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As climate change accelerates, theres also a strong argument to be made for developed countries to increase their migrant intake on the grounds of environmental justice. Ecological collapse, the product of developed-world industrialization, will hit those in poorer countries hardest. For centuries, Europe and the United States plundered these countries, and now their reward is impending obliteration by the ecological distortions that the rich worlds self-interest has unleashed. In addition to aid and other channels of economic assistance, significantly higher immigration intakes are one effective way for the developed world to discharge the moral obligation that this chain of cause and effect creates. This seems especially urgent at a time when those displaced by environmental degradation still have no formal refugee status under international law.

And yet. Despite the obvious benefits, these are not hospitable times for immigration across the developed world. Inspired by the Great Replacementinflected thinking of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, several countries in Eastern Europe are pulling up the drawbridge to foreign migrants, their dim demographic prospects notwithstanding. Even in nations with a healthy immigration intake today, the story is not much happier, and migrants continue to attract a xenophobic backlash. In some of these countries, such as the United States, nativists have ascended to the highest chambers of power. But even in those societies run by less nakedly reactionary governments, the dog whistle and the assimilationist value-grab remain sturdy tools of everyday policymaking. Theres a hypocrisy at the heart of immigration policy in the West today. On the one hand, immigrants are seen as useful agents of growth; on the other, immigrant-bashing is now a reliable vote winner. Openness to migrants is justified and encouraged as a matter of policy, in order to boost a countrys demographic and economic prospects, but the demands of electoral politics simultaneously require that openness to be undercut. Its not quite the case that democracy dictates that immigrantsmustbe demonized, but all too often short-term electoralism means they are.

Shedding immigration policy of its xenophobic skin is especially hard when it comes to climate change, since environmental destruction has long been associated, in the popular political imagination, with the libidinous, foreign Other. Indeed, theres a direct line connecting the thinking of post-Malthus populationists and those who oppose immigration in the developed world today. More important to the history of U.S. policy formulation than EhrlichsThe Population Bombwas a pamphlet of the same title published in 1954, 14 years before Ehrlichs book, by Dixie Cup co-founder Hugh Moore. Moores pamphlet paralleled the Eisenhower administrations approach to international aid policy at a time when the Unites States major concern was to limit the spread of communism. Containing population growth in the global southa place to be exploited for its natural resources and cheap labor but feared for its fecund and potentially Marxist billionsbecame a major priority for U.S. administrations during the Cold War. When an adviser to Lyndon Johnson suggested increasing relief to India in advance of a visit by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Johnson replied, Are you out of your fucking mind? Im not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems. Before long, the international development community had joined this misguided effort to tie aid to reproductive suppression. The full horror of postwar population control measuresforced sterilization, infanticide, the state invasion of womens bodies, whole countries left demographically distorted for generations to comerested on this basic, orientalizing notion: The real danger to social order, not just globally but also at home, came from the irresponsible, untrustworthy foreigner incapable of controlling basic human urges.

This is to say nothing of the more general historical links between environmentalism and race science, which are plentiful. Californias Save the Redwoods League was founded in 1918 by eugenicists who explicitly linked the protection of the environment with the preservation of racial purity. In 1974, Garrett Hardin, a eugenicist and self-styled human ecologist, published Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor, in which he compared the United States to a lifeboat with little space to spare and argued that admitting more people would cause everyone to drown. World food banks move food to the people, hastening the exhaustion of the environment of the poor countries. Unrestricted immigration, on the other hand, moves people to the food, thus speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries. Hardins anti-immigration environmentalism paralleled the U.S. governments campaign against undocumented workers from Mexico. By the late 1970s, environmental policy scholar Robert Gottlieb has written, population control was becoming synonymous with efforts to control the flow of Mexican migrants. The heirs to Hardins xenophobic brand of environmentalism today are organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, both of which continue to push the line that curbing immigration will help reduce carbon emissions. The United States is not the only country where powerful interests employ a veneer of environmental concern to decorate the caravan of bigotry. In Australia, for example, a loose coalition of electronics store owners, ecologists, mining profiteers, and parliamentarians (with some overlap between these categories) has assembled to push the agenda for a smaller, whiter country. The Hardinesque slogan critics have mockingly tarred them with: Fuck off, were full.

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Making Life Cheap - The New Republic