Most environmental organizations keep immigration policy at arm’s length. The Colcom Foundation does not. It has made the explicit argument that immigration levels in the United States are an environmental question one with direct consequences for land use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, and ecological overshoot and it funds advocacy accordingly.

The foundation’s reasoning rests on demographic data. Around 1990, immigration replaced natural population increase as the primary engine of U.S. population growth. Since then, the country has added tens of millions of people in each decade. Colcom Foundation cites Pew Research projections showing that 103 million of the 110 million people expected to be added to the U.S. by 2065 will be the result of immigration. That works out to roughly 82 percent of all projected growth between 2005 and 2050.

What Population Scale Means Ecologically

Translating that growth into ecological terms, the foundation notes that the U.S. is already consuming approximately 240 percent of its available biocapacity. Adding the equivalent of 8.5 Los Angeles metro areas the foundation’s description of 110 million additional people would intensify every existing environmental pressure. More people need more food, more energy, more water, more land. The country’s already-large ecological footprint would expand further, the foundation argues, making climate targets harder to reach and native species harder to protect.

A Contested but Consistent Position

This is not a position without critics. Many environmentalists reject the framing, arguing that per-capita consumption patterns in wealthy countries, not population totals, drive most global environmental harm. Colcom Foundation counters with its own data the U.S. reduced per-capita CO2 emissions by 35 percent between 1970 and 2021, yet overall emissions rose 15 percent because there were 62 percent more people producing them. For the foundation, this arithmetic is the core of its case and it continues to fund research, advocacy, and conservation work premised on the view that population levels are the variable environmental policy cannot afford to ignore. Read this article for additional information.

Find more information about Colcom Foundation on https://www.colcomfdn.org/