Immigration Relates to Climate Change

A valid argument could be that immigration and uncontrolled population growth directly link to climate change. In other words, one way to fix climate change can be to decrease immigration. Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental planner, shares his insight to back up this claim in the video “The Impact of Immigration Policy on the Environment”. He explains that the population plays a major role in the amount of natural resources that are accessible and the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted. An interesting comment made by Kolankiewicz is the fact that if “emigration equaled immigration,” we would have population stability. According to him, this is hard to achieve because 2/3 of population growth “is driven by immigration” (“Sprawl City”). In short, Kolankiewicz is stating that immigration and drastic increases in the population directly link to resource shortages, new technologies that increase gas emissions and economic instability. Additionally, he references the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore; however, he creates a play on words. He basically states that the fact that many environmentalists are refusing to believe that immigration has a relation to climate change is the “inconvenient truth.” A relationship can be found between Gore and Kolankiewicz’s ideas because Gore stresses an increase on CO2 emissions while Kolankiewicz explains why the increase in occurring. Mark Maslin, the author of “Global Warming,” gives relevant information that can be used to validate these arguments. According to Maslin, the global climate is “sensitive to increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide” (“What is Global Warming?”). I think that this is a suitable argument because CO2 emissions play a major role in climate change and the human population is a main cause for the increase of CO2 emissions. Therefore, a possibility to remedy climate change can be to lessen immigration by possibly creating quota systems or other implications of the law.