Measure the environmental impact of immigration policies
The Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform (MCIR) is suing several federal agencies based on their failure to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regarding Resident Biden’s immigration policies. These policies, notably terminating “remain in Mexico,” preventing deportation proceedings for illegal aliens, and failure to finish the southern border wall are all subject to NEPA analysis, due to the huge environmental impact of adding millions of immigrants to the U.S. population.
Among other things, an expanding human population degrades ecosystem services, which include disease prevention, clean water, pollination, and many others, ultimately reducing biodiversity. For example, most of the tick-borne diseases that have emerged in the U.S. since the middle of the last century, including Lyme, resulted from degradation of ecosystem services — in this case, disease prevention. Degradation of ecosystem services on other continents resulted in emergence of HIV and COVID.
In light of this recent lawsuit, I urge you to support reducing immigration to numbers that would allow the U.S. population to stabilize, as well as strict enforcement of immigration laws, so that our nation can achieve environmental sustainability.
Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA