SAVE AMERICA'S WETLANDS NOW!

One of my environmental science students composed a paper about wetlands in America. He started off well enough, citing facts and figures, explaining the importance of wetland habitat, biodiversity and rates of destruction. He also had a lot of quantitative evidence to support his thesis. It was very good. My hand was cramped around my stumpy little red pencil, scribbling accolades along the margins, that is, until the last paragraph where he suddenly started talking about human population growth (okay, I’m listening) and how the United States would be better off environmentally if we stopped letting immigrants into this country (okay, you lost me). Say what? My eyebrow actually coiled into the shape of a question mark. Was he was actually asserting our wetland habitat is threatened because of illegal immigrants? Okay sure they’re here, folding bed sheets in motels or picking berries for $1.25 an hour, but I highly doubt they’re sneaking across the boarder in hardhats, grasping blueprints for strip malls. Furthermore, if human population growth is a global problem, than it shouldn’t matter, environmentally, if they are here or there. It’s not like air pollution or water pollution cares about geo-political boundaries.