CHAPTER 9 IMPACTS UPON NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT It is commonly thought that adding immigrants to the population reduces natural-resource availability for natives. As a popular writer on environmental issues puts it Until we accept the connection between world population control and migration, we shall be tilting at symptoms and flirting with destruction. And until we see the threat that faces the United States from the increments of population represented by the great new waves of aliens pressing to come to America, we are doomed to experience environmental disasters that we cannot now even envisage. Our resource base of raw materials is consistently shrinking. In the 1940s we were self-sufficient in all but five or six of the thirty-five most necessary minerals. Today we are dependent on other (and some less than friendly) nations for twenty-eight of those thirty-five elements. Just as we are prodigious consumers, so are we prodigious producers of wastes. Frantic state and national officials are alternately beseeching and threatening localities throughout the nation to surrender small sites for the burial of the noxious wastes constantly being added to our environment in increasing volume. There is no longer a single spot in the United States where the air is wholly pure. As for the water we are forced to drink, it is universally polluted with germs and chemicals which we resolutely fail to itemize, and the disinfecting chemical universally employed - chlorine - has but recently been accused of inducing cancer. (p. 17) Sinkholes now mark the crisis points in our withdrawal of groundwater. Deserts are advancing. We annually lose two million acres of soil to erosion. We pave over another million acres of prime farm land. We cannot save vital species of plants and animals for want of human elbow room. The last thirty-eight cannot find living space, the grizzly bear is pressed for habitat, and the endangered species list now has the ominous total of 189 entries. We frantically seek space for our hazardous solid and liquid wastes. (Rienow, 1981, pp. 14, 15) The Senator most responsible for the Simpson-Rodino immigration legislation said about the bill: The issue is whether we can or should give up benefits which stem from low population density - cleaner air, less traffic congestion, easy access to parks, and reduced anxiety levels (Simpson, 1981, p. 9). All this is part of a more general vision as expressed, for example, by Zero Population Growth's honorary president, Paul R. Ehrlich, who worries about the supposed danger of additional people to the "perilously shrinking water supply in this country. And to our food supply." The United States in less than 50 years will be more crowded, more polluted, more ecologically unstable, more prone to political unrest, more burdened with social stress, and far, far more precarious than we can possibly imagine (Ehrlich, 1982). The impact of an immigrant upon the environment, and upon supplies of natural resources and energy, is similar to the impact of a native, thereby raising no special analytic problems stemming from being an immigrant. But the entire issue of population's effects is fraught with argument and confusion, because the effects of additional people upon natural resources and the environment are quite complex. A large portion of my (1981) book is devoted to showing that all the main resource fears voiced in the quotations above are without foundation in past trends. The conclusions may be summarized as follows: (l) The long-term trends for virtually every raw material (including energy) are toward lower prices and increasing availabilities. (See Figure 9-1.) These positive trends have been concurrent with increasing population. That is, natural resources have been getting less scarce rather than more scarce, over the long run, as indicated by the fundamental economic measure of cost. This is quite contrary to popular belief. ---------- Figure 9-1 ---------- (2) An additional person necessarily causes increased cost, higher prices, and increased scarcity in the very short run. Critics of immigration focus upon this short-run effect as in this statement in an Environmental Fund article entitled "Immigration and the American Conscience" (Grant and Tanton, 1981/1982): "Had the United States stabilized its population in 1970, we could have the same level of energy consumption and standard of living as we do today without any Iranian oil or a single nuclear plant". The statement about short-run scarcity probably is true. But even more probably, and much more importantly, the statement also is terribly misleading--a snare and delusion that will have unfortunate long-run results if it is taken seriously by policy- makers and the public. This is why: One important flaw in the statement just quoted is that the eleven years it encompasses is much too short a period for the most important effects of population change to appear. Babies take a quarter century to mature into producers of goods and ideas; even immigrants require several years in the new society to reach their full productivity. It takes even longer for the following crucial development process to produce its fruit: (a) An immigrant-swelled population leads to greater use of natural resources than otherwise. (b) Prices of raw materials then rise. (c) The price rise and the resultant fear about actual and impending scarcity impel individuals to seek new lodes of raw materials, new production technologies, and new, most importantly, substitutes for the resources. (d) Eventually the price of the service of the resource in question--for example, the price of energy whether produced from wood, coal, oil, or nuclear power--falls lower than it was before the temporary scarcity began. This resource-augmentation process takes quite some time, and is indirect. Yet this process has been the mainspring of economic advance for 5,000 years. The process is, however, obscured in the above quotation, which makes it seem as if the main effect of the additional people is harmful, whereas the main effect (occurring some time after) is that we are better off than if the whole process beginning with more people had not taken place. If one substitutes the date 1900 or 1800 or 1700 for 1970 in the quotation above, the quotation is surely wrong: if population had stabilized earlier, we probably would not have the energy sources and prices as low as we now have them. In short, increased demand eventually leads in the long run to supplies greater than would exist otherwise.1 If all of history is any guide, we can now say with confidence that natural forces do not increasingly constrain our actvities, though the physical world always must somewhat constrain what we can produce and consume. Much of my 1981 book shows that natural resources (including energy) are, with passing decades, less rather than more of a constraint to U.S. and world growth. To cite such "limits" in discussions of national immigration policy is unsound geology and biology, incorrect history, and rotten economics. The progressive improvement that has occurred in the world's resource availability would not have taken place if population density had remained at the lower levels of earlier centuries and millenia. (3) Again contrary to popular belief, and contrary to the assertions by such anti-immigration organizations as The Environmental Fund and Zero Population Growth, the basic trends in U.S. environmental quality are positive, accompanying (though not necessarily caused by) increases in population. The water and food supplies consumed in the U. S. have been improving in past decades by every reasonable measure of quantity and purity. The air, too, has been getting purer rather than more polluted, according to the official Pollutant Standard Index and other measures provided by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. (See Figure 9-2.) ---------- Figure 9-2 ---------- (4) The weight of the evidence suggests that though additional people cause more pollution in the short run, in the longer run additional people lead to less pollution, strange as that may sound at first. 5. The fundamental building block of the anti-immigrant logic with respect to natural resources is that such resources are "finite." As we read in a publication of The Environmental Fund: Can we take all who wish to come? Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado says no. In developing an immigration policy, Lamm states, "We must begin by recognizing that the resources of the United States are not infinite." (TEF Data, May 1981, No. 1, p. 3) But it is not meaningful to assert that natural resources are finite and limited, because we can make more of them, though the explanation runs against all conventional thinking. The crucial issue is energy, the "master resource" that allows us to obtain more of all the other resources. And there will certainly be energy on earth as long as there is CO2 and energy from the sun to grow plants, without even considering the possibility of nuclear fission or fusion or new sources of energy, or finding other suns before our sun runs out in seven billion years or so. (Extended explanation may be found in my 1981 book, Chapter 3.) The supposed finiteness of resources is simply an uninformed prejudice. It is not surprising that so many wrong economic ideas are held about the relationship of population growth to natural resources, because so much of the process is so contrary to everyday common sense. Take the case of population density and land availability. At first it seems almost ridiculous to assert that greater population density can lead to better economic results -- that, for example, if all Americans moved east of the Mississippi, we would all be better off economically. Upon reflection, this proposition is not as unlikely as it sounds. The main loss to citizens involved in such a move would be massive amounts of farmland, and though the United States is a massive producer and exporter of farm goods, agriculture is not crucial to the economy. Less than 3% of U.S. income comes from agriculture, and less than 3% of U.S. working population is engaged in that industry. The capitalized value of all U.S. farm land is just a bit more than a tenth of one year's national income, so that even if the U.S. were to lose all of it, the loss would equal only about one year's expenditures upon liquor, cigarettes, and the like. On the other hand, such a change would bring about major benefits in shortening transportation and communication distances, the "just in time" factor which has been important in Japan's ability to closely coordinate its industrial operations in such a fashion as to reduce costs of inventory and transportation. Additionally, greater population concentration eventually forces social changes in the direction of better articulated social organization, changes which may be costly in the short run but in the long run increase a society's ability to reach its economic and social objectives. If we were still living at the population density that people achieved (say) ten thousand years ago, we would not have the vital complex social and economic apparatuses that are the backbone of our contemporary society. It is true that if all immigration were to stop tomorrow, any one of us would have somewhat greater opportunities than otherwise: a larger part of a national park to oneself, greater ability to draw from the waters of a river to the extent one chooses. This effect could be achieved even more completely if all the immigrants who had ever come to the U.S., or the descendants of immigrants who came in the last 300 years, were shipped out of the country immediately--all but the one person who would enjoy the solitude, of course. But this line of thinking does not take notice of several important facts: (1) If other persons--immigrants and descendants of immigrants--had not constructed such infrastructure as roads to the national parks, only a Daniel Boone or a native American could have enjoyed it. (2) As John Locke taught us, merely being born into a place does not necessarily or obviously confer a moral right to ownership of the asset that is primarily found rather than created by human efforts. (3) Without additional immigrants, there will be less future creation of new materials and less access to wilderness-- without even mentioning resources created entirely by humankind such as art and music and the facilities to enjoy them, which immigrants to the U.S. have contributed to so handsomely. The anti-immigrationists' message boils down to this: They would like to draw to the full upon the resources made available by nature and developed by others who came before them, without any obligation to develop new resources to share with others who may come in the future. There is nothing logically incorrect with this viewpoint, but it may run counter to one's ethical sense. CONCLUSIONS For those who worry about increasing scarcity of raw materials, and about greater "pressure" upon the environment, immigrants represent additional persons in the society who use up more resources. But these apparently self-evident propositions about the relationship of population size and growth to natural resource availability, and to the quality of the environment, are not supported by the facts. In the very short run, additional people do push up prices, and cause crowding. But in the longer run, there occurs a process whereby the actual or impending shortage leads to the search for new resources, and after those new resources are discovered we are left better off than if the original scarcity problem had never arisen. 86-84 Natres 1/16/87 FOOTNOTES 1An example: the discovery of plastics in the mid-l9th century derives from a shortage of elephant tusks to make billiard balls, due to increased demand. A maker of billiard balls offered a $l0,000 prize for a synthetic replacement, and celluloid was the result. A theoretical framework for this process is offered (using the example of farmland) in Simon and Simon (1987). 86-84 Natres 12/11/87