The debate on illegal and legal immigration into the United States is complex. However, there is no doubt that the matter has had a significant impact on our nation’s environment and welfare.

The U.S. has the highest growth rate of any industrialized country in the world. As of this month, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates our population at 304,883,846, increasing by 3 million per year. Immigration from foreign countries causes 50 percent of the United States’ population growth. The overriding question is, “Can the United States environment, economy and social system sustain this explosion of population growth and drain on our natural resources?”

At a time when our country is faced with an energy crisis, it’s worthwhile to note, and an obvious conclusion, that more people means more energy use. Indeed, the evidence suggests that we are even now at our population saturation point. Already we are experiencing water shortages, excessive pollution, the cutting of ever more timber from our national forests, decreasing wildlife habitat, paving over of 1.5 million acres of farmland a year, overcrowded recreation areas, crowding in our cities, and the inability to provide and maintain an adequate infrastructure of schools, roads and other physical facilities.

At the moment, oil and gas may be uppermost in most people’s minds, but at possibly more risk is our nation’s fresh water supply. It has been said that water will be for this century what oil was for the last.

In article from June 2008 in the California Stockton Record, it stated that the “Northwest may hold the secret to water woes”. Hydrologist Gordon Grant said, “As water supplies tighten in coming decades, the Northwest’s groundwater surplus is likely to garner new attention from around the western United States. It is almost inevitable that the areas that store large quantities of groundwater will become increasingly looked at to provide water.”

Another disastrous and far reaching impact of illegal immigration is the deterioration of our public health. All foreign-born persons here in the U.S. legally undergo medical examinations. They are denied entry into the United States if they are found to have communicable diseases. With no such safeguards, illegal immigrants who stream across our borders every day are free to carry infectious diseases throughout the country.

According to a report in “The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons”, the increasing number of illegal aliens coming into the United States is forcing the closure of hospitals, spreading previously vanquished diseases and threatening to destroy America’s health care system.

In addition, the report says, “Many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease”. Chagas disease is caused by a parasite from Latin America. There is no cure.

The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons report includes a strong prescription for protecting the health of Americans. It includes the closing of our borders to illegal aliens, rescinding the citizenship of “anchor babies” or chain migration and an end to amnesty programs.

Sustainability is the key to preventing further deterioration of the very systems that supports us—our environment, natural resources and health. The U.S. can still have immigration, just not at the current rate. Concern for the environment and national health need not mean being against immigrants.

If you are concerned that unchecked population growth will threaten nearly every aspect of life in the U.S., you may want to consider asking your Representative in Congress to support H.R. 938, the Nuclear Family Priority Act and ask your senators to introduce a Senate version.

Mari Carroll Poulsbo