Treehugger.com recently posted a piece positing that immigration is “at odds” with sustainability. The post is about an essay by Joseph Chamie which recently appeared in YaleGlobal and was largely discredited by the Economist shortly thereafter.

Treehugger.com blogger David Friedlander recaps Chamie’s argument that the US should rethink its “pro-growth immigration policies” and consider the “demographic realities, future population projections and likely environmental costs” of immigration. Friedlander cites US energy consumption and suggests that immigration-fueled population growth could “be disastrous for the planet.” According to Chamie, reducing immigration would magically solve “domestic problems as well as many of those abroad, especially energy and resource consumption, climate change and environmental sustainability.” Chamie also randomly injects race and ethnicity into his assessment — a point that has little bearing on his overall argument other than to severely weaken it:

“Immigration is also altering America’s ethnic composition and culture, i.e., less European and more Latin American, Asian and African. Throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th, the US foreign born population was predominately from European countries, e.g., Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom. Today the top five countries are no longer of European origin but are Mexico, China, Philippines, India and Vietnam, with Mexico accounting for a third of the foreign born. As a result, America will increasingly look, sound and act differently over the coming decades – which is neither good nor bad but different.“

Essentially, Chamie’s whole argument is based on the ill-conceived notion that we live in a “lifeboat with limited resources” and that immigration will sink the boat. However, immigration isn’t really the problem — American consumption patterns and energy use are. According to the World Resources Institute, the U.S. is home to 23% fewer people than the European nations of the EU-15, yet still produces 70% more greenhouse gases. Along those lines, the McKinsey Global Institute offers an alternative solution to Chamie’s immigration policy prescriptions: promoting policies that boost energy productivity — the level of output achieved from the energy consumed — such as building shells, compact fluorescent lighting, and high-efficiency water heating. A recent study meanwhile suggests that immigrants are actually “greening our cities” due to the widespread use of sustainable public transportation by the immigrant population.

After anti-immigrant nativists attempted to take over the Sierra Club in 2004, environmental groups have been careful not to conflate immigration levels with environmental woes — but that didn’t stop Chamie or Friedlander from what Imagine2050 blogger Katie Bezrouch describes as falling “right into the well-laid plans of anti-immigrant groups trying to create fear around immigration in the minds of environmentalists.” Well-known anti-immigrant groups like the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA, along with hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, have long been using flawed logic to invoke green-friendly arguments that scapegoat immigrants and ignore the complex problems at hand. The Economist explains:

“America’s domestic problems aren’t going to go away if immigration is restricted, but millions of people will lose the opportunity to better their lives and the lives of their family members. And the earth’s environmental challenges won’t go away if would-be immigrants are prevented from migrating. And the world will be utterly unable to solve its significant challenges so longer as problems of global import are viewed through a narrowly nationalistic lens. There is no such thing as ‘American Warming’.”

In the months since leaving office, Dick Cheney has been hard at work defending his and George W. Bush’s record in the “war on terrorism,” claiming in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute in May that after 9/11 the Bush administration “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.”

As Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel pointed out afterward, Cheney’s claim conveniently ignored the fact that top Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri “remain at large nearly eight years after 9-11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against al Qaida and the Taliban.”

In a new article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Micah Zenko provides further evidence challenging Cheney’s claim about the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terrorism.

In 2002, the Bush administration had what it believed to be reliable intelligence that Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Sunni extremist group, was producing chemical weapons at Khurmal in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. As Zenko notes, “Khurmal is the only place in Iraq where the United States discovered that WMD were actively being produced, albeit in small quantities, before the war.”

In July 2002, the CIA’s George Tenet and the Joint Chiefs unanimously supported striking Khurmal, but were overruled by President Bush. Zenko concludes that Bush’s decision, which resulted in the United States missing its best opportunity to potentially kill future insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, “was one of many tactical mistakes that contributed to the strategic disaster that America later faced in Iraq.”

According to Zenko, “the key question is: since it was the consensus professional opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its Chairman -– the principal military adviser to the President -– to employ a limited force to eliminate the Khurmal camp, why did the President choose to ultimately reject that counsel?”

Based on interviews with officials who were closely involved in national security policymaking at the time, statements by government officials, and contemporary news accounts, there are four plausible explanations. While each influenced the decision somewhat, the primary explanation why the President deferred attacking Khurmal was over concerns that it could possibly disrupt what was the White House’s goal from the first meeting of the Principal’s Committee of the NSC -– regime change in Iraq.

Noting President Bush’s assertion in April 2002 that he had already “made up my mind that Saddam needs to go…The policy of my government is that he goes,” Zenko gets a nice quote from Doug Feith, who said in an interview with Zenko that the Bush administration ignored the advice of its generals to go after Khurmal because:

If you end up with empty hands [no WMD at Khurmal] you could conceivably derail a much larger project [regime change].

In other words, while they were happy to use overblown claims about Ansar al-Islam’s development of WMD (in addition to patently false claims about Ansar al-Islam’s relationship with Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, as Ansar al-Islam was under the control of neither) in order to whip up support for an invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s ideological commitment to that invasion was so strong that it caused them to ignore a threat out of fear that addressing it could potentially derail the greater policy goal, which was war. We already knew this, of course, in regard to Afghanistan, but for history’s sake it’s good to have one of the Iraq disaster’s chief architects on record with it in regard to Khurmal.

This past Friday, the Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank — released a detailed report entitled “Restriction or Legalization? Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform,” showing that the legalization of undocumented workers would significantly raise the overall income of the native-born. The findings were compared against the negative effect that increased enforcement and lower immigration levels would have on native-born income levels.

The report uses an equilibrium model that was developed for the U.S. International Trade Commission to prove that legalizing undocumented immigrants could increase U.S. household income by a total of approximately $180 billion. Meanwhile, a policy aimed at reducing immigration could cause household incomes to drop by a total of $80 billion. According to Cato, reducing low-skilled immigration “biases the occupational mix of employment” of the entire economy towards lower-paying jobs and is ultimately a “dead-weight loss.” Any increase in wages would be severely offset by the costly “prosecution mitigating activities” that increased enforcement would entail. In stark contrast, Cato researchers Peter B. Dixon and Maureen T. Rimmer explain what happens in their economic model when undocumented workers are legalized and legal immigration increases:

“While our modeling suggests that there would be reductions in the number of jobs for U.S. workers in low-skilled occupations, this does not mean that unemployment rates for these U.S.workers would rise. With increases in low-skilled immigration, the U.S. economy would expand, creating more jobs in higher-skilled areas. Over time, some U.S. workers now in low-paying jobs would move up the occupational ladder, actually reducing the wage pressure on low-skilled U.S. workers who remain in low-skilled jobs.“

Cato’s findings contradict those put forth by the heavy-handed conservative Heritage Foundation and the psuedo-science arguments of NumbersUSA. Today, the “nativist lobby’s supposedly ‘independent’ think tank,” Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), released two reports that essentially boil down to the point that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born workers. However, CIS’ shallow research conveniently overlooks Cato’s nuanced approach which shows that encouraging legal immigration might actually expand the labor market over time and legalizing undocumented workers would raise wages for all those who are employed.

In a press briefing which aired this morning, Cato’s Trade Policy Studies Director Daniel Griswold called on Republicans to “stand up and transcend a minority nativist element that just seems to oppose immigrants generally.” Griswold also emphasized Cato’s support of a guest worker program — a controversial provision that the nation’s two largest labor federations both strongly oppose. Watch it:

During an interview yesterday with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren said that Israel would not be wholly satisfied if Iran agreed to supervision over its nuclear program. “Certainly from Israel’s perspective, we would not be very much at ease with that,” he said. “We have seen how Iran has worked to subvert, to sidestep any type of international supervision of its nuclear program.”

When Zakaria noted that U.S. policies of deterrence against the Soviet Union and China have worked in the past, Oren dismissed the possibility that Iran can be deterred because Iran is “not secular”:

ZAKARIA: Mao was certainly about as crazy as leaders get in terms of the bizarre statements, their willingness to talk about the destruction of the world, inflicting enormous casualties. If these guys were deterred by the fact that they would suffer retaliation, why will Iran not be deterred?

OREN: Because the Maoist regime, the Stalinist regime were secular regimes. They had secular ideologies. … But the Iranian regime is not a secular regime. The Iranian regime is carrying out what they believe to be a divinely ordained task on the planet, and that is the conduct of a holy war.

Watch it:

Oren is subscribing to the radical “Iran as irrational actor” view espoused by the likes of far right neocons Micheal Ledeen and Frank Gaffney. Just because a nation is religious does not make it undeterrable.

As the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes, “Iran’s actual policy choices over the last three decades indicate rational strategic calculations. … Preservation of the Islamic Republic, not some crazy desire to trigger the apocalypse, is what guides Iranian policy.” Mehdi Khalaji, an expert in Shiite theology at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has studied in Qom, has challenged the theory that Iran’s leaders are willing to commit national suicide in pursuit of some wider religious goal:

As the theory of the guardianship of the jurist requires, the most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime, even by overruling Islamic law. Therefore, it seems like Khamenei, unlike the Iranian president, does not welcome and military confrontation with the West, the United States, or Israel.

When asked recently if Iran could be deterred, nuclear expert and Harvard professor Graham Allison, who is renowned for his expertise on bureaucratic decision making said “the benefit that Iran could hope to achieve by building up its own military forces, including nuclear forces would be significantly diminished,” with a credible U.S.-led military deterrent.