Immigration reform, yes. More immigrants, no.

In his Business Forum in the June 25 issue, immigration lawyer Scott Wright calls for "permanent immigration reforms that meet the needs of the New Economy."

Gosh, like any right-thinking American, I, too, endorse meeting the future needs of our society. But somehow my reading of our future needs, based upon three decades of plying my trade as a demographer and labor economist, differs 180 degrees from those Wright proposes.

Employers now plead a vast shortage of high-and low-skilled workers. They support an inexorable expansion of H-1B visas for workers in short supply. H-1B visas are temporary in practice but permanent in application, especially as a holder becomes parent to a citizen-child.

Once a visa holder manages to convert his or her status to a permanent one, he or she can take full advantage of the uniquely generous U.S. family reunification policy.

Advocates of expanded quotas -- industrialists, politicians, immigration lawyers, even some journalists -- wear blinders. They dupe many into believing this act carries no far-reaching societal consequences and certainly no downside.

Wright accuses government bureaucrats as unreasonably opposing expanded quotas. In fact, it is organized labor and environmentalists and a majority of the populace who assail continuation, let alone expansion, of the H-1B program.

Population is key

In 1970, we Earth Day activists espoused a systemic view of all societal actions, one derived from MIT Prof. Jay Forrester's book "Urban Dynamics." Population was the fundamental dynamic underlying sprawl, resource consumption and habitat destruction.

But sheer numbers also subvert realization of cherished non-material American values: breathing room, uncrowded wilderness and recreation land, low-density but compact cities. Hence the initial Earth Day slogan, "Zero Population Growth!" In 1972 the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future joined us in urging Congress to adopt a population stabilization policy with all due speed.

Tellingly, the commission stressed the deleterious effect of further population growth not just upon our physical habitat but upon the ability of Americans to enjoy their cherished low-density lifestyle. The commission noted that both reproductive health and immigration policies would have to be accountable to national population goals. In 1945, the United States enjoyed a still-sustainable population base. The labor market was tight for 20 years, reflecting the restrictive immigration era that began in 1924 and the maturation of small Depression-era birth cohorts.

Workers were prosperous; income differentials narrowed. Low-paid farm workers, especially Southern blacks and Southwestern Hispanics, shifted into better-paying city jobs. Lesser-skilled workers gained bargaining power. Women and blacks saw employment barriers crumble.

The progenitors of the baby boom relished low-cost living and still-accessible, unspoiled natural settings. The 1964 Civil Rights Act's passage and Cesar Chavez's near-success in unionizing farm workers were no accidents. Chavez's movement originated in a tight farm labor market, which also prompted growers to invest in raising worker productivity in order to justify the higher wages needed to retain workers who had urban alternatives.

Meanwhile, the baby boom swelled U.S. population to 200 million in 1970 from 132 million as recently as 1940. Reflecting both high fertility and net in-migration from other states, California's population had grown from 7 million to 20 million in three decades; Minnesota's has grown from 2.8 million to 3.8.

Against this backdrop, Congress rejected demographic self-accountability. Since 1970, we have added 75 million more to our population, half from expansive immigration and birthright citizenship policies.

Births to foreign-born women now raise total births by 25 percent nationally and nearly 100 percent in California, the prime destination of both legal and illegal entrants. California's population now stands at 35 million, five times its 1940 level; Minnesota's is at about 4.8 million, more than twice its 1940 level.

Not in best interest

Expanding any category of immigrant acts against the best interests of common working folk, and our national and global futures.

Explosive population growth rates have fanned explosive increases in housing prices and cries of housing and classroom shortages. Still, employers cry "labor shortage."

As an economist, I instruct that a "shortage" of a good or service signifies that at the prevailing market price buyers wish to consume more than suppliers are willing to supply. This is generally self-correcting: Buyers bid up the price, which triggers an increase in the amount supplied until an equilibrium is reached.

The price of labor is artificially low. Employers paying below-living wages to low-skilled workers rely upon the public coffers to subsidize the difference via welfare programs. Naturally, such employers enjoy extra profits from such "cheap" labor.

But merely importing more workers, low-or high-skilled, muffles the labor market signals that otherwise would call for the increased wages and improved work conditions that normally attract more people into an occupation. Among the displaced costs are environmental degradation and congestion. Ecologists looking at drained aquifers, disappearing wetlands, the paving of our most productive farm land threatened plant and animal species agree that our population exceeds sustainability.

By definition, beyond that point each extra person carries a negative net cost to the community at large. Yet population policy has been summarily removed from the national agenda even as symptoms of population-gone-amok abound.

Compound projections

Today the United States is the world's greatest resource consumer and pollution creator.

The latest Census Bureau population projections show our present immigration policies will more than double our population, to 570 million by the year 2100.

To the best of my knowledge, no politician or H-1B apologist has called for a national debate on doubling the U.S. population.

Expanding the H-1B visa program and the bewildering multiplicity of other entrant categories could result in a year 2100 U.S. population of 1 billion.

One billion Americans! Is our following on the path set by China not worth a public airing? Will employers then consider we have "enough" workers?

Before Congress scales up already-indefensible immigration quotas, why not hold a national referendum on what population level citizens desire, and what we are willing to sacrifice to attain it?

Why not debate the morality of encouraging the sort of "brain-drain" development economists of the 1960s rightly condemned?

The United States should serve as an international role model in shaping policies to safeguard our environment for posterity while reducing our plundering of other nations' resources, including manpower. We can increase our shamefully meager assistance to Third World family planning, female literacy and women-in-development programs, perhaps the best way to narrow the gap between rich and poor nations. The resultant world will be far more politically stable than one in which an overgrown rich nation seeks to drain poor countries of both their physical resources and their brightest brains.

© Copyright 2000 Minneapolis Star Tribune