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for immigrants to enter the country. That, in turn, would go a long way toward reducing illegal entries. It would also alleviate pressure on the border and free up our overburdened patrols to track down terrorists, drug dealers, and other serious threats to our welfare. Unfortunately, as things stand, our border security officers spend most of their time chasing migrants who come north to mow our lawns and burp our babies. A guest-worker program for such individuals would help regulate the labor flow and isolate the criminals, thus making us much safer than any wall along the Rio Grande.

CHAPTER ONE

POPULATION: DOOM AND DEMOGRAPHY

Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to be caught by those with their pants down!

—JOHN TANTON

Odd political bedfellows are nothing new in the nation’s capital, but a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing held on March 24, 2004, was remarkable all the same. The witnesses invited to testify that day included Roy Beck, Mark Krikorian, and Frank Morris. All three worked for organizations set up in the 1980s and ’90s by John Tanton, a radical environmentalist and staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood. Morris was also a former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and, at the time, he was actively campaigning for a slot on the board of the nation’s leading green group, the Sierra Club.

Despite their liberal credentials, however, the trio wasn’t appearing at the behest of Democrats. They were there at the urging of the subcommittee’s Republican chairman, John Hostettler of Indiana, one of Congress’s foremost social conservatives. A Baptist from Evansville who’s since left office, Hostettler had first been elected in 1994 with crucial backing from pro-life groups, along the way even earning the moniker “McGingrich” from one of his political opponents. And the environmentalists hated him almost as much as the abortion-rights activists. Hostettler had voted to allow oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and in 2004 he earned a rating of nine out of one hundred—among the lowest in Congress—from the League of Conservation Voters, which gauges lawmakers’ earth friendliness based on key votes concerning energy, natural resources, and the environment.

But none of that mattered for the purposes of the hearing. That’s because the topic was immigration, and any political differences between Hostettler and his witnesses were trumped by their shared belief that today’s newcomers harm America. Anti-immigrant sentiment coming from the political right tends to dominate the headlines, but the environmental left has always played a central role in efforts to tighten the U.S. border. For restrictionist greens, though, the main issue isn’t the economy or even homeland security. It’s the human species—more specifically, human population growth. The environmentalists want fewer people on the planet because they believe that additional human beings will have a negative effect on the supply of land, food, and other extractive resources. And they want fewer people migrating here for the same reason. The greater the population, they argue, the bigger the threat to nature.

SIERRA CLUB SECESSIONISTS

One survey of twenty leading U.S. environmental organizations found fourteen that consider overpopulation to be “a problem.” The Environmental Defense Fund’s Population Statement says that “resolv[ing] the world’s major environmental challenges will require stabilizing the world’s population at the lowest possible level.” The National Audubon Society says it “focuses on supporting U.S. family planning assistance programs in order to reduce fertility in developing nations and in the U.S.” According to the “Population Policy” of the Wilderness Society, “To bring population levels to ecologically sustainable levels, both birth rates and immigration rates need to be reduced.”

“Stabilizing world population” ranks fourth on the Sierra Club’s twenty-first-century to-do list, but that’s not high enough for some. And it so happens that right