Marijuana growers set fire to old-growth pine forests in Sierra Tarahumara, destroying two-hundred-year-old trees, simply to clear areas for growing pot. Sometimes, the locals burn huge swaths of the forest out of pique with the government. Mexican authorities are helpless against these crusading peasants, who attack officers, set fire to police cars, and storm prisons to free illegal loggers.32
Sending their poorest, most backward people to the United States is obviously a big help to Mexico, but it’s pretty rough on America’s landscape. The sheer numbers of immigrants tromping into the United States can’t help but to harm our wilderness areas. That’s why the largest anti-immigration group is called “Numbers USA,” not “Hispanics Litter and Scorch the Earth.” But it is also a fact that the vast majority of the Teddy Kennedy immigrants come from peasant cultures that have no concept “litter.”
In 2005, the Sumidero Canyon in Chiapas, Mexico, was so jammed with garbage that it became a cause célèbre for environmentalists. In the first few days of cleanup, thirty tons of garbage were removed from the eight-mile canyon.33 Then ten years later, the river was completely clogged again, full of plastic bottles, bags, Styrofoam cups, and plates.34 As one Mexican environmentalist said, “[I]t’s a war without end.”35 Lucy Gallagher of Mexiconservacion explained in an online video that “people actually just dump the garbage on the beach.” Pointing to beer bottles, syringes, shoes, and soap carpeting the beach around her, she said, “[P]retty much anything that you can find in your house waste will be on this beach.”36
After ritualistically noting that “[n]ot every Mexican litters,” the Houston Chronicle said that Mexico is “choking on its refuse.” Mexico City is flooded after every major rainfall because bottles and trash clog the storm drains: “Soft drink bottles, snack wrappers, used diapers and cigarette butts clog city streets, rural highways and scenic beaches. Mountains of garbage stand sentry-like in empty lots and at the edges of bucolic rural villages. Discarded plastic bags hang in trees and dangle from cactus like bitter industrial fruit.”37 Mexicans “tuck pop bottles into hedges, trees and lampposts. Schoolchildren drop snack packages wherever they please. Drivers of intercity buses instruct passengers to toss refuse out the windows rather than leave it aboard.”38 There are periodic outbreaks of dengue fever on account of the mosquitoes clustering around trash dumped on the roads.39
The Chronicle was quick to point out that it wasn’t Mexicans’ fault that they littered: It was the fault of a “deeply entrenched political system.”40 (My money had been on systemic racism.) The logic is murky, but it has something to do with the system discouraging “citizen input,” forcing Mexicans to throw their trash on the ground.41
For decades, Mexican refuse ended up on San Diego’s world-famous beaches by way of the Tijuana River. The “pungent flow, with its brown froth and floating bits of plastic,” carried excrement from Tijuana through eight miles of rural California before landing on Southern California beaches. Border agents avoided the river, not only because of the smell, but because it “melts the wax off your boots if you step in it,” as one agent told the New York Times. This blight on California’s beaches reached a crisis point in the 1990s. One solution would have been for Mexicans to stop throwing their garbage in the river. But as San Diego County Supervisor Brian P. Bilbray said, it wasn’t like dealing with Canada. “This is where the first world and the third world meet.”42 Instead, U.S. taxpayers funded a sewage treatment plant on the border at a cost of $239.4 million. Mexico chipped in $17 million.43
THE MEXICAN LITTERING HABIT
The Mexican cultural trait of littering is well known to everyone, except American journalists. With the rigid circling of wagons by the elites as impenetrable as ever, the truth about the rampant littering problem of Mexican immigrants mostly slips out in the nontraditional media. The comments sections of hiking blogs are a hotbed of unfiltered reporting. After Labor Day weekend in 2011, one hikers’ blog wailed: “KCAL reports that in one canyon alone (they never mention which one, but it certainly looks like the East Fork of the San Gabriel River in the accompanying video) had upwards of 30,000 pounds of trash left in it over the long weekend. THIRTY. THOUSAND. POUNDS.”
The comments thread was more specific:
PISSED OFF HIKER says:
September 12, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Maybe they should lower the price of water in LA county so the Mexicans could take a shower at home and wouldn’t have to have bath day in the river.
JANETTE P. says:
September 13, 2011 at 3:58 pm
I noticed the comment about the Mexicans, sadly, this is more than likely true. My extended family is Mexican so I know how most of them are and the outskirts of Angeles is full of Hispanic people. I went last week just to sit next to the river that runs through the canyons and I wanted to shoot the people who left their crap there—red cups, abandoned sandals, plastic bags—immediately I gathered what I could and brought it up to a huge green trash bin they had there. They ACTUALLY HAD a huge trash bin. I don’t understand the laziness of people. Earth is so beautiful and I hate that people don’t take the responsibility to keep it that way as much as possible.44
It’s not just America’s national parks that are being destroyed, but its neighborhoods. After suburban Wheaton, Maryland, flipped from majority white to majority Hispanic, the Washington Post reports, “[t]he grassy medians often got treated as dumps, collecting beer bottles, dirty diapers and fast-food trash that longtime residents still spend their weekends picking up.”45 Established residents, the Post reported—while absolutely not prejudiced and, in fact, delighted by their colorful neighbors—were, however, “bothered by litter, cars parked on lawns, graffiti and a rash of auto break-ins.” Thus, local Ed Williford complimented the “beautiful things” Hispanics do to their houses and rushed to assure the Post that “we don’t mind the Hispanics. We’re not prejudiced.” His complaint was with the ones “who leave the trash—they have no respect.” His wife elaborated, saying, “Some leave loads and loads of beer bottles and trash. I think people get frustrated when they see that. That’s not the way we like to live.”46 It’s not the way Washington lobbyists like to live either, but they don’t live in Wheaton. Their maids do.
In tony Palm Springs, a letter to the editor of the Desert Sun complained about vandalism in a local park after Mexican Independence Day. “Exercise equipment, landscape boulders, memorial plaques, utility buildings and tennis court signs,” the resident wrote, “are all covered with green spray paint proudly displaying the ‘tag’ of some individual who must now feel very proud of this accomplishment.”47
Similarly, in a Los Angeles Times Neighborhood Report on once majority-black Vermont Square in South LA, the comments section consisted mostly of black residents complaining about the littering of their new Hispanic neighbors. Endorsing another commenter’s remark that the neighborhood looked like Tijuana, “Stoney” said, “I work around many different ethnicities” and “Mexicans just do not clean up after themselves. It is as if they have never thrown a piece of trash away in their lives. They just leave it all on the ground.”48 One longtime black resident, Audrey, said: “Trash in the street is an ugly sight. . . . Adults with children mimicking [them] seem to see no problem with their childish actions.”49 A book about Mexican immigration published by the Russell Sage Foundation disputed the notion that blacks resent Mexican immigrants for taking their jobs, saying that actually what they resented was the “litter, public hygiene, drinking outdoors and noisiness.”50
Do you see a pattern developing?
Even a post on the Democratic Underground website reported (spelling and capitalization as in the original):
There is at least one new beer can or bottle a day thrown out on the area I try to keep clean. Fast food debris are a close second and the final straw was having to pick up a “loaded” diaper last week.
Other property owners have given up trying to keep ahead of the stuff, the roadside looks like some third world
country.
I believe a large percentage of the litter is coming from newly arrived people from south of the border. If anyone has been to Mexico (outside of the tourist areas), you know why I suspect that they may be part of the problem. We have a large Central American population that are drawn here to work on the farms and a large tyson chicken plant that employes many immigrants. I have no problem with people coming here to improve their lives. I do have a problem with people that reduce the quality of MY life.
In reply, one Democratic Underground commenter said: “When I lived in Mexico, we referred to the white plastic bag as the ‘Mexican National Flower,’ and that was probably being kind. Last year when I spent some time in Ireland, I never saw any litter at all . . . anywhere.”51 (You know what else you didn’t see in Ireland? Mexicans.)
Unless we’re witnessing a mass psychosis—let’s all get together and smear an innocent ethnic group—Hispanics are prodigious litterers. Even other Hispanics notice! In 2005, a Latino group in Boston put together a program to teach fellow Hispanics to stop littering, using street mimes to communicate beyond the language barrier. When a draft of their proposal leaked, there was shock, hurt, and, of course, outrage—and not just the usual outrage associated with anything having to do with mimes. Colombian immigrant Diego Luis Peña demanded an apology for the Hispanic-run anti-littering campaign, saying, “People are very hurt.” Local resident Jose Ortiz said that the anti-littering campaign “caused a lot of pain.”52
Inasmuch as the rules of political correctness require that no one notice anything negative about Hispanic culture, maybe we should consider admitting only those immigrants we’re allowed to criticize, like Germans. How can any immigrant assimilate if Americans refuse to mention their little cultural annoyances, such as littering, drunk driving, and child rape? The Irish would still be filling up the paddy wagons if America had treated them with such kid gloves. (Remember the good old days when the Irish were our biggest problem?) The Houston Chronicle explained that Mexicans throw trash on the ground because, in Mexico, no one tells them not to.53 Unfortunately, no one tells them not to in the United States, either—provided the person doing the littering is slightly darker than Joe Pesci.
Ordinary people have noticed. But without these eyewitness accounts in blog posts and online comments, it would be impossible to make sense of news stories about park closures and mass littering.
IT’S PROBABLY “TEABAGGERS” VANDALIZING IRREPLACEABLE ARCHAEOLOGICAL TREASURES
In 2013, Joshua Tree National Park was beset by inner-city graffiti on rocks and boulders—as well as on ancient petroglyphs etched by Serrano and Chemehuevi Indians thousands of years ago. The century-old Barker Dam had graffiti carved into it. Rather than suggest that any particular group was responsible for the vandalism and garbage, federal officials closed large sections of the park.
Joshua Tree Park is located in two California counties, San Bernardino and Riverside, that had recently become majority Hispanic. Twenty years ago, both these counties were more than 80 percent white.54 By 2010, according to the U.S. census, San Bernardino County was 51.1 percent Hispanic and 31.4 percent white,55 while Riverside County was 46.9 percent Hispanic and 38 percent white56—and this from a census bureau that undercounts illegal aliens.
Luckily, Huffington Post readers drew no connection between the recent influx of Latin American immigrants and the sudden appearance of gang graffiti in our national parks, allowing them to blame “teabaggers,” “kids today,” and “this generation of parents.”
IF_Toci
Think of short-sighted TEABAGGERS running a town of twenty-one thousand people for a dozen years. Thousands of people, only in the desert for Cheap Housing, badly wanting a MALL and looking for something to do. Looks like some of them have found something to do.
12 APR 2013 3:42 PM
SilverStacker
I’m surprised the kids today can get off Facebook long enough to do this.
12 APR 2013 7:18 PM
cjaco
Yet another sign that this generation of parents is the worst in history.
12 APR 2013 8:27 PM57
Later that year, all of Cucamonga Canyon in Rancho Cucamonga also had to be closed because the trails were piled high with garbage and the canyon walls covered with graffiti. In 1980, Rancho Cucamonga was 88 percent white and 16 percent Hispanic.58 By 2010, the town was officially 42.7 percent white and 34.9 percent Hispanic.59 USA Today has a nice photo gallery of “scenic Sapphire Falls,” including one shot of four Hispanic men in the act of spray-painting rock cliffs.60
But the U.S. Fire Service stressed that it was closing the canyon not because of the trash and spray-painted gang symbols, but as a simple fire precaution.61 Most of the canyon remains closed to this day.62 Overwhelming popular opinion on hiking blogs was that the closure of Sapphire Falls was due to the epic amounts of trash and graffiti in the canyon, put there by Mexicans:
August 2013
Yes this is above Rancho Cucamonga, the Beverly Hills of the IE, but the problem is it’s surrounded by places like Fontucky, Rialto, Ontario, and the like. Who do you think writes all that graffiti in the canyon? It’s not the high-end soccer moms from Rancho. These guys find these pristine places and ruin them for the rest of us. Same thing happened to Rosarito, Mexico in the 90s (off-topic I know, but illustrates my point). I wouldn’t bring my wife or teenage daughters here.63
March 2014
I grew up down the street from here. And as a kid (1990s), we used to gather all the neighborhood kids and walk up to the falls on hot summer days. . . . I have noticed the past few years, it was pretty much always crowded and the trail was littered with trash and graffiti. . . . The same thing happened to Joshua Tree National Park last year. . . . most of the Indian land is now forever closed off to the public because of the disrespect people showed for their ancient monuments. . . .64
BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live?
The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike.
But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67
It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps.
Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three
actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.
America’s premiere hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, jumped into the fray, with multimillionaire con man and SPLC head Morris Dees running for the Sierra Club board simply to smear the three real environmentalist candidates as “white supremacists”—yes, even the former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation. Dees had never before shown the slightest interest in environmentalism. But, evidently, what poor Southerners need most is a massive influx of foreign poor people competing for their jobs. And what the environment needs most is millions of poor immigrants trashing our national parks. Now the alliance makes sense, no?
In 2012, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune announced that the Club officially supported mass immigration—amnesty, no borders, more legal immigration, the whole nine yards. “The Sierra Club,” he gushed, “has thrived because of the ability for our members to engage with the full tools of democracy.”69 Businessmen seeking cheap labor take note: The Sierra Club’s “tools of democracy” are new voters, who will give the Left hegemonic control of our politics. At that point, the EPA will start shutting down power plants, coal mines, oil exploration, and so on.
Environmentalists can’t keep ignoring immigration forever. They have eyes. If mass-immigration enthusiasts want to make the argument that preserving America’s natural wilderness is not as important as transforming our culture to a poorer and more Latin one, then they should make that argument. Instead we get bald-faced lies from the government, silence from the press, and bought-off “environmentalists” denouncing anyone who threatens their money supply.