For a couple years I've been asking liberal environmentalists why they roar about spotted owls,snail darters,wolves and try to alter the American way of life yet are silent(or nearly so) on immigration and illegal immigration? Perhaps the most popular & ifluencial environmentalist of our time,Edward Abbey, wrote in his book,"Desert Solitaire" that the greatest threat to our anvironment is population growth.The great engine of OUR population growth is immigration,legal & otherwise. The "Economist"magazine reported one in five of us was not born here(USA) or is the child of an immigrant. That's about 60,000,000. If they use just one gallon of oil a day apiece (I've read average US per capita oil use is just under 5 gallons a day)they would consume the ENTIRE daily output(1,000,000 barrels or 55,000,000 gallons a day) of the Anwar oil field in Alaska,assuming we were allowed to drill it. If they used average per capita gallons a day,we need about FIVE Anwars JUST FOR IMMIGRANTS. The issue of immigration & it's demands on our shrinking resource base and,hence our environment is an almost ignored issue. I can say from personal experience on blogs that the left has no easy answer for it and raising the issue elicits anger,then silence. The issue seems to lay bare a fundamental contradiction the left's environmentalists would have to deal with---IF they were ever challanged with it.

Here's an interesting site about this topic.

http://www.desertinvasion.us/