Source: Center for American Progress

Center for American Progress, based in Washington, D.C., published two studies: one that provides a state-by-state analysis of teachers of color, noting that while 40 percent of K-12 students are non-white, only 17 percent of teachers share those characteristics. The second study proposed solutions for expanding recruitment and retention of qualified minority instructors.

“While our schools are very diverse, our students aren’t seeing that diversity reflected in their teachers,” said Saba Bireda, one of the two reports’ writers, during a conference highlighting the reports’ findings. “Teachers of color are role models to students of color. They are real-life examples of a career path towards teaching.”

Using 2008 data compiled by the federal National Center for Education Statistics called Schools and Staffing Survey, the CAP researchers found 20 states have gaps of 25 percent or more between minority teachers and students.

California leads all states: 72 percent of students are of color while only 29 percent of teachers identified as non-white. Two-thirds of Texas students are non-white yet only one third of teachers share similar backgrounds.

Ulrich Boser, who compiled the national data, spoke starkly about the results. “Diversity is the litmus test for modern society,” he said.

Others studies also point to the educational benefits of having more teachers of color.

A 2004 paper  analyzing teacher racial composition and pupil test-results in Tennessee found a small boost in student performance on standardized tests when taught by teachers of the same race. After four years of receiving instruction from a same-race teacher, students improved test scores by a range of 8 to 12 percentage points. Inconveniently, those findings applied to white students as well.

More recently, a 2011 working study by economists focusing on a large community college in California pointed to strong gains by minority students taught by instructors from any minority background.

“Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans are 2.9 percentage points more likely to pass courses with instructors of similar background and 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass courses with underrepresented instructors.”

The authors add: “These effects represent roughly  half of the total gaps in classroom outcomes between white and underrepresented minority students at the college. The effects are particularly large for Blacks.  The class dropout rate relative to Whites is 6 percentage points lower for Black students when taught by a Black  instructor.”

But a combination of employer bias, undesirable working conditions and a lag in numbers of minorities with college degrees explains why white teachers are over-represented in U.S. classrooms.

In 2004, researchers at Harvard conducted a famous study  partly titled, “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” It determined job applicants with more caucasian-sounding names receive 50 percent more call-backs from potential employers than those with black-sounding names.

High-school graduation rates favor whites to blacks and Hispanics by roughly 20 percentage points, with some 77 percent of whites having graduated in the class of 2007. College completion rates show much of the same, with whites wrapping up their college studies more frequently (by 12 to 20 percentage points).

CAP’s study also found minority teachers are generally less satisfied with their work conditions, with whites showing more approval (78 percent) than blacks (70 percent.) And while the pay gap along racial lines is modest, with whites earning $49,570 to $48,890 and $49,260 for blacks and Hispanics, respectively, satisfaction with pay differed wildly: 53 percent of caucasians were happy with their pay versus 37 percent for blacks and 46 percent for Hispanics. Much of that disparity, the researchers reason, is the result of teacher placement: whites tend to stand in front of more affluent pupils, while minority instructors are more likely to be placed in schools with many low-income and high-risk students.

However, the shortfall of minority teachers should not be blamed on demographics, alone, says Boser during a brief interview with TAI.

“I would argue that the the question is not the relative percentages of graduation rates, but the absolute numbers of available potential teachers, and I do think that a sufficient pool of well-qualified potential teachers of color exists in most areas.”

Source: The New Teacher Project via Center for American Progress

Non-traditional accreditation programs are one way recruiters can bolster the number of minority educators in classrooms across the country, the researchers argue. So far, 25 percent of Hispanic, and 27 of black, school teachers have come through alternative pipelines, compared to 11 percent of whites.

The New Teacher Project, which has placed 37,000 teachers in high-needs urban schools, tries to respond to the demographic needs of school districts by recruiting mid-career and older college graduates. TNTP estimates some 37 percent of their fellows, teachers who receive multi-year on-going education towards a teaching certificate, are of color. Its various fellowship projects are also known to attract minority candidates with professional backgrounds in math and the sciences — despite usually taking pay cuts to enter the teaching profession.

Source: Teach for America via Center for American Progress (percentages are rounded)

And unlike fellows of Teach For America, a teacher accreditation program that boasts of recruiting young graduates from top national universities, TNTP fellows teach longer, especially minority candidates. 60.5 percent of TFA teachers continue working as public school instructors after their two year commitment. 35.5 percent taught after four years. Comparatively, 72 percent of TNTP fellows come back for a fourth year of teaching. Among blacks and Latinos, 78 percent remain.

Leaders of non-traditional teacher programs sharing their experiences at the CAP event placed additional emphasis on retention. “I want to sure [new teachers] are growing in their profession,” said Rachelle Rogers-Ard, a teacher who manages a recruitment and retention program in Oakland  that seeks out teachers of color. “We’re recruiting folks because we want them to remain in education.”

But targeting minority populations to staff classrooms does not mean the instructors will be highly qualified or effective. “We wouldn’t support lowering certification standards, they are really low to start with,” says Sandi Jacobs of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that is critical of teacher assessment standards nationwide.” Still, she sees value in alternative accreditation routes to help add more diversity in the teaching profession. “There are things that alt routes do that help remove … barriers for anyone, specifically to promote that diversity.”

Rogers-Ard, however, thinks nurturing new talent is an aspect of education many critics of the teaching profession overlook: “That first year doctor might not be as effective as a fifth year physician.”

Put simply, too much attention is centered on in-school matters, and the brick and mortar operations to keep kids from going astray after-hours are strapped for funding.

The Baton Rouge-based service project that Hammatt helped kick start, Reinforcing the Rewards of Reading, Building a Better Baton Rouge (3R’s for 3BR), part of the Kiwanis Club of Baton Rouge, has a few thousand dollars on hand to do what after-school programs, summer, and private daycare programs promise to achieve with much bigger price tags: boost literacy among low-income students.

“For a much lower cost per child, we can increase the entry scores for students significantly,” said Hammatt, a former teacher of the year finalist, instructor on education at Louisiana State University, and founder of 3R’s for 3BR. After three years of planning, his program launched last week with financial backing from The Kiwanis International Foundation.

The local Baton Rouge Kiwanis branch will provide three years of funding for 3R’s for 3BR, contributing tens of thousands of new and used books to households with young kids straddling the poverty level. Book shelves will be set up in community areas–so far there are four, including a regional medical center where many young adults bring their kids due to limited babysitting options. Parents, or guardians, will be able to read to their children with free books, and then have the opportunity to take the tomes home.

Home library as effective as summer school, college educated parents

This is not a program that is likely to be effective for middle-class pupils. The various reasons under-privileged students lag in performance indicators–lack of access to safe, public spaces, the greater likelihood of a college educated guardian, limited access to after-school and weekend entertainment due to household finances– do not encumber wealthier students. As John B. King Jr., New York state’s Education Commissioner, said in response to a TAI question at an extended-learning hearing in Washington D.C., “Affluent families are doing lots of things for their kids outside of schools, its just poorer families can’t afford those things.

“Tomorrow is Saturday and I’m taking my daughter out to dance class… and I have the means to do that,” King said.

3R’s for 3BR is geared at younger readers for a reason: poor students already trail considerably their wealthier peers — three months at the kindergarten level to three years at the fourthgrade level in the achievement gap between rich and poor pupils. More recently, in 2010, a Annie E. Casey Foundation report showed 83 percent of poor students who took NAEP in fourth grade were not proficient in reading, compared to 55 percent of moderate to wealthy students.

For the lower rungs, a bevy of research suggests targeted efforts to give poorer students the tools that boost reading can make up for those limited household resources.

An Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report that examined over 20 countries concluded (PDF) socioeconomic factors outside the classroom are the most significant variable in a student’s success.

And studies like this one show simply putting a book into an economically disadvantaged child’s hands can galvanize reading scores, since often poor families have few, if any, books in the house. The study concluded overcoming one of the greatest symptoms of lower-economic status, the summer reading slide, takes nothing more than spending $50 on books per child for the summer.

That’s an inexpensive stopgap to a problem in which poor students enter the fall three months behind their wealthier peers each year. For added measure, the co-author said a home library was “equal to the effect of summer school.” Summer school is usually for remedial learning—increased access to books might obviate the need for additional instruction in the first place.

And what about the suspicion poorer families lack the commitment or interest to read to their children? As far Steve Bialostok–an early childhood literacy professor at the University of Wyoming–is concerned, there’s little to undergird that truth.

“I’ll just say that there’s a folk model among those who are middle class…that poor(er) families – even given the resources such as books – don’t read to their kids, either due to lack of time, desire, or both,” Bialostok begins. “I simply do not believe this is true.”

Hammat doesn’t shy away from the social imperatives 3R’s for 3BR represents. “We cannot ensure that the books will continue to be read once they leave our sites,” he says. That said, Hammatt says there are a lot of parents who relish at the opportunity to read to their kids when given the chance, and as this USA Today article from 2010 indicates, that’s usually half the battle. In the first days of the program, bookshelves at two of the four site locations are nearly empty—for now, parents want them.

3R’s for 3BR also offers tips to parents whose reading skills may not to be up to speed, designed by Hammatt’s sister-in-law who’s a retired kindergarten teacher. If a parent of guardian is unfamiliar with a particular word, they’re encouraged to ask the child where the plot might turn to next. Pointing out colors and counting objects is also recommended, and stressing relational terms is key–words like bigger and smaller.

Zeroing in on domestic factors affecting child learning, a 27-country study released in 2010 the International Sociological Association Research Committee found that:

Children growing up in homes with many books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class. This is as great an advantage as having university educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.

Data from the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — the gold standard in evaluating student learning administered by the U.S. Department of Education — underscores the link between volume of books in the house and student achievement. The chart below compares fourth grade performance in reading with books in the home.

Looking more closely at urban schools, 100 books in an underprivileged child’s home catches up that student to a wealthier child with 25 books. With 3R’s for 3BR projecting 100 books will cost roughly $350, the academic effect is equivalent to adding several thousand dollars to household income.

For Hammatt, who falls on the side of the education debate that views out of school factors as far more influential than school campus matters in a child’s education, greater access to literacy is his attempt to make socio-economics a moot issue.

Back to Baton Rouge

In the relatively poor and mostly black school district of East Baton Rouge Parish, inexpensive alternatives meant to improve student learning can’t come soon enough.

Louisiana’s early education initiative, LA4, which enrolls four-year-olds into pre-k education services, has seen per pupil spending drop off even as the program’s popularity has increased. The Pelican State spent $5,700 per Pre-K student in 2002 and only $4,706 in 2010 while participation increased from 12 percent to 32 percent of the state’s four-year olds, according to the most recent National Institute for Early Education Research report on early education funding.

In the 2011-2012 school year, of East Baton Rouge Parish’s 42,700 students 88 percent were non-white and 80 percent received free and reduced lunches.

To get more of the community involved, 3R’s for 3BR has reached out to sororities of historically black colleges to volunteer as on-site readers. Currently, the majority of the volunteers are white. “By and large, the parents of young Black children ARE the program,” Hammatt says. “We are simply making the books available.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin defended the results of an unprecedented escalation and intensification of border security that began in the 1990s and accelerated under Presidents Bush and Obama.

“The specific theory of action,” Bersin explained, “was to push people out of easy urban places to cross the border, to push them out of the situation where you could simply walk across the border, get into the transportation network and then move anywhere into the interior of the United States.”

He pointed out that in 1993 there were 3,000 border agents; today, there are over 21,000.

Bersin and his fellow panelist, Clinton-era commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service Doris Meissner, explained how concentrations of border agents in San Diego, Calif., and El Paso, Texas, which in 1993 were the two primary entry points for undocumented immigrants, had pushed unauthorized border traffic towards Arizona, which is still the most active illegal crossing point into the United States. Today, however, overall apprehensions have dropped by 73 percent since they peaked in 2000, which Bersin and Meissner both claimed was sign of effective deterrence.

But Bersin also stressed the difficulty of putting an end to the organized crime outfits who now provide most of the ‘coyote’ or border smuggling of undocumented immigrants. He pointed out that coyotes used to be mom-and-pop operations, but the increased cost of crossing the border, because of the security ramp-up, had empowered the cartels. He likened the effort to combat Mexican organized crime to anti-Mafia efforts in the United States, which “took 30 years” to achieve permanent success.

Meissner, who oversaw the initial implementation of the agent concentration strategy, argued for legal pathways for immigrants as a means of further deterring illegal crossings. She also stressed the importance of making the public aware of the progress made in border security under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

The author of CAP’s new report on border security (PDF) and moderator of the event, Marshall Fitz, argued that the comments made by Bersin and Meissner, as well as his report, showed the need for policymakers in Washington to stop talking as if the border isn’t functioning. In his report, he rebuts the claims of House Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) that border security hasn’t improved under the Obama administration and that non-border related immigration reform therefore can’t proceed: “Rep. Smith is effectively demanding an absolute seal of the border — an unattainable objective — as a precondition to discussion of broader immigration reforms.”

An image from the report shows the scale of the across-the-board decrease in border apprehensions in the past decade:

The Morning Call reports that Corbett said districts forced to keep teaching positions unfilled “have their own financial decisions they have to make.”

Corbett concluded, “I would note that many of them took federal [stimulus] money, were told the federal money would go away, made their budgets based on that, and now that money is not there.” The governor’s budget matches state spending levels of 2008-2009.

While the state’s coffers took a beating since the country’s economic downturn, enough money was available to keep funding for Pennsylvania’s mainly lower-income students from taking additional hits, says Bruce Baker, a professor of education at Rutgers who also contributes to the influential National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

After looking at budgeting priorities of various states, Baker noticed that more federal funding fed into short comes in dollar streams allocated to wealthier districts than poor districts. Once Pennsylvania’s share of the $48.3 billion states received in 2009 through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) dried up, more money was cut from poorer districts while wealthier ones saw no change in state contributions to their education costs. “They’ve hammered the poor districts with [a] warped shell game,” he said.

By analogy, Baker offered this explanation to The American Independent:

For example, let’s say I have a family assistance program, where poor families get a total allocation of $800 per family per year for food assistance, and rich families still get $100 (even though they don’t need it.)   Let’s say we’ve only got two families in the system, one rich and one poor. Because of a recession, my state funding is $200 short this year, but the feds give me a stimulus of $200 to replace it. I could use my $700 in state money for the poor family, and given $100 each in federal money to each family. I’ve still honored my formula which is intended to yield $800 for the poor family and $100 for the rich one.

But, what [Corbett] did was to say that the poor family got $200 in [federal] money and $600 in state money and the rich family got $100 in state money. So, when the fed money is gone, the rich family still gets $100 in state money and the poor family gets $600 in state money – but $200 less than the previous year.

The next twist was to give the rich family $102 in state money the next year, and give the poor family $612 the next year, so each got a 2% increase in state money, but the rich family actually gets a $2 increase and the poor family gets a $188 cut in total funding.

Corbett, in his defense, maintains his budget provides more for education than what the previous governor, Democrat Ed Rendell, called for in 2009. Morning Call reports Corbett’s defenders say his budget should be interpreted as an increase in funding

Pennsylvania, like most states in the union, could not have steered through the recession without the stimulus funding. Jennifer Cohen, an education policy analyst at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email that states were allowed to roll back their education contributions to 2006 levels, with SFSF dollars filling in the void.

Formula Funding Issues

Baker’s second contention is how those additional 2 percent increases were calculated. Like many aspects of public budgeting, schools receive funding by a formula, known as “formula spending.” As Cohen explains, “most education funding formulas take into account lots of things in addition to population like poverty [and] cost of living,” to impact the communities that have lower income levels and small tax revenues.

Baker says Corbett, and other state leaders like Governors John Kasich in Ohio and Andrew Cuomo in New York, aims to provide any increased aid in a flat, “off the formula” distribution. “That is,” he says, “any increases would be a flat percent and not driven through the formula calculations that would drive more funding back to poor districts.”

The implications of going off the formula can be a mixed blessing, says Raegen Miller, an education funding analyst at the Center for American Progress. Depending on how progressive or regressive state funding mechanisms are, “that can either improve equity or exacerbate inequity,” he says. When funding decisions are made irrespective of socio-economic indicators, the money is a lump sum that is evenly distributed by the number of students — small communities can end up with more aid.

Regardless of the jargon, however, Miller warns that,  “off the formula funds aren’t subject to whatever other checks and balances you have in state and local funding.”

Among the donors spotted at the conference on Tuesday, the second day of the three-day gathering, were former Stride Rite chairman Arnold Hiatt, hedge fund financier Donald Sussman, electronics pioneer Bill Budinger, real estate developer Wayne Jordan and Suzanne Hess, the wife of real estate mogul Lawrence Hess.

There was no sign of some of the deepest-pocketed Democracy Alliance members, such as tech entrepreneur Tim Gill, insurance magnate Peter Lewis, or billionaire financier George Soros, though Michael Vachon, a Soros representative, did attend.

The conference itself featured mostly big picture analyses of the midterm elections and their predicted impact on the donors’ favored policy causes,rather than strategic planning for the 2012 elections, sources told POLITICO. And – despite the tens of millions of dollars in independent advertisements aired in 2010 by GOP allies attacking Democratic candidates – Democracy Alliance is not formally recommending its donors contribute to any outside groups that focus primarily on election advertising.

Indeed, despite that fact that Democrats were outspent by outside groups on electoral advertising in the 2010 midterms by a big margin, they’re still divided on the question of the right approach to take leading up to 2012. One of the reasons is that the Democracy Alliance was founded in 2005 in the wake of an election in which outside left-leaning groups spent heavily and still lost the presidency. The idea was to take a new approach that would challenge the right’s “intellectual infrastructure” — think tanks like the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation — by creating institutions like the Center for American Progress to influence policy and media debates.

Now that they’ve been outgunned on the airwaves and trounced at the ballot box, some donors are getting restless and looking to create a political spending outfit to rival the network of right wing groups that revolve around American Crossroads and political operative Karl Rove. The meeting ended without any resolution to direct spending through any new group of this nature.

Not surprisingly, some of the founders of new liberal outside spending outfits, like Jim Jordan, who helped run the group Commonsense Ten, are firmly in camp one. But Michael Vachon, an adviser to wealthy Democratic donor George Soros, thinks liberals should stick to working toward campaign finance reform.

“I don’t believe that the left is going to be able to raise the kind of money that you see raised on the right because the donors on the right are ultimately acting in their own economic self interest,” Vachon told Politico. “So I don’t think that we should attempt to match the funding.”

Obviously, some sort of synthesis is in order here. After 2004, Vogel writes, a lot of Democratic donors turned to funding more permanent liberal intellectual institutions like the Center for American Progress (CAP). Those investments have served them well, but groups like CAP weren’t designed to fight electoral battles and didn’t run political advertising to counter conservative groups, like American Crossroads, which were set up with the explicit mission to elect candidates. Craig Varoga, a Democratic independent advertising operative, argues that it shouldn’t be viewed as an either/or situation:

“The lesson from 2004 is that media (paid advertising) without long-term infrastructure doesn’t work,” said Varoga, who runs a non-profit outfit called Patriot Majority that spent more than $5 million on ads supporting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s successful reelection campaign in Nevada. “And the lesson from 2010 is that long-term infrastructure without media is also a losing recipe,” he said.

Well, I think I’ve been willing to compromise in the past and I’m going to be willing to compromise going forward on a whole range of issues.  Let me give you an example — the issue of energy that I just mentioned. I think there are a lot of Republicans that ran against the energy bill that passed in the House last year. And so it’s doubtful that you could get the votes to pass that through the House this year or next year or the year after.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t agreement that we should have a better energy policy. And so let’s find those areas where we can agree.

Obama specifically mentioned a number of broad issues where he believes Democrats and Republicans can find consensus, including expanding the use of natural gas resources, incentivizing electric vehicles and developing a more robust nuclear power industry.

Obama continued:

Let’s go ahead and start making some progress on the things that we do agree on, and we can continue to have a strong and healthy debate about those areas where we don’t.

In that spirit, I thought I’d outline some of the policy proposals that could get bipartisan support in Congress.

At a press conference with environmentalists today, I asked Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington office of Environment America, what she thought could pass next Congress. She mentioned a renewable energy standard, which would require a certain percentage of the country’s electricity to come from renewable sources like wind and solar. Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) introduced an RES in late September. The bill gained a number of Republican co-sponsors, and proponents are convinced it can pass the Senate.

But Republican gains in the Senate could mean a renewed push to add nuclear power and so-called clean coal into the mix. Aurilio said that environmentalists are “concerned” about that potential scenario and stressed that coal and nuclear are outside the bounds of an RES.

Other possible bipartisan proposals include the Homestar bill, which would give consumers incentives to make their homes more efficient; a proposal on appliance efficiency; a bill to extend a Treasury grant program for renewables; and a bill to establish a land and water conservation fund.

Asked about the oil spill response bill — which was passed by the House, but was never passed in the Senate — Aurilio said simply, “It needs to happen.” League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski, asked by TWI about the oil spill response bill, said, “It should have already passed,” and acknowledged that it will be difficult to pass such a bill in the lame-duck session. While the prospects for passage in the next Congress are also unclear, Karpinski said the results of the national oil spill commission’s investigation may provide an incentive to move the bill forward.

For more on energy bills that could pass next Congress, see this piece by Dan Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Some examples, from CAP’s interactive state-by-state breakdown:

• The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity spent $16.3 million this year on advertising, focusing in the last three months before the mid-term elections on Washington, D.C., Montana and Texas.
• The American Petroleum Institute spent $39.3 million on advertising this year, including $2 million in the last several months on ads in Washington, D.C., Michigan and Missouri opposing efforts to put new taxes on the industry.
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $3.8 million this year on energy-related advertising.

CAP released the numbers just weeks before the midterm elections, when environmental groups are also spending millions on advertising. For example, the Sierra Club and the League of Conversation voters released a television and radio ad today targeting the Republican candidate for Congress in Virginia’s fifth district, Robert Hurt. Hurt is running against Rep. Tom Perriello (D), who has come under some criticism in the state for voting for the House cap-and-trade bill. The ad comes as LCV is spending more than it ever has on the midterm elections this year. Here’s a list of its other ads.

The report, written by independent researcher Jennifer Washburn, looked at 10 industry-university research contracts. Washburn found that the contracts “raise troubling questions about the ability of U.S. universities to adequately safeguard their core academic and public-interest functions when negotiating research contracts with large corporate funders.”

As public funding for research dwindles, more and more research is being funded by industry. While Washburn, on a call with reporters today, said industry research is important, she warned that it’s important that there be some oversight of these agreements.

Some specific findings from the report:

• In nine of the 10 energy-research agreements we analyzed, the university partners failed to retain majority academic control over the central governing body charged with directing the university-industry alliance. Four of the 10 alliances actually gave the industry sponsors full governance control.
• Eight of the 10 agreements permit the corporate sponsor or sponsors to fully control both the evaluation and selection of faculty research proposals in each new grant cycle.
• None of the 10 agreements requires faculty research proposals to be evaluated and awarded funding based on independent expert peer review, the traditional method for awarding academic and scientific research grants fairly and impartially based on scientific merit.

But on the conference call today, Washburn laid out a number of the study’s limitations. “We really don’t know where industry had an influence,” she said, adding later, “We don’t know whether any research has been suppressed,” Washburn explained that it is nearly impossible to determine such a thing.

She also said many of the universities discussed in the study pushed back against the report’s findings, arguing that Washburn should have examined the university practices, not just university-industry contracts.

Here are a few of the major points:

• The assumption that immigrant-driven population growth alone drives the U.S. carbon footprint is false. The 10 highest carbon-emitting cities have an average immigrant population below 5 percent, according to a 2008 Brookings Institution study. [...]
• Immigrants, especially recent immigrants, tend to lead “greener” lifestyles than the native-born and are more likely to use public transportation and practice sustainable habits like compact living, conservation, and recycling. [...]
• Immigrants are disproportionately hurt by the dirty energy economy and face unique environmental challenges. Consequently, they fight for greener solutions, including challenging the use of hazardous pesticides in the agricultural fields where many immigrants work. A successful campaign by immigrant farm workers during the 1960s led to the banning of the dangerous pesticide DDT.
• 2010 polls of key electoral states find that immigrant-rich communities overwhelmingly favor policy that will create green jobs and tend to support congres- sional candidates who back efforts to fight global warming.

The main argument made by groups that tie environmental concerns to immigration is that immigration will increase the population, which will in turn increase consumption, decrease open spaces and harm the environment. In some ways, this may be true: Immigrants from third-world countries in particular are likely to consume more energy in the U.S. than they did in their native countries.

But as the CAP report points out, many of the environmental arguments against immigration are heavily flawed because not all people impact the environment in the same way. Many of the cities with the lowest levels of carbon emissions have higher percentages of immigrants, while many cities with small immigrant populations have far higher carbon emissions:

Tying immigration to environmental concerns can have some serious consequences, particularly in the debate over whether volunteers should be allowed to leave water bottles in the Arizona desert for border crossers. Groups that push for more border enforcement argue illegal immigrants are destroying open spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border by trekking through them into the U.S., and Minutemen reportedly routinely slash and drain bottles they find there. (They leave the bottles, which seems to point to a non-environmental motivation.) Meanwhile, representatives from a Tuscon-based group, No More Deaths, that leaves out bottles have been arrested for leaving garbage in a national refuge.