The bobcat, lynx, timberwolf, and the capa rose are among the over 1,500 plants and animals now on the growing U.S. threatened species list. The ones we are more familiar with are out of our helpful reach. Elephants, pandas, and pangolins don’t live within the U.S. borders where we have our legal system to use as our tool of protection. Here in the U.S. we lose a football field worth of their natural habitat every 30 seconds. That is because we are adding the equivalent of a NFL football stadium full of people into our already overstressed overused landscapes every ten days.

Our attempts to reduce our individual footprints by consumption reduction cannot come close to canceling out the destruction brought about by our collective feet. We are stomping out the natural world beneath us with our own population growth, driven almost entirely by an immigration policy that wasn’t created with wildlife in mind.

The destruction of natural spaces is primarily driven by the need for more space to accommodate more of us: more schools, roads, places of business, hospitals, water treatment facilities, farms, parking lots, etc. Focusing on individual consumption is beneficial, but we are losing the war while winning a few showy but insufficient battles. As a voting citizen I want you to know that there are many of us who want you to put down your fears and take up the cause of ending our current unsustainable immigration policies for the sake of wildlife.

Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA

P.S. Secure our borders. Stop the influx of immigrants and refugees. Implement the Congressionally-mandated biometric entry/exit system. Evict those here illegally. End chain migration. End birthright citizenship. End the visa lottery. End amnesty. End asylum. End catch-and-release. Make E-Verify mandatory. And more! Illegal immigration is a weapon of mass destruction!