Despite overwhelming opposition from the media, from leaders of the religious and civil-rights communities, from the education establishment, and even from prominent conservatives like Jack Kemp and William J. Bennett, California voters last fall enthusiastically adopted Proposition 187, which bars illegal aliens from receiving welfare, education, or health benefits except for emergency medical treatment.

The anger toward illegal immigrants had grown steadily among Californians in recent years, fueled both by the huge number of illegal aliens lining in the state- nearly two million, or about half of the country’s entire illegal population- and by the state’s lingering economic recession. And the resentment had deepened as the apparent costs of providing benefits to illegal aliens rose; for the fiscal year 1994-95, that figure is estimated to stand at $2.35 billion. California, moreover, had gone far beyond what was required by federal law in granting benefits to illegal aliens, including instate tuition in the Cal-State University system and free prenatal care.

As is all this were not tinder enough, in mid-October 70,000 mostly Latin demonstrator marched through downtown Los Angeles waving Mexican and Guatemalan flags and shouting Viva la Raza. Tracking polls, which had shown Proposition 187 ahead by only 5 points just prior to the demonstration, registered a fourfold jump in the three days immediately following. Proposition 187’s success has inspired activists in several other states to consider similar measures, but their plans may be derailed if the law is declared unconstitutional. (A federal court has enjoined California from enforcing Proposition 187, pending the outcome of a suit.) Nonetheless, the proposal’s popularity has launched a long-overdue national debate on immigration- legal as well as illegal.

Like so much American social policy, immigration policy is a monument to the law of unintended consequences. Although assurances to the contrary were offered by the legislators responsible for the last major overhaul of the nation’s immigration law, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, that law profoundly altered both the makeup and the size of the immigrant flow. Until 1965, most immigrants came from Europe; today, some 80 percent of those legally admitted are from Asia or Latin America. The new law also significantly increased the pool of eligible applicants by giving preference to family members of immigrants already here.

But these changes might not have had such striking effects had they not coincided with dramatic developments in civil-rights law and with the expansion of the welfare state. As it is, immigration now intersects with two of the most troubling issues of our time: race and entitlements.

In 1993 (the last year for which figures are available), over 800,000 legal immigrants were admitted to the United States and an estimated 300,000 illegal aliens settled here, more or less permanently. Over the last decade, as many as ten million legal and illegal immigrants established permanent residence- a number higher than at any period in our history, including the peak immigration decade of 1900-1910.

To be sure, these numbers are somewhat misleading: because our population is so much larger now than it was at the beginning of the century, the rate of immigration is much lower, barely one-third of what it was then. And while the proportion of persons living in the U.S. who are foreign-born is high by recent standards- about 8 percent in the last census- it is still lower than it was for every decade between 1850 and 1950.

The numbers alone, however, do not fully describe the dimensions of the immigration issue. Americans are not just concerned about the size of the immigrant population; they are worried about the kind of people who are coming, how they got here, and whether they are likely to become a benefit or a burden to our society. There is deep suspicion that today’s immigrants are fundamentally different from earlier waves. In recent polls, 59 percent of Americans say that immigration was good for the country in the past, but only 29 percent think it is a good thing now. Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, who favors restricting immigration, summed up this national ambivalence: "I know that earlier large waves of immigrants did not’t ‘overturn’ America, but there are. . . reasons to believe that today’s migration is different form earlier flows."

Immigration enthusiasts (among whom I count myself, albeit with some important reservations) like to point out that Americans have never been eager to accept new arrivals, for all our rhetoric about being an "immigrant nation." As Rita Simon of the American University law school noted recently, "We view immigrants with rose-colored glasses, turned backward." Perhaps, then, there is nothing much new in the worries so many people express about whether this generation of immigrants will indeed assimilate to American norms. But comforting as the thought may be that today’s Mexicans, Vietnamese, Pakistanis, and Filipinos are the equivalent of yesterday’s Italians, Jews, Poles, and Irish, it fails to take into account the tremendous transformation America itself has undergone in the last half-century.

The America to which Europeans immigrated- first northern Europeans in the 19th century and then southern and eastern Europeans in the first quarter on the 20th- was a self-confident, culturally homogeneous nation. There was never any question that immigrants would be expected to learn English and to conform to the laws, customs, and traditions of there new country (although even then, some immigration restrictionists questioned whether certain groups were capable of such conformity). And immigrants themselves- especially their children- eagerly wanted to adapt. Public schools taught newcomers not only a new language, but new dress, manners, history, myths, and even hygiene to transform them into Americans who sounded, looked, acted, thought, and smelled the part.

In those days there were no advocates insisted that America must accommodate itself to the immigrants; the burden of change rested solely with the new arrivals. To be sure, by their sheer numbers they managed subtly to alter certain features of their new country. Because of them, the U.S. is less Protestant than it would otherwise have been; no doubt American cuisine and art are richer; and the pantheon of American heroes from Christopher Columbus to Joe Di Maggio to Albert Einstein is more diverse. Still, until fairly recently, Americans- native-stock or of later lineage- understood what it meant to be American, and it meant roughly the same thing regardless of where one’s ancestor’s came from.

We are far less sore what it means to be American today. Thus the question, "What to do about immigration?" is inextricably wound up with how we define our national identity.

Some critics of immigration- notably John O’Sullivan, the editor of National Review and Peter Brimelow, author of the forthcoming Alien Nation- believe that national identity must be define in explicitly racial and ethnic terns and that the current high levels of nonwhite immigration will drastically alter that identity. O’Sullivan argues:

• A nation is an ethno-cultural unit- a body that begins its life as a cultural in-gathering but, by dint of common history, habits, tastes, shared experiences, tales, songs, memories, and, above all, intermarriage, becomes progressively more like an extended family- that is more ethnic- over time.

As long as American’s core remained overwhelmingly Wasp, so this argument goes, it was possible for Italian Catholics or Russian Jews or Japanese Buddhists to become American. Both O’Sullivan and Brimelow fear, however, that the large numbers of nonwhite who are now coming in will undermine the assimilative capacity of the nation; they both cite Census Bureau projections that the majority of the U.S. population will become nonwhite (or more accurately, non-Hispanic white) by the year 2050; and they both blame current immigration policy for this portentous outcome.

But is race or ethnicity really the issue? If so, O’Sullivan and Brimelow can relax. Yes, the majority of immigrants admitted to the U.S. in the last twenty years have been relatively dark-skinned Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, etc. Yet by the year 2050, their great grandchildren are unlikely to look much like them. Intermarriage rates in the U.S. have never been higher; nor have mixed-raced births. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) recently touted this development in its monthly newsletter in a front-page article, "Interracial Baby Boomlet in Progress?" Births to mixed Japanese/white couples now exceed those to all-Japanese couples. There are now so many ethnically-mixed persons in the U.S. that the Census Bureau is debating whether to create a special classification for them. (Perhaps it should consider calling the category "American.") Not even groups with strong traditions or religious prohibitions against intermarriage seem exempt from the trend. About half of all American Jews, for example, marry non-Jews.

Nor is the inclination to intermarry diminishing among more recent immigrant groups. One-third of young, U.S.-born Hispanics marry non-Hispanics; and perhaps more significantly, nearly half of all Hispanics consider themselves white. Peter Brimelow dismisses this phenomenon, noting that those of Mexican origin, who make up nearly two-thirds of the entire group, are predominantly Indian. But he misses the point. By defining themselves as white, Hispanics are identifying with the majority. In a recent survey, a majority of Hispanics said the group with which they felt they had most in common was whites, and so did Asians.

In short, the problem of national identity is not primarily connected with heredity or ethnicity. It is, rather, a function of culture. But on this score, the evidence is decidedly less reassuring.

From the White House to Madison Avenue to Main Street, the idea has taken hold that the United States is a multicultural society. Many doubt that such a thing as American cultural even exists. When I recently told a university audience that American blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites have more in common with one another than they do with their contemporaries in any of their ancestral homelands, the students literally gasped in disbelief. "I don’t know what you mean by ‘American culture,’" one young Puerto Rican woman told me. "I have the right to my own culture and language." She said this, however, in perfect English, leaving me wondering just what culture and language she might be referring to.

But if the irony of her situation escaped this particular student- whose coloring and features suggested predominantly Spanish ancestry- her political statement was clear. A European-looking, English-speaking Hispanic who chooses to reject American culture, she represents the flip side of the large number of brown-skinned Hispanics who see themselves as white. It is hard to know how many such persons there are, but their numbers are surely growing as ethnicity becomes increasingly politicized.

Into this confusing mix come immigrants who, unlike these ersatz ethnics, truly are culturally different form those around them. And such are the misgivings of the rest of us that we no longer seem able or willing to help these newcomers become Americans. Public schools, which worked to acculturate previous immigrant groups, now see it as their mission to preserve immigrant languages and culture. The Los Angeles school system, which educates more Latino immigrant children than any in the nation, prides itself on teaching these youngsters primarily in Spanish for three years or more. Denver public school officials recently ordered on local high school to stop teaching 450 Hispanic youngsters in English, and transferred out 51 Asian students so that the school could concentrate on its Spanish bilingual program. The demand for Spanish-speaking teachers is so great tat districts from Los Angeles to Chicago have begun importing instructors from Mexico, Spain, and Puerto Rico; in 1993, Mexico signed an agreement with California to provide both teachers and 40,000 textbooks for the state’s Spanish-language classrooms.

Yet bilingual education did not originally grow out of the pressures of immigration. It started as a small, federally funded program to help Mexican-American children (largely native-born) in the Southwest, and it was already in place years before the large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the 1970’s and 80’s. Its chief sponsor, former Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-TX), declared that the purpose of his bilingual-education bill was not "to create pockets of different languages throughout the country . . . but just to try to make [Mexican-American] children fully literate in English." By 1975, however, civil-rights enforcement agencies in Washington were insisting (on the basis of a Supreme Court ruling involving the Civil Rights Act of 1964) that school districts teach "language-minority" youngsters, mostly Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans, in Spanish or face a cut-off of all federal funds.

In the early stages of the program, the overwhelming majority of students in bilingual classes were U.S. born; today, nearly 60 percent still are. What is more, many of these children are more fluent in English than Spanish- no one knows exactly how many, because most states use an arbitrary cut-off score (usually the 30th or 40th percentile) on a standardized English test to place Hispanic youngsters in Spanish-language programs, rather than testing to see whether they are more fluent in English or in Spanish.

Bilingual voting ballots, which are now mandated by the federal government, were also an outgrowth not of immigration but of civil-rights legislation- in this case, the 1975 Amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965- and they too were aimed at a U.S. born population: namely, Mexican-Americans living in the Southwest. The main impetus behind the amendments was to give Washington the same power to oversee federal elections in areas where Hispanics lived as the original Act gave it over the Deep South, where egregious efforts were being made to prevent blacks from voting.

Since few Spanish-speaking immigrants naturalize and since few can therefore vote, the 1975 amendments have had little effect on them. But thanks to additional amendments adopted on 1982, and a series of court decisions, the Voting Rights Act is now used mainly to create districts which pack in a s many Hispanics (or blacks) as feasible in order to assure the election of minority candidates. This practice has received widespread publicity because of the often bizarrely gerrymandered districts that result, but what is less well-known is that immigrants- including illegal aliens- often make up the majority of persons entitled to representation in these mew Hispanic districts.

So far, at least, the Act has not been invoked to create safe districts for Asians, although in principle they qualify under the same "language minority" designation as Hispanics. The law already requires federal ballots to be printed in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean, among other languages; and the huge increase in the Asian immigrant population in California probably means that the courts will before long use their presence to justify the need for safe seats for Asians. Since Asians are too widely dispersed for simple ethnic gerrymandering to suffice, we may expect the courts to order new remedies such as cumulative voting. This technique, which allows voters to cast multiple ballots for a single candidate in a multi-member, at-large race, would, for example, enable Asians comprising only 14 percent of the electorate in a given city to elect one representative on a six-member city council even if no whites voted for the Asian candidate.

The manipulation of both the Bilingual Education Act and the Voting Rights Act points to a central problem of our present immigration policy: the current influx of newcomers eligible to receive them creates an ever-growing demand for such programs.

One solution, favored by those who want to restrict immigration for other reasons, is the cut off the flow of immigrants. Yet while this might diminish the clientele for ethnic entitlements, the programs would continue to serve the native-born populations for whom they were originally created, For it is not immigrants who clamor for these programs. Asian immigrants, for one, have largely eschewed bilingual education in favor or English-immersion programs. Even some Latino immigrant parents have stages protests in California, New York, and New Jersey upon discovering that their children were being taught in Spanish; others simply withdraw their children, sending them to parochial schools that teach all students in English.

The other solution to the problem of ethnic entitlements, of course, would be simply to end them for everyone. There are many good reasons for doing this, even if immigration were to cease altogether. Race- and ethnic-based entitlements have been a bane of American social policy for the last quarter-century. They have divided Americans, increased group hostility, and perverted the whole notion of color-blind justice. Furthermore, they are the foundation on which the entire edifice of multiculturalism is built. Without the enticement of racial and ethnic preferences in education, employment, voting, and elsewhere, group identity, instead of intensifying in recent years, might have diminished.

Multicultural education has become the main instrument to help preserve group identity. But multicultural education is no more a byproduct of increased Latin and Asian immigration than are bilingual education and ballots, ethnic voting districts, and affirmative action. In fact, multicultural education first came into being largely to address the demands of blacks for proportional representation in the curriculum- though by now it has spread (some would say, metastasized) to the point where all students are encouraged to think of themselves primarily as members of groups rather than as Americans.

Thus, when California recently adopted a new textbook series for kindergarten through eighth grade, ethnic protesters turned out at school-board hearings in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, and other cities, insisting upon changes not only ion the treatment of blacks but also in the way the series dealt with Indians, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, and even conservative Christians.

Critics of immigration like O’Sullivan and Brimelow believe that multiculturalism would, in O’Sullivan’s words, "be easier to dismantle if immigration were reduced." But the California story suggests that, if anything, it is ethnic diversity itself that might actually hasten the demise of multiculturalism. Like a house of cards that has grown too unwieldy, multicultural education may collapse of its own weight if it is required to include the distinct stories of each of the hundreds of different groups now in the schools.

But the unraveling of multicultural education, salutary a prospect as it may be, is hardly a good reason for maintaining our current immigration policy. Clearly, that policy needs changing in ways that are consistent with our national interests and values. I would argue, indeed, that our immigration policy should reinforce our national identity- which is not necessarily the same thing as our racial or ethnic composition.

What, then, should we do? Let me deal with legal immigration first.

• Change the system to one that favors skills. The basis of the current system is the principle of family reunification, adopted in 1965 with the exception that this would maintain the ethnic balance of the U.S. population as it existed at the time. Of course things have not worked out that way. But questions of ethnic balance aside, there is nothing sacrosanct about family reunification as a guiding principle of immigration policy, and we should not be deterred from changing it out of fear that such a move might be interrupted as racist.

  In any case, the problem with the current immigrant pool is not that there are too many Latinos and Asians per se, but that too many of the people we now admit are low-skilled. Mexicans come with only about seven years of schooling on average, and less than a quarter have obtained high-school diplomas. Such newcomers face a much more difficult period of adjustment and bring fewer benefits to the U.S. economy than would more highly skilled immigrants.

  It is true that under certain criteria, which include only 140,000 slots for skills-based admissions, immigrants are twice as likely to hold Ph.D.’s as are U.S.-born persons. But they are also more likely to be high-school drop-outs. We ought to admit more of the former and fewer of the latter, and regardless of their country of origin. As it turns out, immigrants from Africa and Asia have among the highest average levels of education. Nearly 90 percent of all African immigrants are high-school graduates - a figure 15 percent higher than that for Canadian immigrants. And Indians, Taiwanese, and Iranians have among the highest proportions of college or graduate degrees.

  
  
• Encourage immigrants to assimilate. Immigration policy entails more than laws regulating who gets admitted and under what criteria. It also involves - or at least should involve - how we incorporate immigrants into our society. On that score, we are doing much more poorly now than we did in the past, in part because we have given up on the notion that we have an obligation to assimilate immigrants. Regardless of what other changes we make in immigration policy, we must reverse course on this issue. Of immigration to the U.S. ceased tomorrow, we would still have twenty million foreign-born persons living here, plus their children. Assimilation is essential for them, as well as for the rest for us, if we are to stop the further fragmenting of our society.

  First and foremost, this means encouraging immigrants ad their children to learn English, which in practical terms means abolishing bilingual education in favor of English-immersion programs in the public schools. By now we have nearly thirty years of experience demonstrating that bilingual education helps children neither to learn English nor to do better in school. Latino immigrants in particular have been badly served by bilingual education - and by their putative leaders, usually U.S. born, who are the main lobby behind this expensive, ineffective, and wasteful program.

  But bilingual education is not the only culprit. With so many services available in their native language, immigrants have fewer incentives today to learn English tan they did in the past. Private services - native-language newspapers, advertising, etc.- fall outside the scope of public policy. But government services ought to be provided only in English. A common language has been critical to our success in forgiving a sense of national identity. Our public policies should preserve and protect that heritage. If the courts continue to obstruct local and state efforts to make English the official language of government, we should pass a federal constitutional amendment to ensure it.

  
  
• Limit welfare benefits. Although immigrants as a whole are somewhat more likely than natives to receive welfare, the opposite is true of those of working age (15-64). In addition, immigrants have higher labor-force-participation rates than natives, with Hispanic men having among the highest - 83.4 percent compared with 75 percent for non-Hispanic whites. If we modify our admission criteria to favor more highly skilled immigrants, welfare among working-age immigrants should drop below even the current rate of about 3 percent, alleviating much of the concern about immigrants and welfare.

  The problem is high dependency rates among refugees and elderly immigrants. Among the former, this is a direct result of U.S. policy, which guarantees cash and medical assistance to all persons admitted under the refugee-resettlement program. Having been admitted, they are then attracted to states with relatively high benefits, and this tends to encourage long-term dependency. Thus, in California, some two-thirds of Laotian and Cambodian refugees and more than one-third of Vietnamese refugees remain on welfare after more than five years in the U.S.

  While dealing comprehensively with this situation entails the much larger issue of welfare reform, it is possible to make a dent in it by redesigning programs to limit the number of months refugees can receive assistance. One of the most promising possibilities would be to turn over responsibility for such assistance to private agencies, such as Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. And the Council of Jewish Federations, which have proved more successful at moving refugees off welfare. In Chicago, 74 percent of refugees in an experimental private resettlement project found work within six months of arrival, and only 2 percent remained on welfare after thirteen months, compared with more than 40 percent in the state-administered program.

  The problem of elderly immigrants in more complicated. In 1990, 55 percent of elderly Chinese immigrants in California who had arrived between 1980 and 1987 were on welfare, as were 21 percent of elderly Mexican immigrants. Because they have worked too few years or at insufficient wages to qualify for adequate Social Security benefits, most such recipients obtain Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

  But many of these immigrants are the parents of resident aliens who brought them here under family-reunification provisions. Anyone who sponsors an immigrant must guarantee that he will not become a public burden, and is required to accept full financial responsibility for up to five years. Simply enforcing these provisions would greatly alleviate the problem of welfare dependency among elderly immigrants. (Among recipients in California that should not pose a problem, since 50 percent of their children’s households in 1990 had incomes over $50,000, and 11 percent over $100,000.) We might also consider lengthening the number of years sponsors are required to provide support to family members; Canada currently requires a ten-year commitment.

All these reforms are addressed to the policies governing legal immigration. What about illegal immigration?

Like welfare dependency among immigrants, illegal immigration is not so big a problem as many people imagine (in one recent poll, two-thirds said they thought most immigrants are illegal aliens). Estimates of overall numbers vary widely, with some commentators hysterically claiming more than ten million illegal aliens. But the more reliable Census Bureau estimates about four million, with (as noted earlier) another 300,000 or so added each year.

In theory, no amount of illegal immigration is acceptable, since the phenomenon represents our failure to maintain secure borders, a prerequisite of national sovereignty. On practice, however, it is unlikely that we will ever completely eradicate illegal immigration: our borders are too long and porous and our society too free and prosperous. But there are steps we can take that would significantly reduce the current flow.

• Stop illegal aliens at the border. There is no mainstream support for mass round-ups and deportations of the type used in the 1930’s and 50’s to roust illegal aliens; nor could such a program withstand legal challenge. Therefore, the only way to reduce the flow is to contain it at the border. The frontier between Mexico and the U.S. is 2,000 miles long, but only about 250 miles of it are traversable. Most illegal aliens enter in a handful of places near metropolitan areas - about 65 percent around San Diego and El Paso.

  We know that it is possible to reduce the flow significantly with more Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) personnel and better equipment and technology. A recent two-month, $25-million experiment in beefed-up border control near San Diego halved the number of illegal crossings; similar experiments in El Paso produced comparable results. While the most determined may seek alternative routes of entry, for the large majority rough terrain will limit the opportunity.

  
  
• Deport alien criminals. Apprehending and deporting illegal aliens who have successfully gotten past the border requires more resources and more draconian enforcement measures than most Americans would be willing to endorse; but there is overwhelming support for deporting those arrested for criminal acts in the U.S. In order to do this, however, local law-enforcement officials must be able to ascertain the status of persons in their custody, which they cannot now do easily. A pilot program in Phoenix, which allows police officers 24-hour access to INS records, might prove an effective model for enhancing local police efforts and making more deportations feasible.
  
• Outlaw sanctuaries. Several cities, including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Chicago, have enacted ordinances banning city employees form contacting the INS if they know someone is in the country illegally. These ordinances are an outrage and show utter disregard for the rule of the law. Any city that chooses to obstruct immigration enforcement should lose all federal funds.
  
• Deny welfare benefits to illegal aliens. This is what California voters thought they were enacting with Proposition 187. In fact, in most states illegal aliens are already prohibited from receiving welfare and any but emergency medical treatment, but the authorities lack adequate means to verify the legal status of recipients. Consequently, a pilot program instituted in the early 1980’s, the Alien Status Verification Index, should be expanded and upgraded with access to on-line INS data bases so that the status of welfare recipients can be checked.

  A potentially more intractable problem is that U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are eligible, as citizens, for AFDC and other welfare benefits. Indeed, one out of four new AFDC recipients in California is a child of illegal-alien parents. The only way to prevent them from receiving benefits is to deny them citizenship in the first place, which would probably require a constitutional amendment. I would not suggest that we travel this route, at least not until we have exhausted all other means of keeping illegal aliens out. But neither should we consider the mere discussion of the issue taboo, as it is in mist public-policy circles today. Especially mow, when U.S. citizenship entails many more rights and benefits than responsibilities, it should not be beyond the pale to reconsider what entitles a person to obtain it.

  
  
• Repeal employer sanctions. While we are looking at ways to prevent illegal immigration, we ought to acknowledge that the linchpin of our current policy- punishing the employers of illegal aliens - has been a miserable failure. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which established such sanctions, did virtually nothing to reduce the flow into the country. If anything, it probably contributed to the problem of welfare dependency among the four million illegal aliens already here, by making it more difficult for them to support themselves.

  In typical fashion, those who falsely promised that employer sanctions would fix the illegal-alien problem now think they can tinker with the existing provisions to make it work. Senator Alan Simpson proposes a national identity card; the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform thinks a national computerized work registry will do the trick.

  But the purpose of both would be to enable employers to become better policeman for the immigration system, when they should never have been put in that position in the first place. Nor should the rest of us have to put up with more regulations and infringements on our privacy. It is simply wrong to burden the 98.5 percent of persons who are legally in the country with cumbersome and probably ineffective new requirements in order to try to punish the 1.5 percent of persons who have no right to be here.

These recommendations probably will not satisfy the most ardent foes of immigration, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the most influential restrictionist organization no operating. But many restrictionists are confused or just plain wrong about the mature of the immigration problem.

FAIR, for example, focuses almost exclusively on two issues: the size of current immigration, and its economic consequences. But neither of these is the heart of the matter.

FAIR’s roots are in the population-control and environmentalist movements: this explains its preoccupation with numbers. Its founder, John Tanton, is a past president of Zero Population Growth and chairman of the National Sierra Club Population Committee. FAIR’s two most prominent demographer-gurus are Garrett Hardin and Leon Bouvier, both of whom have been actively involved with population-control groups. Their primary concern is that immigrants - no matter where they are from or what their social and economic characteristics - add to the size of the population. (Bouvier has actually said that he believes the ideal U.S. population would be 150 million persons, though he has not clearly spelled out what he would do with the other 100 million of us who are already here.)

It is true that immigrants account for about half of current population growth in the U.S. Nonetheless, U.S. population growth as a whole is relatively modest, at 1 percent per year. Even with immigrants, including the more fecund Latins, we are in no danger of a Malthusian population explosion.

FAIR’s other chief concern, the economic impact of immigration, probably has more resonance in the general debate; but here, too, confusion reigns. For years economists have discussed the consequences of immigration - legal and illegal - without coming to a definitive consensus. On one side are those like Julian Simon of the University of Maryland, who argue that immigration is a big plus for the economy, actually improving the standard of living of the native-born. At the other end of the spectrum are those like Donald Huddle of Rice University, the author of an influential 1993 study for the Carrying Capacity Network, a population-control group in Washington. Huddle estimates that immigrants (legal and illegal) cost more than $42.5 billion a year in net public assistance and displace more then two million American workers, incurring $12 billion a year in additional public-assistance costs for those displaced.

Huddle’s figures have been widely disputed, including most recently in a General Accounting Office study. Even George Borjas of the University of California, San Diego, easily the most influential academic critic current policy, estimates that immigration brings economic benefits to the U.S. in the range of $6 to $20 billion annually - small, but still a net positive gain. More importantly, Borjas acknowledges that these benefits could be increased significantly if we changed our policy to attract more skilled immigrants.

No economic model, however, can adequately capture the more subtle benefits that Americans have clearly derived from immigration, and not just from the flows that brought many of our grandparents and great-grandparents here. As Francis Fukuyama and others have argued, most immigrants still seem to personify the very traits we think of as typically American" optimism, ambition, perseverance - the qualities that have made this country great. The ranks of successful immigrant entrepreneurs are legion; on Silicon Valley alone, recent immigrants have built many of the major technology companies, including Sun Microsystems, AST, and Borland International.

Immigrants have also transformed urban America over the last decade, from Korean Grocers in New York to Salvadoran busboys and janitors in Washington, Mexican baby-sitters and construction workers in Los Angeles, Cambodian doughnut-shop owners in Long Beach, Haitian cooks in Miami, Russian taxi drivers in Philadelphia, and Filipino nurses and Indian doctors in public hospitals practically everywhere. As they always have done, immigrants still take the difficult, often dirty, low-paying, thankless jobs that other Americans shun. When they open their own businesses, these are frequently located in blighted, crime-ridden neighborhoods long since abandoned by American enterprise. And their children often outperform those who have been here for generations. This year, as in the last several, more than one-third of the finalists in the Westinghouse high-school science competition bore names like Chen, Yu, Dasgupta, Khazanov, Bunyavanich, and Hattangadi.

The contrast between the immigrant poor and the American underclass is especially striking. As the sociologist William Julius Wilson and others have observed, Mexican immigrants in Chicago, despite their relative poverty and much lower levels of education, show few of the dysfunctional characteristics of unemployment, crime, welfare dependency, and drug use common among the city’s black and Puerto Rican underclass. In cities like Los Angeles and Washington, where American blacks and Latino immigrants inhabit the same poor neighborhoods, the despair of the former seems all the more intense by contrast to the striving of the latter - as if one group had given up on America even as the other was proving the continued existence of opportunity.

For all our anxiety about immigrants, then, in the end it is Americans of all classes who are caught in the middle of a national identity crisis. It is still possible to turn immigrants into what St. John de Crevecoeur called :a new race of men," provided the rest of us still want to do this. But if we, the affluent no less than the poor among us, cease to believe that being an American has any worth or meaning, we should not blame immigrants, most of whom entertain no such doubts.