San Francisco, CA - Sierra Club members turned out in historic numbers this year to elect five of their peers to the 112-year-old environmental organization's Board of Directors and to reject a ballot initiative that would have forced the group to support restrictions on immigration. Over fifteen percent of the Club's membership returned 122,308 ballots – the second highest in the Club's recent history – and defeated the anti-immigration measure by more than a 5 to 1 margin.
If I was supposed to be unbiased about this, I failed.
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John Muir, an immigrant himself, would be deeply relieved, I'm sure, to hear that this ludicrous attempt to blame our environmental problems on immigrants went down to a landslide defeat in the organization he co-founded.
Back in the l990's, Pete Wilson and other rightwingers and Libertarians put an anti-immigrant measure on the ballot, implicitly blaming California's economic problems on undocumented immigrants. They succeeded in passing Prop 187. And what did this landmark measure achieve? The courts immediately threw out most of it, the proposition had zero effect on immigration, and the Republican party is suffering still from the backlash.
Blame is an attitude, not a policy.
Posted on April 26, 2005 12:04 PM by Kit Stolz
Thanks for the historical background, Kit. When this started happening in 1998 or so, I remember thinking the whole conservationist movement could lose its core constituency over it. That'd be the death of environmentalism for sure.
That's besides the fact that it's just wrong.
Posted on April 28, 2005 11:04 AM by Judith Lewis