What is the Environmental Impact of Immigration to the United States?

This is a complex issue, but for the purposes of this short post, I’ll use the metrics of establishment environmentalist entities, such as the US government. I’ll use tonnage of emissions, with the understanding that some may disagree, and that there are many other possible angles to this issue. Tonnage of emissions is, at least in theory, quantifiable.

EnergyStar is a government program that gives certification to various products that they’re energy-efficient. You may have noticed the emblem on some of your appliances. From the government website:

ENERGY STAR is an important tool in fighting climate change, improving air quality, and protecting public health. By reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants, ENERGY STAR also provides states and local governments with more flexibility and reduced costs towards meeting their climate, air quality, and public health goals. In 2020 alone, ENERGY STAR and its partners helped Americans save more than 520 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and avoid $42 billion in energy costs. These savings resulted in associated emission reductions of more than 400 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, roughly equivalent to more than five percent of U.S. total greenhouse gas emissions.

400 million metric tons per year is a lot of emissions. Very impressive!

Now let’s take a look at a Pew Research article on immigration:

The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.7% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.8%) in 1970.

According to MigrationPolicy.org, immigrants have been responsible for approximately 20 million extra births in the United States since 1990. Ignoring births to immigrants from before 1990, we can conservatively estimate that immigration is responsible for an additional 65 million Americans in recent decades.

The bulk of these immigrants came from Latin America, specifically Mexico. More recently, they come from Asia. From Pew Research (ibid.):

Worldpopulationreview has a handy interactive map that shows us, among other things, the per-capita emissions for most countries in the world. According to this map, Mexico has a per-capita emission of 3. China is 8, India is 2. Philippines and El Salvador are both 1. To reach a fairly precise value, we’d have to extrapolate the figures in the above table, and then combine the respective per-capita emissions. I’ll leave this for somebody who’s better at math than I am – but the resulting average won’t be far off from 3. Probably slightly less. We’ll call it 3.

For the United States, the per-capita emission is almost 13 – yielding a difference of about 11.

65 million times 11 is 715 million extra metric tons of emissions due to immigration in recent decades.

Though official sources don’t necessarily agree, I think that an increasing amount of immigration will come from black Africa, where carbon emissions hover around 0-1. In other words, every African immigrant will increase emissions by around 12 metric tons annually.

The amount of excess emissions, from immigration, is almost TWICE AS MUCH as what is prevented through EnergyStar.

If EnergyStar is “an important tool in fighting climate change,” as the US government claims, then how much more so would be stopping immigration.