- Joined
- Nov 11, 2023
I made a mistake, it was the Sierra Club, and the investor’s name was David Gelbaum: https://cis.org/Oped/Farewell-Sierra-ClubAny more info on this? A cursory google didn't turn up anything.
In 1989, the Sierra Club’s board adopted the policy position that “migration to the United States should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the United States.”
However, by the mid-1990s, political and donor pressure convinced the Sierra Club to declare first neutrality on the immigration issue and finally, in 2013, support for amnesty.
On the whole, adherents of Big Green are not only in complete denial of the ecological limits to mass immigration, but engaged in wholesale projection by rabidly insisting that people who care about lowering immigration levels can’t possibly also care about the environment. Rather than confront the fact that immigration to the United States from any source has greatly increased its population, Big Green insists that anyone who notices the resulting environmental consequences must hate immigrants personally and want to “dehumanize” them. There’s nothing dehumanizing about recognizing that immigrants, just like native-born citizens, have local ecological footprints.
It’s hard to know precisely how much of the environmental movement’s retreat from the truth about immigration is based on denial or ignorance, and how much is based on simple fear of being labeled a bigot or wishing to please big donors’ demands. For instance, it was in 2004, well after the fact, that it was reported that American businessman David Gelbaum, $100 million contributor to the Sierra Club, told its director in the mid-1990s that “if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”
It’s funny how Sierra Club’s stance on immigration in 1989 is more hardline than either of the mainstream parties in the last 30 years.




