A special section for correspondence and controversy

Private Bag

A special section for correspondence and controversy     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

Summary The programs described above cost the state about $1 billion. Other state costs (which are not my responsibility) are incarceration costs for illegals, $400 million. Education cost for children of illegals has been estimated to be $1.7 billion this year. These two alone equal $2.1 billion.Please accept my assurances, and those of Governor Wilson, that we in the administration are not xenophobic or nativistic.I do not know if 8.6 million persons is a reasonable number for our nation of 250 million plus to accept and assimilate. I am convinced that 4.3 million is too many for a single state of 30 million to assimilate effectively. Certainly the costs of doing so are beyond our capacity to absorb without help.I am convinced that our existing assimilation ability is hamstrung by federal practice that ignores our immigration laws by permitting an unchecked flow of illegal immigrants into our country. Over half of this population enters and resides in California.The problem is exacerbated by the almost total failure of the federal government to support itslegal immigration decisions with federal funds to offset the costs of the resultant influx of immigrants.Presented at the Pacific Research Institute Conference on immigration, San Francisco, CA, April 25, 1994.     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

Private Bag

A special section for correspondence and controversy     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

H.R. 4300, The Family Unity and Employment Opportunity Act of 1990.     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

This paper gives crude estimates of the environmental consequences associated with the birth of one baby in the United States. We calculate the magnitude of one hundred environmental impacts which one American born today will cause over a lifetime. The impacts are grouped under five headings: waste generation, mineral consumption, energy consumption, ecosystem alteration, and food consumption. We also consider, but do not quantify, impacts on extinctions of species and indigenous cultures. Our purpose is to emphasize the role of population growth in the creation of environmental problems, and to make potential parents aware of their ability to impact the global environment. We conclude that one especially effective way for individuals to protect the national and global environment, and hence protect the wellbeing of all existing people, is to stop creating more humans.     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

A fantasy about the future might show a world in which the human-centered ethics that now directs the moral and political behavior of most of the people of the industrially powerful democracies has come to dominate the moral thinking of everyone on Earth. This ethics is grounded in a priori principles which, in all cases of conflict or competition, give vital human needs and interests priority over those of every other living thing. The end point of this step-by-step process of preference is the breakdown of the self-sustaining biosystem which nature has perfected. But any ethics is absurd if its practice would cause the breakdown of the biosystem which sustains civilized life. It must be revised or discarded. A new model with an empirical method must replace the old, a priori, human-centered ethics. The new model would treat ethical theories as theories about how people can live in the physical world. When so conceived, a theory of ethics would be confirmed or refuted by the harm or benefit that results when it guides individual and societal behavior. Negatively a theory is mistaken and must be rejected if its practice would jeopardize the health or stability of the Earth's biosystem. Positively and secondarily, it must enable people to satisfy a coherent mix of their conflicting needs and interests. Such an ethics can never be final. Like the theories of science, an ethical theory is always subject to correction as people discard their mistakes and substitute revised theories that work better—that better meet the negative and positive conditions of an acceptable ethical theory.     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

Thomas Berry's three sentence summary of the twentieth century is employed as a point of departure for evoking a mighty awakening into an ecological consciousness which fosters a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship. Drawing upon an evocatory process, with emphasis upon storytelling, the author operationalizes such an awakening by accessing five stages of personal change, development and growth. This framework of five stages starts with personal reference, and moves through dissatisfaction, insight, and decision, to satisfaction or expressiveness. Within this method for expanding consciousness and activating human energy, the bold proposal is made to increase the ordinary volume of insights that a person experiences “ten fold!” Such a consciousness-expanding commitment is worthy of our human energies in the twenty-first century.     

A special section for correspondence and controversy

With thanks in this issue to Joel E. Cohen of Rockefeller University, who agreed to the reprinting of his book review and suggested publishing the response it inspired; also to Victor R. Fuchs of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Paul A. Samuelson of MIT, and Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who consented to the publication of their correspondence. ED.Review of The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Democratic Countries Don't Have Enough Babies?Ben Wattenberg. New York: Pharos Books, 1987. Reprinted with permission from theWall Street Journal, August 6, 1987.