Sierra Club to Vote on Immigration Limits

Re “Sierra Club to Take On Immigration Question,” Sept 29:

The Sierra Club has finally climbed its Mt. Whitney. It now appears ready to acknowledge that population control is the foundation for lasting environmental control. A strong stand against immigration as we now experience it is a concept whose time has come. Let’s all join in.

ALLEN HOWLETT

Fullerton

As the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and a tenacious fighter for environmental justice and environmental equal rights, I am deeply disturbed that Sierra Club members have the audacity to believe that the U.S. must keep other people out in order to preserve the environment.

Ask yourself whose environment they want to protect. National parks in this country are generally used by the middle and upper classes more than by inner-city or low-income people. What the Sierra Club really stands for, to my great disappointment, is not environmental equal rights, but environmental snobbism.

Instead of fighting with those of us who realize that the environment is for everyone, the Sierra club should wake up and smell the pesticides, and the oil refineries, and the smelters. Will the environment in Mexico be any better by stopping Mexican immigrants at the border? Will the Salvadoran environment improve if a political refugee is forced back to his home country?

We in the environmental justice movement welcome the participation of Sierra Club members and anyone else who is truly interested in a clean environment for everyone’s future. Poor people suffer too, whether they are immigrants or home-grown. A truly enlightened environmental policy is one that has room for all of us.

MARTA R. SALINAS

Irvine

Alexander Cockburn’s Oct. 2 Column Left on the Sierra Club’s proposal to enforce existing immigration laws was an example of how far a person can go to selfishly prove his own point. Drawing parallels between the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the Sierra Club is a cheap shot and an obvious sign of a man who lacks a reasonable argument against the club’s proposal.

Cockburn has chosen to ignore the fact that the U.S. with its lax immigration laws is becoming the safety valve for the rest of the world’s inability to deal with overpopulation problems. The Sierra Club doesn’t want to bring back genocide but only to enforce those laws that we Americans have told our government are important to us.

MICHAEL NEWMAN

Pacific Palisades