A brand-new and startling report from NumbersUSA has exposed that 17,800 square miles of open space in the USA were snapped up by development between 2002 and also 2017 and most of that comes from immigrant driven growth. If you need some help visualizing that, just slap Connecticut and Maryland together.
“The rate of sprawl in this century has slowed down fairly substantially from what it was in the ’70s through the 1990s. That’s the good news, and it’s for a variety of reasons, some of which are not so good—the 2008 meltdown, for example,” said Leon Kolankiewicz, scientific director for NumbersUSA and the lead author of “From Sea to Sprawling Sea,” in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“The bad news, if I could put it that way, is that population growth represents an ever-larger share of the forces driving that urban sprawl.”
Population development represented about 60 percent of sprawl over the larger 30-year span between 1982 as well as 2017. Yet, throughout the period between 2002 and 2017, fully 67 percent of sprawl was because of populace growth, aside from other factors.
In a 2015 report, Pew revealed that 55 percent of population development in the U.S. between 1965 and 2015 stemmed from immigrants or their offspring.
Pew projected that 88 percent of U.S. populace growth from 2015 through 2065 will likely arise from immigrants and their offspring.
A 2019 report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) shows an even greater dramatic trend. CIS’s analysis of data as well as projections from the U.S. Census Bureau recommends that future immigration can drive 95 percent of U.S. population growth between 2017 as well as 2060.
The year starting July 2020 and also finishing July 2021 marked a landmark in immigration-driven population growth. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, it was the very first year documented that net worldwide movement directly accounted for a higher proportion of populace development than natural increase.
NumbersUSA’s interactive online map reveals new growth has actually been dominated by populace growth in a number of the states with the biggest foreign-born populations.
In California, for instance, where roughly a quarter of the populace is international born, 86 percent of the open space lost from 2002 with 2017 was shed as a result of populace development.
Texas where wholly 11 percent of the country’s immigrants reside according to Pew, compromised a shocking 2,616 square miles of open space to advancement throughout that 15-year period, with 73 percent of that sprawl liquid chalked up to populace development.
Florida, home to another 10 percent of the U.S. immigrant population per Pew, stands out much more starkly. Population growth accounted for fully 95 percent of the 1,065 square miles of open area lost from 2002 to 2017.
Kolankiewicz told The Epoch Times that most anti-sprawl activists “don’t want to touch the population issue with a 10-foot pole, because it’s mostly immigration driving it right now.”
“They prefer to deal with those things that are more politically correct—forcing people to live in higher-density residential areas,” he added.
“Recognition by scholars that population growth is a major (not the only) driver of urban land expansion and sprawl is sharply at odds with the way the news media and anti-sprawl activists in the United States have tended to portray the causes of sprawl,” the report states.
“The news media and anti-sprawl activists have chosen to accept that rapid, unending U.S. population growth on the order of 20 to 30 or more million new residents per decade is a given and a fait accompli. They have no intent of questioning or challenging it.”
The report explains the stress in between politicians’ actions or promises on immigration as well as, on the other hand, the conservation of American open lands.
The Biden administration, as an example, has promoted a 30 by 30 campaign intended at shielding 30 percent of U.S. land as well as water by 2030.
“Many of the same politicians and groups who are ambitiously calling for protecting 30 percent of the United States land area from development by 2030 are also advocating large increases in immigration that would swell the U.S. population even further,” the report states.
“Most fail to even recognize that U.S. population growth is a major factor in causing the loss of open space and natural habitat in the United States. The White House “30×30″ plan, for example, does not have a single reference to U.S. population growth.”
Sprawl is also a major reason for environment loss and fragmentation.
“There’s no dispute that this is the largest single cause of the biodiversity crisis, both for flora and fauna,” Kolankiewicz said.
H/T The Epoch Times
