Senior editor at The Atlantic and conservative pundit David Frum caused a mini-tweet storm late last week when he suggested that California's immigration population is at least partly to blame for California's epic drought and subsequent ongoing water crisis.


But Frum is not alone in making that tenuous and politically charged connection between climate, resources, and one particular group of people.

"If Californians are having fewer children, why isn't there enough water?"

This rather direct and cursory logic is on display in television commercials across the state of California these days, part of a wider campaign with the objective of drawing a connection between California's historic water crisis and the state's particularly high population of immigrants -- of which Latinos, both documented and undocumented, are obviously the chief component.

The ad campaign, and the conceptual shotgun marriage between the issues of climate change and immigration policy underlying it, is part of an initiative from Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), according to The LA Times.

The group holds quite conservative views on immigration policy, calling for stricter enforcement of current immigration laws in the name of preserving California's natural resources against the rising tide of population growth. To give you a taste of the kinds of political positions on immigration policy that CAPS espouses, consider this one: Children born on U.S. soil shouldn't have an automatic right to citizenship.

Putting aside the major alterations to Article Two of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment required to make such a radical policy reality, CAPS has still seemingly succeeded in influencing some big voices to give their "immigrants are taking our water" argument an airing in national media.

Besides Frum, who criticized The New York Times' latest article on the California water crisis for "scant reference to [California's] immigration-driven population surge," the LA Times noted that Paul Mulshine, columnist at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, and Stanford academic Victor Davis Hanson has made similar population-based critiques of California's water management and drought crisis. Mulshine, for example, patronizingly noted that while immigrants in California "may be nice people" they are also "competing for water resources."

The Evidence Says Otherwise

The argument is certainly making the rounds. And while population obviously has a relationship to resources, when it comes to epic droughts in the 21st century and the (mis)management of water resources, there's plenty of evidence that such basic Malthusian calculations do more to draw attention away from the biggest factors behind California's water crisis -- in favor of advancing a relatively minor contributing circumstance as a focus of the debate.

For example, taking population growth in general for granted as a major cause of the water crisis, Ben Zuckerman, UCLA astrophysics professor and CAPS board member said, "Essentially all of California's rapid population growth has been due to people from other countries and the children of immigrants."

But is Zuckerman's fundamental assumption about population growth, much less the blame he places on immigrants and the water-hungry babies of immigrants, borne out by evidence?

The answer is no, according to NASA climatologist William Patzert, who told the LA Times blaming the water crisis on immigrants doesn't "fit the facts," and that the primary factors are the drought, caused by low levels of snow pack, and bad planning on the part of California's government. It's "not because the immigrants are drinking too much water or taking too many showers."

In fact, as The New York Times noted (in the same article that Frum blasted for its "omission" of immigration as a relevant factor), California's agriculture industry is by far the biggest consumer of the state's now precious liquid resource:

"California farmers produce more than a third of the nation's vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts," wrote The New York Times. "To do that, they must use nearly 80 percent of all the water consumed in the state" [emphasis mine].

On top of that, the assumption that California has experienced an unusually big population boom recently, and furthermore that the population boom is based on immigration, is similarly wrong -- at least when you take a look at the actual numbers.

As the Sacramento Bee put it, citing Census Bureau figures late last year in a report on California's slow-growing population, California's population is projected to grow 9 percent between 2010 and 2020. Compared to general U.S. population growth projection of 8.4 percent over the same period, California's growth doesn't stand out enough to even likely gain it another seat in Congress by 2020.

And as for California's foreign-born population during the last two decades of the presumed immigrant population "boom" in the state, The Huffington Post found in Census records that between 1990 and 2013, the state only added 3.7 million immigrants out of the 9 million new residents to the state, accounting for a less than 6 percent difference, overall. And the state's population growth in general has slowed since 2000.

Finally, there's the long view that incorporates climate change, governments' generally pitiful response to it, and the glaring, yet mostly forgotten fact that since the states' founding and first population boom, Southern California, in particular, has been quite an impractical place to live.

The Bigger Picture Missed by Playing Politics

As urban theorist Mike Davis described in Ecology of Fear -- an exploration into Southern California's naturally unfriendly climate and the people who live there -- the concept of "natural disasters" in California is a social construction "largely hidden from view by a way of thinking" that "imposes false expectations on the environment."

Was the arid, Mediterranean climate of Southern California really meant to support more than half the population of a state with an economy bigger than Russia? Perhaps, even without factoring in climate change, we should remember that drought in California is more the ecological norm than the exception -- a fact our short-term perspectives tend to blind us to, even while we search for political scapegoats on which to blame the most recent catastrophe.

Every day Californians, as Southern California-native Davis put it, in effect, "think ourselves gods upon the land but are still really just tourists." So let's not try to blame the most recent arrivals.