Who would you choose if you could vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election? Who Americans choose has important implications for people around the world. Unfortunately, neither major party candidate is committed to ending U.S. population growth or creating an environmentally sustainable society.
by Philip Cafaro
Once every four years, I attend to my civic duty and engage my inner masochist by voting for a President. With rare exceptions, I vote with a clothespin on my nose. America’s sclerotic two-party system reliably delivers unappealing candidates with little opportunity to change the status quo for the better. I’m 62 years old and for my entire adult life, under Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses, economic inequality has risen and environmental quality has declined.
This year my choice is an easy one. Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for high public office. His public mocking of a disabled reporter during his first Presidential campaign is just one of countless contemptible actions illustrating his low character. His attempts to disenfranchise fellow citizens who voted for his opponent in 2020 demonstrate contempt for democracy. His refusal to peacefully transfer power after he lost that election was treasonous and unprecedented in U.S. history.
Kamala Harris is an empty pants suit, another in a long line of corporate-friendly Democrats who only remember her party’s working-class roots when election time rolls around. But she is not a traitor. While I sometimes refuse to vote for “the lesser of two evils” and register a protest vote for minor party candidates, Donald Trump is too dangerous for that. As a patriot, I have to vote for Harris.
In addition to the unappealing choices, an additional frustration is America’s poor level of political discourse. By now, I know whoever we elect probably won’t improve things. But it would be nice if at least twice a decade, Americans could discuss the important issues facing us and imagine possibilities for improvement. Instead, we mostly get name-calling, canned talking points, and irrelevancies.
Nonsense on immigration
Immigration is a good example. Polls throughout the year have reliably identified immigration policy as one of the public’s top concerns. There’s a sense among many that illegal immigration is out of control and total immigration numbers are too high. That laws designed to protect political asylum seekers are being misused by economic migrants. Residents are complaining that New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and other major cities are spending billions of dollars to accommodate destitute migrants while cutting welfare programs that their own poorer citizens depend on.
The fundamental question is this: how many immigrants should the U.S. allow in annually? And also, what steps are reasonable to enforce whatever levels we agree on? The pent-up demand to enter the U.S. is many times higher than the number of immigrants American citizens want or American society can accommodate. The situation is the same in the European Union, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.
These are questions worth addressing, conversations worth having, in the U.S. and throughout the developed world. But instead, we get mostly gibberish.
Immigration helped elect Donald Trump in 2016 and it appears to be a winning issue for him this time around. But in the presidential candidates’ only public debate, Trump ignored the question of numbers and everything connected with it. Instead, he spread an absurd and discredited rumor that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio had been eating people’s dogs and cats. He seems compelled to demonize immigrants, when the problem isn’t people’s character or where they are from, but their excessive numbers. More recently, he even said he is in favor of greatly increasing legal immigration, although it’s anyone’s guess how seriously he meant it. He also seems reluctant to call for mandatory E-verify, or penalties for employers who hire (and take advantage of) illegal immigrants.
Trump lies as easily as he breathes, and almost as frequently. But on immigration, Kamala Harris is more mendacious and supports worse policies. During two decades in California politics, she supported “sanctuary city” and “sanctuary state” policies prohibiting state and local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration officials. As a U.S. Senator, she sponsored bills to defund federal immigration enforcement. Yet she claims to support immigration enforcement, based on a recent proposal to accelerate the processing of bogus asylum claims. Then, four years ago, Harris joined an administration that went further than any previous one in relaxing immigration enforcement. The numbers are astounding.
850,000 visitors overstayed their visas and remained in the U.S. illegally in 2022. Nearly 1.4 million prima facie inadmissible migrants were released by federal officials into the country in fiscal year 2023, many after filing bogus political asylum claims.During the Biden administration’s first three years, two million people from faltering and failed states were “paroled” into the U.S. under special programs originally designed to accommodate a few hundred people. These actions represent an unprecedented increase in illegal immigration which, added to continuing high levels of legal immigration, led to the highest absolute net migration levels in U.S. history.
The numbers don’t lie
I wish I could vote against what I suspect will be a continuation of these terrible immigration policies, which will continue rapid U.S. population growth. Sadly, I can’t, due to Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness. Does this predicament sound familiar to any readers from France, Sweden, or elsewhere in the E.U.?
As a long-time environmental advocate, I’d like to vote for a Presidential candidate who would actually move America toward sustainability, or at least slow our rapid progress away from it. But I can’t. On the one hand, Donald Trump opposes most good environmental policies. He took the U.S. out of the U.N. climate treaty, tried to give away federal lands to private developers, and reflexively supports business interests over environmental protection. Harris is better on some of these issues — but her immigration policies commit the U.S. to rapid population growth for the foreseeable future. She will probably do more environmental damage than Trump, given the environmental demands of tens of millions more Americans.
That might sound like hyperbole to those who don’t appreciate the impact of population growth on the environment, but TOP’s readers know better. And we’re not talking about small differences here. In 2023, net migration into the U.S. was approximately 3 million, the highest ever. By contrast, only three years earlier in 2020, a combination of Trumpian immigration enforcement and Covid restrictions led to the lowest U.S. net immigration figures in recent decades, about 750,000. Projecting out a continuation of those immigration levels leads to a difference of 275.4 million people in 2100 (see figure below).
In the highest immigration scenario, simply projecting out one year of the Biden administration’s most permissive policies, the U.S. population balloons to 615.1 million by 2100. In the low immigration scenario, following past Trumpian restrictions on immigration, population rises at first and then declines slowly over the second half of the century to 340 million — back to today’s number.
Even smoothing out the comparison, by comparing two scenarios for average annual net migration under the Trump and Biden administrations — approximately 1 million and 2 million, respectively — we still see a 122.4 million difference between projected populations in 2100 (492.7 million versus 370.3 million). Both generate continued U.S. population growth, but one scenario leads to four and a half times as much growth as the other, and a population that would still be rapidly growing at the end of century.
Harris makes the standard Democratic noises about the seriousness of climate change and the need to protect the environment. But she’s a pro-business Democrat with no personal interest in environmental issues. Whatever minor victories environmentalists might gain under a Harris administration are unlikely to make up for the environmental harms caused by a ballooning U.S. population.
There really is no good environmental choice in this Presidential election. As usual. Sigh.
Stale pro-growth ideals still rule in American politics
Meanwhile, bad old ideas die hard. Campaigning for Vice President Harris recently, “former President Bill Clinton pointed to waning fertility rates as a pretext for more immigration. ‘We’ve got the lowest birth rate we have had in well over a hundred years,’ Clinton told voters in Georgia.” He added, “’We are not at replacement level, which means we have got to have somebody come here if we want to grow the economy.’”
Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, defended the campaign’s immigration proposals in a recent Vice-Presidential debate, noting that they are supported by “the Wall Street Journal and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” That a Democrat would approvingly cite these capitalist tools tells you all you need to know about my party’s cluelessness on the environmental and economic impacts of mass immigration.
J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is the only one of the four candidates for highest office who generally talks sensibly about immigration policy. He is alert to the role mass immigration has played in driving down poorer workers’ wages and driving up housing prices in recent years. He has also said that one of the biggest problems with American democracy is that the public wants less immigration but the political apparatus always supports more. So far, so good.
But it turns out that Vance, too, wants a growing population to support a growing economy. He just wants this through higher birth rates to native citizens rather than through immigration, stating: “I want more Americans.” Some of the ways he wants to achieve this are by taking away American women’s right to abortion and by shaming people who choose not to have children.
Well, I want fewer Americans! I want us to pour less concrete and leave more water in our rivers. When will I get to vote for that? When will any of us around the world? Not anytime soon, apparently.
In the meantime, I’ll do my part to defeat Donald Trump. And then I’ll resume calling for the population policies we need for America to become a sustainable country.
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