slowing its profligate consumption and waste dumping, by remaining a major food exporter, and by curbing its intense competition for world energy supplies.

Immigration in all its many forms has in the last two decades become the main driver of America’s excessive population growth. Unlike fertility and mortality, immigration is the demographic process most responsive to policy changes and to regulation.

Newly-arriving immigrants of all categories — legal, quasi-legal and illegal — now add at least 1.1 million, or one-third, to yearly national population growth of 3.3 million yearly. The net figure is based on estimated total immigration of 1.6 million yearly minus total estimated deaths and emigration of the foreign-born at about 500,000 yearly.1 Net illegal immigration now accounts for a little more than a third of annual permanent immigration — about 400,000 a year. Net legal and long-term temporary (quasi-legal or Limited Duration) immigration accounts for a net of about 700,000 per year.

In addition to the newcomers, nearly a million children are born to immigrants in the U.S. each year — about 25 percent of all U.S. births. Births to illegal immigrants, conferring immediate U.S. citizenship, are more than a third of all immigrant births. For many immigrant women, resettlement in the U.S. now raises their fertility above that of their counterparts back home.2 Net new arrivals of immigrants and births together account for fully 61 percent of population growth. The total foreign-born population reached 35 million in 2005, or 11.8 percent of total population.