{"id":306546,"date":"2017-05-04T03:37:40","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T02:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/wanted-1-5-billion-immigrants\/"},"modified":"2017-05-04T03:37:40","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T02:37:40","slug":"wanted-1-5-billion-immigrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/wanted-1-5-billion-immigrants\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanted: 1.5 Billion Immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump famously promised to deport every person living in this country without proper papers. I have another idea: The 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. should be granted citizenship immediately in a mass induction.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s simple. Let\u2019s say a country consumes 10 percent of the planet\u2019s resources. Well, then it should be home to 10 percent of the world\u2019s people. We have about 4.4 percent of the global population, which means we can consume that much of the planet\u2019s resources guilt-free.<\/p>\n

But by most calculations, we consume far more than 4.4 percent of the world\u2019s natural wealth. Therefore, 11 million new people isn’t nearly enough. We should send out a call for many hundreds of millions more to join.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so obvious that one has to wonder why the UN isn\u2019t working on it.<\/p>\n

\"immigration-immigrants-welcome\"<\/p>\n

(Photo: Flickr\/ alborzshawn)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

After all, surely any country that hoards a planet\u2019s wealth for its benefit should expect to care for a proportional number of that planet\u2019s people. Setting aside who precisely benefits from the use of resources in any country, this principle is sound. It even has flexibility, depending on the resource you think is most important.<\/p>\n

What would that add up to for say, fossil fuels?<\/p>\n

According to the Worldwatch Institute<\/a>, we use \u201cabout a quarter of the world\u2019s fossil fuel resources \u2014 burning up nearly 25 percent of the coal, 26 percent of the oil, and 27 percent of the world\u2019s natural gas.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s more than China and Russia combined, and China alone accounts for 19 percent of the world\u2019s population. Think what we will about China, even as the world’s biggest carbon emitter it’s consuming far less energy than its fair share \u2014 thank goodness.<\/p>\n

By that calculation, the U.S. should be home to a quarter of humanity, meaning that 1.8 billion people should be passport-carrying U.S. citizens. So, rather than building walls and piling up restrictions to immigration, we should fling our borders wide open to welcome 1.5 billion more.<\/p>\n

But if an additional 1.5 billion people isn\u2019t appealing, then let\u2019s use another measure.<\/p>\n

How about copper? In 2015, the total worldwide copper consumption<\/a> amounted to 21.8 million metric tons, of which our share was approximately 1.7 million, or 8 percent. Fine, that\u2019s easier to bear, but it does mean that we still need to increase our population by 281 million.<\/p>\n

And it goes on and on and on. How about aluminum<\/a>? Nope, that\u2019s 27 percent. Okay, how about industrial roundwood<\/a>? Not good, that\u2019s still 19 percent. Even a composite figure of our total consumption of all resources combined would be well over 4.4 percent.<\/p>\n

You might\u00a0object that much of what we consume is domestically extracted. Surely those are our <\/em>natural resources, not the world\u2019s, right? So they should be omitted from any calculation. All right, that\u2019s another way to go. Let’s close down our borders and live solely off nature\u2019s bounty within \u2014 no imports.<\/p>\n

So you see, we have three excellent options.<\/p>\n

We can close our borders and even ask the 11 million immigrants to please leave because we\u2019ve decided to relinquish our claims to the world\u2019s resources. Or we can do the same because we’re going to reduce our consumption to the 4.4 percent we’re rightly allotted.<\/p>\n

Or we can simply grant citizenship to the 11 million undocumented migrants and millions more because it’s the right thing to do. Surely that’s a sensible alternative to foolishly consuming ourselves and the planet to death while cruelly expelling people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This piece was reprinted from Other Words<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump famously promised to deport every person living in this country without proper papers. I have another idea: The 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. should be granted citizenship immediately in a mass induction. Why? It\u2019s simple. Let\u2019s say a country consumes 10 percent of the planet\u2019s resources. Well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2523,"featured_media":306547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-306546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}