Anti-immigrant groups weaponize wilderness rhetoric to justify border exclusion.

Evidence

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day in April 2010, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a driving force behind Arizona’s notorious Senate Bill 1070, issued a fifty-three-page report, “The Environmentalist’s Guide to a Sensible Immigration Policy.” As Andrew Ross recounts, FAIR—and allied groups like the Center for Immigration Studies—have actively sought to build a green anti-immigrant constituency, dividing the environmental movement. FAIR spin blames undocumented immigrants for everything from biodiversity loss and wilderness desecration to accelerating climate change and increased greenhouse emissions. A Center for Immigration Studies press release, urging more draconian enforcement in southern Arizona’s national forests deploys the standard coupling of immigration and impurity: “How long will these beautiful lands remain unspoiled if the border is not secured?” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1320

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapter-5-6 wilderness critique (ch56 Guha on wilderness ethics) and the book’s broader thesis that settler purity rhetoric and extraction share a topology. — connects to: Right-wing environmentalists tried to link immigration to ecological harm; Right-wing environmentalists tried to turn the Sierra Club against immigration — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 721; Marginalized groups can weaponize purity discourse to contest nationalist inclusion — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3260 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle for the eco-justice course: how ‘purity’ ecology gets captured by exclusionary politics — compare FAIR’s ‘unspoiled lands’ to colonial wilderness narratives.

Broader Connections

• Marginalized groups can weaponize purity discourse to contest nationalist inclusion #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3260
• Border enforcement devolves to private groups claiming character-based national belonging. #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1759