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Colorado State University philosophy professor suggests decreasing immigration

Proposal draws criticism from audience
Cafaro

“Who wants to tell people ‘We don’t want you?’” Philip Cafaro, professor of philosophy at Colorado State University at Fort Collins, asked. It’s a difficult question, especially when referring to the immigration of many people into the United States.

Yet, Cafaro believes current immigration into the United States – not just illegal immigration but legal immigration as well – has to be decreased because of economical and environmental reasons.

Last year, he even published a book on the issue.

On Thursday, he spoke about the immigration issue at his presentation for the Life-Long Learning Lecture series at Fort Lewis College titled “Economic and Environmental Arguments for Reducing Immigration Into the United States.”

A controversial topic, the presentation and especially the audience’s questions, became critical. They were more critical than other Lifelong Learning Lecture presentation have been. During his presentation, even before the start of the question-and-answer portion, audience members raised their hands and questioned some of Cafaro’s graphs and arguments.

While Cafaro claimed that immigration causes decreased minimum wages in certain economic sectors with heavy immigrant hiring, an audience member contradicted him and said that decreased wages are more a problematic consequence of capitalism than of immigration. At this point, Cafaro made clear that immigration is not the only reason.

Still, he claimed that decreasing immigration could help to decrease this problem and referred a graph. And again, another audience member questioned the graph and said that he believed that it omitted important factors and with them, the graph would have looked a bit differently.

Cafaro also referred to environmental issues to support his argument. His example was urban sprawl. “The most important factor driving sprawl is population growth,” Cafaro said. In his opinion, decreasing immigration would lead to less population growth and less sprawl.

Near the end of his presentation, Cafaro showed scenarios on how the population of the United States could look in the years 2100 and 2200. With the United State’s current immigration policy of over a million immigrants each year, Cafaro predicted that in 2100, the U.S. population would grow to 524 million; in 2200 it would be 800 million. With his plan of decreasing immigration to 250,000 immigrants per year, the population would grow only to 379 million in 2100 and to 386 million in 2200.

In the end, another audience member asked Cafar: Would he rather live in today’s Fort Collins with about 150,000 residents or in the Fort Collins of 100 years ago as the audience member estimated only about 10,000 people? Cafaro’s answer didn’t surprise very much: “I love my fellow people, but I love them with sufficient space.”

Thomas Feiler is a student at the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany, and an intern at The Durango Herald.

Sep 13, 2016
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