The Green Xenophobes

An interesting article over at the Guardian's Comment is Free blog by Spiked editor and reason contributor Brendan O'Neill, who notices a convergence of Britain's hard-left and hard-right over the issue of immigration:

Some leading environmentalist groups are explicitly anti-immigration. The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) is a scary Malthusian outfit which believes that Britain's population must be cut by half, to no more than 30 million. They propose to do this by making it an "eco-crime" to have large families, by educating the public on why they should stop being dirty little breeders, and by raising the drawbridge to foreigners. Rosamund McDougall, a former co-chair of the OPT, has described mass immigration as "a route to environmental collapse"—and she said that not in some right-leaning rag but in the liberal and respectable webzine Open Democracy. McDougall argued that Britain's "levels of net inward migration are causing rapid environmental deterioration".

The OPT's solution to the "problem" of immigration is to impose strict quotas on the number of people who can come here. It wants to "balance immigration with emigration", so that the number of immigrants who come to Britain each year must be the same or lower than the number of Britons who leave. That is, net immigration must be zero.

Whole thing here.