The ideas that immigrants are a “drain” on resources or present an environmental risk to the United States are not limited to explicit eco-fascists though. Both of those narratives are common on Fox News, including from the network’s top star Tucker Carlson. On April 25, after Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) blamed migrants for causing “environmental degradation” at the southern border, Carlson thanked him for mentioning the “effect on the physical landscape, on the land.” The host added, “Where is the Sierra Club, you know, as our country is being trampled?”
Carlson has discussed this theme repeatedly over the years. The Potomac River “has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier,” he said in a 2019 interview in The Atlantic. “I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants.” (The Potomac Conservancy condemned Carlson’s remarks, calling them “racist plain and simple.”)
“I actually hate litter which is one of the reasons I'm so against illegal immigration. It produces a huge amount of litter,” he said in August 2018.
That December, Carlson said that immigrants make “our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” He faced a significant backlash following those remarks, including from 26 companies which pulled advertisements from his show. But he doubled down on the comments just days later in a monologue that explicitly called increased immigration levels – not just the act of migrating – a threat to U.S. natural resources.
“Thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife,” he said. “Illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.”
“The left used to care about the environment – the land, the water, the animals,” he continued. “They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were.”
Far-right website The Federalist wrote up that segment under the headline: “Tucker Carlson Is Absolutely Right: Illegal Immigration Is Destroying The Environment.”
One year earlier, far-right pundit Ann Coulter wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Caller titled “Choose Between A Green America And A Brown America,” criticizing the Sierra Club for adopting progressive immigration policies. In the piece, she made a racist reference to a “Mexican cultural trait of littering” and promoted “taking white Western European immigrants” over “Mass Third World immigration.”
The eco-fascistic right often couches its anti-immigrant conservationism in Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation. “A sensible environmentalism” would have to ask “is it good for us or the environment that the population grows artificially through the mass introduction of foreigners?” Christopher Roach wrote in a piece for American Greatness, a hotbed of far-right Trumpist nationalism. Roach also referenced “an immigration regime that transports billions from the fertile—though impoverished—Third World,” highlighting again the overlap between great replacement panic and eco-fascist narratives.
The far right’s demonization of immigrants as “dirty” or bad stewards of the environment goes hand-in-hand with the lie that they steal wealth from the United States, or otherwise don’t contribute their fair share.
“Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming,” Carlson said on May 21, 2019. “The United States is being plundered.”
That segment was based on a report from an immigration restrictionist group that has deep ties to the far-right ecology movement, called the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The group seeks to drastically reduce the level of authorized immigration and stop all unauthorized border crossing, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated FAIR as an extremist group.
In a recent blog post, FAIR government relations manager Preston Huennekens argued that “any increase in our population is going to our tax natural resources” and that migration had negative environmental impacts “through the physical act of migrating itself,” including “border trash, smuggling trails destroying fauna, etc.”
The idea of scarcity is crucial to the racist appeal of eco-fascism, and Fox News regularly suggests that municipal and federal resources can’t accommodate increased migration.
“At a time when there were more than half a million Americans homeless living on the streets – a crushing number that our leaders ignore but that rises every single year – at that moment, Joe Biden is giving hotel rooms to illegal aliens,” Carlson declared. “It's hard to believe that's real. Oh, but it is real.”
Anchor Harris Faulkner played that clip on her March 23, 2021, show, to which Fox News’ Will Cain responded: “Welcoming in migrants from Central America, that's all fine and good but not if it’s coming at the expense of a limited amount of resources that we're depriving of Americans.” As Media Matters noted at the time, immigrants contribute more to governmental resources than they use.
