The NPG Forum, 12-21-2011

[Val]

The NPG Journal: Vol. 5, No 2 - 12/21/11




COMMENTARY: by NPG President Donald Mann

Within a matter of days we will begin celebrating NPG’s 40th anniversary. A few weeks ago, we mailed out our 2012 NPG Membership Cards. If you have already renewed your membership, thank you. If not, please let us hear from you soon. We’ve made it through these many years thanks to the support of tens of thousands of individuals. And whether you have been an active member for years or just recently signed on to help us advance our mission, we owe you all a great debt of gratitude.
I know that there are still quite a number of people who remember NPG’s earliest days. It was a time when a confident new generation of Americans recognized that by speaking up, standing together, and fighting for a livable world, we had the power to shape a better future for all mankind. In many areas, such as the environment where NPG partnered with other powerful organizations to change laws and disastrous policies, we’ve made tremendous strides. Yet the battle to rein in America’s population growth remains as challenging as ever. Who would have ever predicted four decades ago that our elected leaders would permit legal and illegal immigration to spin so totally out of control?
Fighting and winning the battle for responsible population and immigration policies remains our top priority. And we pledge today to continue to use our clout to educate all Americans on the vital need to halt and eventually reverse skyrocketing population growth before our nation is forced to pay an even greater social, economic and environmental price.
The good news is that NPG’s clout increases with each new technological breakthrough. Gone are the days when we had to spend tens of thousands of dollars per year mailing NPG Forum Papers, research data and other critical information to community and school libraries. Today, thanks to the influence of the Internet and NPG’s informative website, Negative Population Growth, there is no limit as to how far our educational reach extends.
As we welcome the year 2012, I am pleased to announce that our 40th Anniversary year will see the launch of the most aggressive and far-reaching educational outreach programs we have ever put together.

U.S. DEPORTATION NUMBERS – REAL OR UNREAL?

When the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives openly challenges the Obama Administration’s deportation numbers, it should make major headlines. However, late in October, Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX) spelled out his frustrations regarding present deportation policies in a column presented in Politico which did not get much national attention. We bring you a portion of his comments here and urge you to access the Congressman’s entire article at: Politico.com (Politico – October 25, 2011)
Highlights of the Chairman’s concerns include:
“The administration appears to have artificially inflated its deportation numbers. It includes voluntary removals in the deportation statistics…”
“Even The Washington Post found the Obama administration used questionable methods to achieve its deportation numbers last year. Just like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, the Obama administration’s record is a trick. In reality, President Barack Obama and his administration are giving amnesty to illegal immigrants through inaction. It’s no wonder that the president recently admitted to Hispanic voters that his administration’s deportation numbers are ‘deceptive.’”
“Take away the hocus-pocus, and it is clear the Obama administration is neglecting to enforce immigration laws. The administration has all but abandoned worksite enforcement actions. Over the past two years, worksite enforcement has plummeted 70 percent.”
“Last year, nearly half a million immigrants were caught trying to enter the country illegally, and those are just the ones we apprehended. There are an estimated three successful illegal immigration entries for every illegal immigrant apprehended. That means more than 1 million illegal immigrants cross into the U.S. each year.”
“It is disappointing that the Obama administration continues to put illegal immigrants ahead of the interests of U.S. citizens. Fourteen million Americans are now looking for work. Meanwhile, 7 million illegal immigrants have jobs in the U.S. We could free up millions of these jobs for citizens and legal immigrants if we simply enforced our immigration laws.”

ILLEGAL ALIENS AND VOTING

Have things gotten so out of control with elected leaders catering to the demands of illegal immigrants that we are now going to allow them to vote in our elections?
If you live in New Haven, CT that may soon be the norm.
Mayor John DeStefano has announced that he will “lobby the state for a ‘resident voting rights’ bill that would allow any resident of New Haven – regardless of immigration status – to vote in municipal elections.”
According to an article by Don Pesci which ran in The Waterbury Republican American newspaper in the nearby city of Waterbury, “DeStefano has estimated that his city is home to 10,000 ‘noncitizen immigrants,’ half of them above 18.”
Pesci notes that: “It is not clear at this writing whether the legislature would be willing to consider New Haven the equivalent of a separate state, conferring upon its illegal residents a right of citizenship that is usually a prerequisite to voting in municipal elections.” He also cited a story from Newsday which stated that Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy reacted “coolly” to Mayor DeStefano’s plan but that the Governor “did not freeze out DeStefano completely” and that he was “willing to ‘hear the mayor out’ on his proposal.”
NPG believes that as we go into the bitter 2012 elections it is terribly unfortunate that officials in many areas are not going all out to see that illegal aliens cannot cast ballots in any elections. We condemn Mayor DeStefano for his proposal and are very sad to see that Governor Malloy did not automatically state that he would veto such a measure should it reach his desk. We encourage Connecticut residents to contact the Governor’s office demanding he veto this measure.



IMMIGRATION AND THE U.S. SUPREME COURT

When the U.S. Supreme Court announced last week that in 2012 it will hear the case as to whether or not Arizona’s laws protecting citizens against an ever-building wave of illegal aliens will be permitted to stand, they set the stage for a ruling that will have huge implications for our nation’s immigration policy.

THE LEGALITY OF BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

It is always a plus when a major well-funded organization with hundreds of thousands of members joins forces in fighting for responsible immigration policies. That is why NPG applauds the recent actions by The Heritage Foundation to put its weight behind changing America’s current birthright citizenship laws which are often incorrectly interpreted to convey automatic U.S. citizenship to children born on American soil.
In writing on this issue, Heritage notes:
“Birthright citizenship should be easy to change.
Birthright citizenship is based on a mistaken interpretation of the Constitution. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.’
This Amendment was passed after the Civil War in order to make clear that slaves who had been freed were U.S. citizens.
The Senators who wrote the Amendment did not intend it to mean that everyone born here is a citizen. The Heritage Foundation’s legal experts have studied the history of the Amendment, the statements of those who wrote the Amendment, the laws Congress passed on citizenship at the time, and the legal cases about the Amendment…
…and they have determined that we are not required by the Constitution to grant birthright citizenship.
These experienced constitutional scholars have concluded that Congress can eliminate birthright citizenship simply by passing a resolution.”
A new Rasmussen poll shows that 65% of likely voters oppose birthright citizenship.
NPG has already obtained thousands of petitions from our members seeking Congressional action on this important issue through passage of H.R. 140, The Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011. As we continue to send them on to Members of Congress, it is very clear that changing the current policy is going to be an uphill battle. We welcome The Heritage Foundation as an integral partner in getting this legislation through Congress as soon as possible.



DESTRUCTION OF WILDLIFE HABITAT

There are already 1,000 species in the United States that are threatened with extinction because too many people are encroaching on and damaging their natural habitat. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, from 2000 to 2030, housing development is projected to increase on about 21 million acres of rural, private land surrounding national forests and grasslands scattered around the country, which will result in excessive pollution of our streams, rivers and estuaries.



WATCH OUT AUSTRALIA – DON’T FOLLOW IN U.S. FOOTSTEPS…

In a recent letter to the editor of The Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia, Frosty Woolbridge, an NPG friend and researcher, commented on that nation’s fate if they continue on their current path of inviting immigrants to settle into their country while turning a blind eye to the consequences:
“A short 40 years ago, our Congress of the United States of America attempted to alleviate the plight of the world’s poor by immigrating 100 million of them into our country. What happened? Today, we suffer gridlocked cities, massive poverty, blackened air over our cities, degraded educational systems, horrible debt, multiple languages, distinctly separated cultures…, and dwindling resources with a loss of quality of life…
…We are a nation in denial. We suffer 15 million unemployed, but import 125,000 green card (able to legally work in the USA) carrying legal immigrants every 30 days. That means we will never be able to employ our own citizens at a living wage. The wages will continue to drop. That is what immigration causes, but our government and the elites force us to swallow politically correct claptrap as if it will solve the problem.”
DEFINING “OVERPOPULATION”

Here at NPG we have consistently pushed our members to use the “Letter to the Editor” column in their local paper to spread our message and our mission. We do so because for all that we do to disseminate the research contained in our Forum Papers and other publications, a well-stated explanation of our goals by a fellow citizen can often have huge educational repercussions. A perfect case in point is the following letter written by Lisa Marie Daniel of Bethesda, MD which appeared in The Washington Post in mid-November:

“Five Myths commentary on population missed the point
The Nov. 6 Outlook commentary ‘5 Myths About Global Population’ stated that ‘most serious demographers, economists and population specialists rarely use the term ‘overpopulation’ – because there is no clear, demographic definition.’ There absolutely is a clear, agreed-upon definition of overpopulation: Overpopulation is a condition where an organism’s number exceeds the carrying capacity of its habitat. This definition comes from the hard science of ecology—a field with which, sadly, few economists, demographers or population specialists have significant familiarity. You might as well ask ballerinas to opine on the latest fuel-injection technology.
Talking about discussion of individual countries’ economies is misleading because an otherwise overpopulated country may be able to specialize and prosper through trade. Unless the Earth quickly develops trade partnerships with other planets, however, the human race will continue to be limited by the overall carrying capacity of the planet we’re on.”



NPG NOTES

NPG PETITIONS DELIVERED TO HUNDREDS OF STATE LEGISLATORS

We would like to extend a special thanks to the hundreds of NPG members who took the time to sign and return the Member Authorization that accompanied our NPG Fall Newsletter that permitted NPG to use their name in contacting state legislators and urge them to participate in our recent National Survey of State Legislators.


GETTING OUR MESSAGE TO THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE

President Obama seems insistent on deciding our nation’s immigration policy without going to Congress to change the current laws, but NPG members will have none of it.
That was definitely clear from the hundreds of signed petitions we received from NPG members in recent months taking President Obama to task and protesting the new deportation policies he announced in October.
In the cover letter addressed to the president that will accompany the petitions, we wrote:
“NPG members definitely feel that by taking unilateral action on deportation that goes against the will of the majority of Americans you have created “defacto amnesty” for millions of illegal aliens presently in the country. We very much consider this effort to be a major setback for our nation as it will set the stage for more illegals to violate our borders and feed future population growth which is already growing at an alarming and unsustainable rate.”
Again, our thanks go out to all of our dedicated NPG activists who understand that numbers count in politics and how crucial it is that we speak with a strong voice in getting our message to our elected leaders.



NPG’S 40th ANNIVERSARY MULTI-MEDIA SCHOLARSHIP CONTESTS

Calling all students interested in competing for some sizeable scholarship money!
To celebrate NPG’s 40th Anniversary we are launching three Scholarship Contests which will award a total of $22,500 to 18 talented students for the 2012-2013 scholastic year:
Scholarship Essay Contest: High school seniors and college freshmen, sophomores, and juniors will be presented with the following challenge:
Without critical changes, U.S. population growth will reach 438 million people in less than 40 years. Explain how this projected growth will negatively affect the United States socially, economically and environmentally. Submissions must be between 500 and 700 words.
A total of six scholarships, ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 will be awarded. Text from the winning essays will be used in print advertisements, newsletter stories, the NPG Journal and other outreach projects as well as being posted on NPG’s website and Facebook page.
Student Poster Contest: Building on the success of our 2008 effort, high school students will be asked to:
Submit a multi-color poster designed to display the negative consequences of allowing U.S. population to grow to an unsustainable level of 438 million people.
The theme for this contest is intentionally designed to pair with the Essay Contest Question to give NPG a wide pool of material for advertising and other informational material. A total of six scholarships, ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 will be awarded for the best posters.
Video Contest: New this year is an invitation to film and video production students at the college level (as well as college-bound high school seniors) to:
Create a one to three minute video that strongly conveys the negative effects of permitting population growth in the United States to grow to an unsustainable level of 438 million people in the next 40 years.
A total of six scholarships ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 will be awarded to winners of the video competition. Winning entries will appear on NPG’s website.



QUOTES

“Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the national interests of this country.
There is no inherent right to come live in the United States, in disregard of whether the American people want you here. Nor does the passage of time confer any such right retroactively.”

Thomas Sowell
National Columnist



“A quarter-century after Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, his example remains instructive: Reagan supported one provision of the 1986 act, an amnesty for the three million undocumented aliens then in the country, only because he believed that other provisions, which fortified border enforcement and required employers to verify the legal status of their workers, would end illegal immigration. ‘Future generations…will be thankful,’ the president said, ‘for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship.’
Thankful? Americans instead feel angry – and, for all of his big-hearted openness toward immigrants, I believe Reagan would have shared their anger, recognizing the failure of the federal government to ‘regain control of our borders’ as a profound breach of faith. The breach of faith, he would have insisted, must now be repaired.”

Peter Robinson
Former Reagan Speechwriter



“I won't be intimated by the Obama Justice Department just as I won't be intimated by the Mexican Drug Cartel's placing a $1 MILLION bounty on my head…and just as I won't be intimated by the daily death threats I receive…all for doing the job I was elected to do!”
Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Maricopa County, Arizona

“According to the State Department, more than 5 million people are now waiting to immigrate to the United States in various family and employment categories.”

Star Parker
National Columnist

[nrdthxpr]

Obviously, the source of the problem is overpopulation in the nations of South America. If family planning education was available to everyone, the women would birth only the children they could support, so they would not need to slip across the border looking for jobs. Why don't the nations of South America do so? Because they are dominated by "machismo" male supremacy that bloats a man's ego the more children he can force his wife to give birth to.

[Val]

I don't know if we will renew our membership. 40 years and there has been no reduction in US population, even with all their efforts. 120 million more people now, with over 80% from immigration and their children, but a lot from the lowest spectrum in the US who "don't believe" in overpopulation. Then there are those like some Hollywood types who are rich and have large families without care for the future generations. Greedy, selfish types--from monetary greed to genetic greed. A government that rewards its workers and welfare recipients with more money for more children and gives tax write-offs for more children.
Nixon addressed an un-hearing Congress about it. Carter knew and did little. Then others proclaimed it was not a problem, when it just got worse and worse. It still does.......
The US could have isolated itself from the impending population crash, but not the global pollution of CO2 and mercury.....or running out of landfill places, and the depletion of its resources.

[nrdthxpr]

Val,

In the past several days there has been a documentary on TV about some scientists investigating the melting of the ice caps around the World. Apparently, because of the increase of green house gases and global warming , the melting is escalating, and because it is self-generating as more land and water is exposed to absorb the sun's heat, nothing can stop or reverse the process. Of course, they can't predict exactly how long it will take, but without its ice cap the Himalayas will no longer seasonally feed the rivers the people of india depend on. The same in South America. Without the ice caps the rivers will dry up. So, however long or short a time it takes, that will put a stop to economic growth and probably reverse it rather dramatically. But apparently, business invstors can't believe this, but dismiss it all as a "hoax" of some sort, which means, with their political power, there will be very little preparation for any such weather changes. I'm 80 this year, so I can accept my inevitable demise however it transpires, but I feel more sorry for the children than I dare to bring into full consciousness.

[Val]

Same here. I really feel bad for the children of the future. My son will have a more full life, but kids born right now will be in their young adulthood as the ecology begins collapsing.
The albedo change from melting icecaps, with sea ice and glaciers, plus the geometrically increasing methane releases from tundras are at the beginning of self-sustained warming from the initial warming by human HGHG emissions. I remember the 2006 documentary with Hanson telling us we had 10 years to reduce fossil fuel burning, and then last year the same amount of time given, but with only a 50% chance it will be successful in stopping warming enough to not pass these tipping points. Each year the odds are more in favor of it becoming totally unstoppable. It is a hell of a thing that the procrastinators and denialists have done.

[nrdthxpr]

Most of them are addicted to growing the economy so they can't see any consequences from too much of their good thing. As conditions get worse, they may change, and I can only hope it will be in time to salvage something of our human civilization.