Progressives to Launch an Environmental Impact Statement on U.S. Immigration Policy

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Friday, August 3, 2012, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR) announced a major new project: an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on U.S. immigration policy.  PFIR also unveiled the website for the new project, and invited public comments on the proper scope and parameters of the study.

In recent decades, American environmentalists have debated about whether or not to weigh in on U.S. immigration policy.  Many environmentalists have wondered:

• What roles immigration and population growth play in driving the problems environmentalists seek to solve?
• Can these problems be solved without addressing immigration and immigration-driven population growth?
• What are the policy choices with regard to immigration levels, and how can we choose fairly and wisely among them?

The main policy decision to be evaluated in the new EIS is what level Congress should set for annual immigration into the United States. Current legal immigration into the U.S. is now approximately 950,000 people per year, while an average of 300,000 to 400,000 people immigrate illegally.

According to Dr. Philip Cafaro, a principal investigator in the study: "The EIS will identify a number of plausible alternative immigration scenarios, regarding how many immigrants to allow into the country annually. The study will also develop demographic projections specifying future U.S. populations, based on these different annual immigration rates." This will be followed by detailed analyses examining the likely ecological impacts of different population sizes in areas such as; urban sprawl and farmland loss; water demands and withdrawals from natural systems; greenhouse gas emissions and resultant climate change; habitat loss and impacts on biodiversity; energy demands and national security implications; and the international ecological impacts of U.S. immigration policies.

"The EIS project aims to develop a thorough, objective analysis of the ecological impacts of U.S. immigration policy, so that policy decisions can be made in full knowledge of those impacts," stated Leah Durant, Executive Director of PFIR.

PFIR hereby solicits public comment on the scope and methodology of this new Environmental Impact Statement on U.S. immigration policy. This initial "scoping" phase of the study will last through October 1.  More information can be found by visiting http://www.immigrationeis.org/.

SOURCE Progressives for Immigration Reform