ImmigrationCalifornia group blames immigrants for state’s historic drought

Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), an anti-immigration environmentalist group, has made a splash with provocative advertisements which feature a young child asking, “If Californians are having fewer children, why isn’t there enough water?”

As theLos Angeles Times reports, the ad is part of a broader media campaign by the organization which blames immigrant populations for the historic drought in the state. CAPS is calling for stricter enforcement of immigration laws on environmental grounds: it argues that the state’s natural resources cannot sustain the high levels immigration-driven population growth of recent decades. The group also calls for ending the right to citizenship for children born in the United States, and is fighting state efforts to allow immigrant access to Medicaid.

This month, CAPS also asked its 128,000 Facebook follower to “Like” if they agreed that “California’s drought could have been prevented with responsible immigration policies and limited population growth.”

Some conservative commentators share CAPS’s concerns about immigration, even as they reject the group’s environmental agenda. In a recent article in National Review, conservative commentator and Hoover Institute fellow Victor Hanson echoed CAPS’s argument when he wrote that while the drought is not a novel development for the state, “What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s” — giving further credence to the claims of CAPS.

Statistically, California continues to add between three to four million people each decade, with the largest percentage being immigrants or their children. Currently, one in four residents of the state were born outside of the United States.

“Essentially all of California’s rapid population growth has been due to people from other countries and the children of immigrants,” said Ben Zuckerman, an astrophysics professor at UCLA and a member on the board of CAPS. “The larger the population of California, the more difficult it will be to deal with the effects of the drought.”

Drought experts and climatologists dismiss CAPS’s claims about the connection between immigration and drought as laughable. These experts point out, for example,  that the majority of the water used in California – more than 80 percent — is used to support the massive agricultural industry.

“Blaming the drought on immigrants ‘doesn’t fit the facts,’” said William Patzert, a climatologist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “The drought is caused by meager snowpack and poor planning, not because the immigrants are drinking too much water or taking too many showers.”

Other critics of CAPS’s claims point out that most immigrants likely use less water than the average California resident because they often live in multi-family dwellings, which, on average, use less utilities than single-family properties.

CAPS was founded in 1986 by conservationists who said that mainstream environmental groups were not advocating effectively for population controls.