From the Washington Post:

Tucker Carlson: There’s an immigrant-litter apocalypse on the Potomac. Data: Not so fast. Erik Wemple

Media critic

Dec. 16, 2019 at 1:29 p.m. PST … What’s not evolving in Carlson’s politics is his hostility toward immigrants. Here’s a choice exchange between Carlson and the feature’s reporter, Elaina Plott: “I hate litter,” he said. For 35 years now, he said, he has fished in the Potomac River, and “it has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants, who I’m sure are good people, but nobody in our country —” “Wait,” I said, cutting him off, “how do you know they’re —” “Because I’m there,” he said. “I watch it.” Those remarks recommit Carlson to the racist and xenophobic comments he made on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” a year ago…. In his appraisal of the Potomac litter situation, Carlson didn’t specify how he determined that the people he’d seen dropping litter are immigrants or native-born U.S. citizens. So we asked him. We will update this post if we receive a response.

Probably because they are mestizo-looking people, almost all of whom in the D.C. area are immigrants or their children, as I’ve learned from countless Washington Post articles over the years.

Another empirical question relates to his characterization of the Potomac as “dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier” over the past 35 years. Could that be the case? Considering that Carlson is addressing litter — and not water quality — we checked in with the Alice Ferguson Foundation, which has been organizing cleanups along the Potomac’s shores for three decades.

The Alice Ferguson Foundation was was founded in the 1950s by Henry Gardiner Ferguson, a distinguished US government geologist, in honor of his late wife Alice Lowe Ferguson. In other words: classic WASP conservationism of which Carlson is an example today.

Here are photos of the Alice Ferguson Foundation staff. None of the 29 pictured staffers has a Spanish-surname. There are two black women and a lady named “Patel.” The other 26 of the 29 staffers appear to be non-Hispanic whites.

Part of that big job has included keeping data on the number of trash bags that volunteers drag out of the watershed’s environs, and then some. The organization’s spreadsheets include entries for loose tires, bags per volunteer, number of cigarette butts, number of straws, top brands and so on. …

As we all know, there were zero illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2007, the first year of this graph, so this proves Tucker must be wrong about how things were different 35 years ago in 1984.

Oh, wait, according to the Pew Hispanic Center:

In 2017, an estimated 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007.

I’m not a big believer in Pew’s numbers, but it is the Conventional Wisdom that the number of Undocumented Workers has declined since 2007.

The data does show, however, that the experience that Carlson evokes to slander immigrants conflicts with the experience of Potomac cleanup activists. “I think the litter has definitely decreased because of the awareness of trash,” says Samantha Battersby, a program coordinator for the Alice Ferguson Foundation. “I’ve definitely seen a downward trend in all areas.” The Potomac Conservancy issued this statement to the Erik Wemple Blog regarding litter levels: “It’s difficult to measure litter pollution in a precise way, but we fully support Alice Ferguson Foundation’s methodical data tracking and their assessment that there’s been a [downward trend] in litter pollution in the last decade. Based on their data and our experiences at our river cleanups, we can’t agree that litter has exploded,” reads the statement.

In other words, as the number of illegal aliens declined after the popping of the Immigration Housing Bubble in 2008, the amount of litter has not gone up.

“Anecdotally, we can report that our volunteers are seeing less litter from plastic bags than they were when we started hosting local shoreline cleanups more than 15 years ago; the local fees on plastic bags, and now bans on other items like plastic straws, do seem to be having a positive result on our local environment.”

Dirty disposable diapers and Del Taco wrappers, well, let’s not talk about …