To the Editor:

In your editorial “Immigration: It’s Time” (June 19), you tar the people who oppose so-called comprehensive immigration reform as “anti-amnesty posses” and “nativist dead-enders.“

I’m sure you can take any policy and find nogoodniks who support it, but the merits or lack thereof are what should be important to your readers.

Here’s some of the thinking that motivates me to oppose amnesty. In 1971, John P. Holdren, now President Obama’s head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and in 1975 a professor of mine at Berkeley, and Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University introduced an equation showing that human impact on the environment equals population times consumption per capita times technology.

According to the Pew Research Center, the population of the United States, the country with the largest per capita consumption, will grow from the current 306 million to 438 million in 2050, and 82 percent of that growth will be due to mass immigration. The environmental implications of that population growth are staggering. Debate that.