Last year, lots of muddy politics came your way courtesy of Club traditionalist majoritarians and a six-figure mass mailing thundering against you as racist/fascist take-over conspirators. There was less of that this time around, but the real difference between last year and this year is that you were also bested on the field of ideas.

While the Sierra Club's neutral position on U.S. immigration policy is still in place, and the issue-dodging defense that "we won't amend this position because doing so would disrupt the Sierra Club" is still too often offered up a la carte (a rhetorical habit on which former Club president Adam Wehrbach has acidly commented, "Neutrality? This is our bold statement of justice?"), nevertheless, something new has been added. A better idea than yours has arisen: The Sierra Club has grasped the fact that migration is part of the issue of corporate globalization, and has started making a point of it ("Our Stance on Migration").

The findings disseminated in academic articles such as "Past and Present Acts of Exclusion: Immigration and Globalization" (M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, April 2001) and in venues such as the 2001 conference "Global shifts: U.S. immigration and the cultural impact of demographic change," the 1998 Peoples' Summit of the Americas in Santiago, and the Globalization Caucus for the NGO Forum of the UN World Conference Against Racism have all pointed at the same thing: Rising human migration is an effect, not a cause, of social and environmental impoverishment, and globalization is a primary cause of that impoverishment and that migration.

That's why our local corner of the Sierra Club here passed a resolution saying just that in Feb. '04, the last time this issue was heating up the Club. It's clear that you didn't like this idea, but in the course of the campaign you didn't do much in the way of refutation, content to characterize this as "blame the evil Americans." You were also content to promulgate the notion that people leave their native countries as though comparison shopping -- because they think they can parlay their so-so lives into really good lives, not because their lives have become unlivable and their families will starve unless they flee their country and seek to improve their lot elsewhere.

The Western corporate model of global trade is understood throughout the Third World -- and in pockets of the First World -- as the extension of colonialism under another name. It typically involves fewer gunboats and more currency transactions and is more far-reaching and devastating. The outcome has remained the same as it was in the 16th century: the impoverishment and exploitation of the global South by the imperial North.

Gregory, I know it is easier for you to assert that "much of the poverty in the Third World has absolutely nothing to do with trade policy," because that feels intuitively right. But it's not.

When Ben and Dick came through town a few months ago to drum up support, Ben was likewise dismissive. He said migration as an outcome of globalization was "only part of the picture" (which is always entertaining when coming from folks whose whole focus on population growth as an environmental problem is slashing U.S. immigration quotas) because Chinese migration is on the rise and "globalization has nothing to do with China" -- then he ran to the salad bar, before I could commend to his attention "Chinese Globalization and Migration to Europe," a March 2004 research paper from the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. It concludes: "crudely reinforcing the barrier between China and the West will only make migration more difficult or costly, but will not address the underlying factors that generate and promote migration in the first place."

China has proven perfectly capable of exploiting itself via the massive privatization program it began in 1997, resulting in 20 million unemployed. For countries that need forcible encouragement, Structural Adjustment Programs, imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, force draconian austerity measures on Third World countries as a qualification for development loans, invariably forcing governments into tax restructuring, wage-slashing privatization and layoffs, deep cuts in health care, and diversion of funds from education and social services into the repayment of crushing debt. The disastrous social outcomes -- the recipe for forced migration -- are a matter of record.

Guys, virtually your whole argument is that immigrants to the U.S. promptly commence consuming resources at or near the same wasteful level as you and I, but none of you have as yet announced that you are moving to Mexico in order to selflessly shrink your biological footprint. And for the sake of candor, you might want to drop the "I don't blame the immigrants" pose, another belief in which you are doubtless sincere, though blaming immigrants is central to your thesis: They have too many children, and it's their fault. They live in poverty, which is their problem or the problem of their native country. And advocacy for immigrant's rights -- which is to say human rights, the same rights that secure your freedom and protect you from harm -- is translated by you as "advocacy for large-scale immigration into the United States."

When it comes to environmental destruction, wrote George Monbiot in 2002, "population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasized." When one's whole focus is basic survival, one will seek to have many children, knowing that most of them will not survive infancy and that the survival of the family depends on the ones who do. It is not overpopulation that breeds poverty -- see Barry Commoner's helpfully titled landmark 1975 essay "How Poverty Breeds Overpopulation (and Not the Other Way Around)." See also former population bomb-er Paul Ehrlich, who has gone beyond the original simple formula he co-authored in the late 60s and which you have seized upon and stuck with as holy writ, I=PAT: Human (I)mpact on the environment is equal to the size of the (P)opulation times the average level of (A)ffluence times the environmental impact of the (T)echnologies providing the goods consumed.

When last the thorny matter of immigration and the environment appeared on a Sierra Club ballot, San Francisco social justice activist Chris Crass pointed out the problem with I=PAT, which "averages everyone into an equation that completely removes economic and political institutions that shape and determine consumption." This meant that "the entire system of global capitalism and the exploitation of the land, ecosystem and workers are nowhere to be seen" in a neat, simple formula that "blurs all distinctions between economic class and consequently determines that poor immigrants have the same environmental impact as wealthy families regardless of the consumption levels of either."

By the time of a 2004 NPR interview, Ehrlich's views had expanded. "What we want to do is develop a foreign policy that reduces the need of other people to come here," he said, "change our agricultural policy so that farmers in poor countries, instead of having to send their children to the United States to get money, would be able to thrive on their own. But, right now, our trade policies, which are free trade for the rich and high tariffs for the poor, are just hurting the poor people of the world and forcing them to try and come and make a living in our country."

Hence your current tortured relationship to Ehrlich, who once offered you simplicity and the ability to blame poor people. The guru must have fallen into Error, as what he is saying now isn't the same thing he said then. You are unable to connect his statement "No sensible reason has ever been given for having more than 135 million people [in the United States]" with his statement above. You can't see how they connect. You can't believe they don't contradict each other. Once, I would have hesitated to accuse you of such a drastic inability to grasp a point, but no longer. I've seen you prove it a dozen times over. Hence: Immigrants come here. They consume. They have babies. They must be kept out. Period. It's all you know, and all you want to know.

David Brower, the Sierra Club's 20th-century motive force, journeyed along much the same path Ehrlich did (and hence, by your lights, must have originally been Right, until he learned more, thought about it, integrated what he learned into his original thinking...and thereby became Wrong). Toward the end of his life, Brower dryly observed that it was not surprising that residents of countries that have been mugged by the relentless exploitation of the West should be inclined "to come to the U.S. to share the loot we stole, fair and square."

"Rather than complaining about immigration from Mexico," Brower wrote, "the U.S. could stop causing it." As John Muir pointed out, we're finding that when we tug on any one thing, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe. The environmental movement has come to a deeper understanding of the world we live in and is pointing the way forward on this issue. Alternatives are being fashioned. The big picture is being grasped. You should step back and take a look.

Andrew Christie is Chapter Coordinator for the Sierra Club's Santa Lucia chapter in San Luis Obispo, CA

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