Global Warming Will Deter, Not Encourage, Illegal Immigration

The liberal media this morning is trumpeting a new study claiming global warming will cause millions of Mexicans to illegally cross the border into the U.S. as a result of warming-related crop failure. The message being peddled is that conservatives who want to control our borders should therefore rally behind costly global warming legislation.

There are, however, a few very important flaws with this study.

First, the author of the study, Michael Oppenheimer, is a longtime staffer with the environmental extremist group Environmental Defense. Michael Oppenheimer claiming global warming will cause some sort of crisis is about as objective and credible as BP saying it did everything possible to prevent the Gulf oil spill.

Second, global warming has indisputably benefited rather than harmed global and Mexican crop production. A plethora of peer-reviewed studies document, and hard scientific data confirm, that global and Northern Hemisphere precipitation, soil moisture, and crop production have all dramatically improved as temperatures have warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age a little over 100 years ago. 

Third, Mexican crop production has steadily increased during the past 50 years, as temperatures have risen. Mexican crop production has fully doubled in the past 35 years alone.

Fourth, even if Mexican crop production were declining rather than improving, the much more simple and direct answer to illegal immigration concerns would be to better guard the border. Illegal immigrants can enter the country in large numbers only if our government makes deliberate decisions to leave the border unguarded.