Dear HCN,
I have been an avid
reader of High Country News for several years and have enjoyed its
insightful take on the issues shaping the West as we head into the
21st century. I am, however, deeply disturbed by your recent
coverage of the Sierra Club ballot question, “Give me your tired,
your poor, your huddled masses’ (HCN, 5/11/98). It seems as though
the author, a former intern and reporter at HCN, ignored the
central tenet of journalism: get the facts right. It also appears
as though no one bothered to double-check on her
reporting.
Specifically: I am not and have never
been a director of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration
Reform, and therefore have no responsibility or voice in its
activities. I am a member of FAIR’s advisory council, which is
purely honorary and puts me in the company of other
environmentalists like Dick Lamm, Gene McCarthy, Paul Ehrlich, and
John V. Lindsay. FAIR, while supporting immigration reform, does
not advocate eugenics or race-based population
control.
I was never an officer at the Sierra
Club. I served on the board of the Sierra Club Foundation, a
separate and distinct organization, for many years. I, personally,
did not “funnel more than $100,000” to the pro-A campaign. My
brothers and I asked the Sierra Club Foundation to release $85,000
to the Sierra Club from a Weeden endowment set up years ago by our
father, to fund an even-handed mailing to all Sierra Club members
wherein each side of the issue presented lengthy arguments in
support of its views. We did this because without such a mailing no
educational material would have been sent to Sierra Club members by
the club. In that event members would have heard the arguments only
through the media, which in view of the environmental importance of
the issue, we felt was inadequate.
Other errors
are as follows: Ric Oberlink did not resign as executive director
of Californians For Population Stabilization to run the Sierrans
for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS) campaign; his resignation
took place many months before SUSPS even started; a
disproportionate share of the signatures SUSPS collected to qualify
its ballot question came from California in part because a
disproportionate share of Sierra Club members come from California;
the SUSPS petition did not call for “tightly controlled borders,”
which the U.S. already has, but only for the Sierra Club to support
a national population policy that offered a realistic chance of
stabilizing the U.S. population, something that cannot be done
without addressing the relatively high levels of immigration
today.
Supporters of Alternative A also support
everything offered in Alternative B, including “working on the root
causes of global population explosion, including access to birth
control, economic security, and equity for women” (in fact, the
club’s Inspector of Elections described the choice offered voters
as completely nonsensical and perhaps a violation of club
bylaws).
The Sierra Club’s paid leadership
appears to have a history of manipulating ballot questions to
achieve results to their satisfaction: in 1994, the ballot question
relating to ending commercial logging on public forests – not
supported by the club leadership – was worded so that a “yes’ vote
actually meant opposition to the proposal. The membership
“rejected” the ban; two years later, with much clearer wording, the
“zero cut” policy won by a two-to-one margin.
The
article takes it as fact that socially and politically motivated
(read “racist’) proponents of immigration reform have recently
targeted environmentalists when there is substantial information
demonstrating just the opposite – a growing cadre of concerned
environmentalists understanding the global, as well as local,
environmental impacts of a demographic trend: population growth in
the U.S. significantly fueled by immigration. The article made no
attempt to explain why poll after poll shows strong support for
immigration reform in minority communities (including a majority of
blacks and Hispanics).
The sad thing to me is
that your article reflects the way this issue was debated: on its
divisiveness, not its merits. The fundamental question was never
addressed of whether it is wise for the United States to grow to
400-500 million people in the next 50 years, with all the attendant
environmental pressures that would
create.
Alan
Weeden
Los Angeles,
California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Article didn’t cover the real immigration issues.
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