A politically correct Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis tugs at our cultural sensitivities. “…common factors (for the continental trash heap) are: litter has already accumulated – the more litter present the more people are inclined to litter; lack of social pressure to do the right thing; absence of penalties or consistent enforcement; availability of receptacles; sense of pride or connection in the areas they are littering; or, the item is not considered litter such as cigarette butts.”

So what? They are befouling  environment and they are here illegally. Our border states are awash in a sea of refuse and we’re next!

“You can find everything” said Shela McFarlin, Special Assistant for International Programs at the Arizona BLM.”Blankets, airline tickets, Bibles, wedding pictures, photos of children, school reports, because clearly people don’t tend to throw away everything they’ve brought with them-they’re forced to.” She continued “What we’re beginning to wonder is how extensive is the problem? How many millions of pounds of garbage?” Also found are driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, etc., most of them forged. McFarlin continued, “How many roads are really damaged? How many miles of illegal trails?” The majority of the trash is backpacks, clothing, food cans, toothpaste, toys, and water bottles. But the Diablito (Arizona) site, like dozens of others, includes piles of human feces, tampons, medicines, syringes and even used condoms.

Leo W. Banks in "Trashing Arizona" Tuscon Weekly, April 2 2009, quotes veterinarian Gary Thrasher, who travels the borderlands dailyin his work, "If a sick person discards a medicine bottle, anyone picking it up might be exposing himself." He continues, "You see guys joking around, picking up clothes and hats from these dumps and wearing them. I don't know what they're thinking. People are coming across from down in southern Mexico, and there are lots of problems you can run into, including cholera."

Environmental effects of littering in the desert are catastrophic and include the indirect impact on water quality; death to livestock, wild animals, and plant life; blocked waterways and flooding; and, fire hazards, among other unwelcome phenomena.  The cost of clean-up to private land owners and local governments is devastating. 

Autopsies confirm that animals, domestic and wild, graze on the toxic garbage and suffer painful deaths from ingesting plastic bags or other refuse.  

Harmless sounding buffelgrass seeds cross the border naturally in manageable quantities via wind and water.   Amounts of those seeds never seen before now piggyback in on the clothes of illegals, tires of smuggler vehicles and are germinating out of control. The mature plant is tough, virulent and tends to elbow out native grasses competing for space and water.

But the greater buffelgrass menace is fire. “In the past, fires rarely produced big blazes in the desert.” writes Banks, ”But today, if illegals don’t extinguish their cook fire, or they set fire to distract law enforcement and abandon it-two common events-the result can be a runaway fire fueled by buffelgrass. These fires kill plants and trees which set up the desert’s entire regeneration process, and the potential impact is huge.” He quotes conservation scientist Gary Naban, “Once a fire moves through, it knocks back the nurse trees and permanently alters the desert’s capacity to heal itself.”

In 2006 testimony to a congressional panel, the Forest Service’s Tina J. Terrell reported that smugglers “intentionally set diversion or rescue fires, using uncontrolled wildfires to divert law enforcement from their illegal activities.” She added this grim report: “Smugglers traveling at high speeds have run employees off the road, rammed law enforcement vehicles, and caused accidents. Employee and visitor vehicles have been vandalized and stolen while unattended.”

Former Department of Justice Federal Prosecutor James H. Walsh’s May 2006 article “Illegal Aliens’Impact on Public Health and Environment” remains right on. He wrote,  “ The presence of 12 million to 20 million (perhaps up to 30 million)illegal aliens in the United States has consequences. This uncounted, unplanned for population of lawbreakers is affecting the quality of life in the United States. Air pollution, water pollution, energy consumption, deforestation, soil erosion and agricultural degradation, over fishing and ocean exhaustion threaten the stability of natural resources.”

So where is the Sierra Club hue and cry? Jerry Krammer of the Center for Immigration Studies opines, “Yet this toll (ecology carnage) has been trivialized or ignored by the nation’s largest environmental organization…..The powerful group presents a distorted, propagandistic view of the situation in its Border Policy Campaign, which has produced a website and film that seek to stir public outrage against the Border Patrol and the fence which has been constructed along much of Arizona’s border with Mexico.”He continues,” The Sierra Club veers into propaganda as it promotes immigration reform which would provide legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.”

Jim Gilchrist, founder and president of the Minutemen said in a 2007 interview,” Why are the Sierra Club and similar groups, who are facing these problems, not raising national awareness to the border carnage – the extinction of vegetation, animal life, and waterways?  We challenge them and feel they won’t take it on because they’re too “wimpish,” ….no different than politicians who don’t want to talk about the illegal alien invasion.  The Sierra Club officers don’t seem to want to talk about the environmental carnage caused by illegal aliens….”

This is the exact opposite of what our highest profile, self-proclaimed defender of the environment organization should be screaming from the highest mountain. One reason is as simple as dirty old money. Liberal philanthropist David Gelbaum’s $101.5 million grant “dwarfed all previous individual contributions to the club,” but it came with a warning. “I did tell Carl Pope (club president) in 1994 0r 1995 that if they ever come out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me,” revealed Gelbaum to the L.A. Times. Sierra soon found their anti-illegal alien attitude changing.

Opinion polls uniformly find between 60% and 70% of likely voters are staunchly against illegal immigration and support the new Arizona law. That, however, cuts no ice with the Obama administration, which bulldozed a monstrous health care package through over majority wishes.

The American majority now confronts a stubborn coalition of immigrant rights, religious and labor groups, cheap labor Republicans, Democrats pandering to Hispanic voters, naive human rights types, irreconcilable liberals, (limousine and academic), and a Mexican government pushing illegals through from the backside. Like the Gulf Disaster, the gushing won’t stop until the hole is plugged….in this case the many holes in our porous southern border.

It won’t be easy but it must happen.