Chicago – The Center for New Community, a national civil rights organization, today released a report titled, Apply the Brakes: Anti-immigrant Co-optation of the Environmental Movement.

The Center’s report explicitly reveals how anti-immigrant forces have corrupted the dialogue on population and the environment.

In 2009, an article in the Population Special Issue of the Earth Island Journal mentioned a new organization and website named Apply the Brakes (ATB). A few months later, the Center for Immigration Studies — an anti-immigrant organization group founded by white nationalist John Tanton — cited ATB in a memorandum denouncing Sierra Club leadership for not addressing the issue of immigration.

These and other signals illustrate ATB’s mission to legitimize discussions about “domestic population growth” that have a pronounced anti-immigration focus.

ATB and Center for Immigration Studies, along with other organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), Carrying Capacity Network, and Negative Population Growth (NPG), are scapegoating immigrants for rising pollution and urban sprawl as a way to build support for repressive anti-immigrant legislation.

This report seeks to help the environmental community fully understand the ATB network’s detrimental philosophy and the histories of its key participants.

According to The Reverend David Ostendorf, Executive Director of the Center for New Community, “Population is a topic clearly tied to concerns about the environment, and cannot be underplayed.  However, racism and nativist arguments that blame immigrants for population problems have absolutely no place in this discussion, and should be rejected without hesitation by environmental activists.”

“While Apply the Brakes leaders argue that their concerns are based solely on the ecological impacts of a growing population,” he added, “some of the group’s political alignments and associations with nativists and white nationalists suggest otherwise.  It is indeed time to apply the brakes to this group.”

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