It was the best of editorials, it was the worst of editorials.

On April 1st, Jonathan Power examined immigration's differential impact in the International Herald Tribune ("It's the Working Class that Bears the Burden"). You couldn't ask for a better diagnosis of the problems associated with mass immigration. You couldn't ask for a worse solution to those problems.

For the benefit of our dear readers, I've reproduced some of the good parts. Power writes:

"It's the workinig class that bears most of the cost of absorbing new immigrants, whether it be in France, the United States or Malaysia, but the middle class dominates the debate, forging an alliance in its favor across the political spectrum -- liberals who want to be multicultural, and conservatives who argue for the free market and open borders.

Two new academic reports challenge the conventional wisdom that immigration is an unalloyed good for the economies of developed societies. George Borjas, a Harvard professor of economics, has published a study for the Center of Immigration Studies in which he argues that when immigration increases the supply of workers, the earnings of native-born workers fall significantly. A parallel study by two professors of economics at Columbia University, Donald Davis and David Weinstein, shows that the net loss for native-born Americans is $70 billion a year and increases as the immigrant population grows.

All this needs to be put on the front burner of the political agenda if we are to have an honest debate about immigration. In nearly every host country, immigration has become a major social and economic issue. The native working class must be fairly represented in this debate.

While the educated and much-traveled often revel in the surface manifestations of new music, cuisines, religious practices and lifestyles, it is the poorer members of the native working class who have to live and work alongside immigrants, without even asking them if this was the way they would choose their country to change.

[...] Immigration today has become too massive, despite the many controls. The growth of an even larger immigrant population is inevitable if the natives don't reproduce sufficiently and their older members retire too early. Tensions are going to rise much further."

While none of this will be news to those who have followed the issue in recent years, it is refreshing to come across such good sense in an MSM organ like the IHT -- and yet further evidence that the coalition formed in the 1990's to keep the issue out of the public arena is collapsing.

Too bad Power isn't as bold at recommending solutions as he is in diagnosing the problem. He identifies two ways of reigning in out of control immigration: an even greater liberalization of Western immigration policy and new labor market incentives for elderly and unskilled native workers.

"Part of the answer to this, paradoxically, is to liberalize the immigration market -- to take down all the artificial barriers of government controls. The Cato Institute, a libertarian U.S. think tank, argues that then immigration will become a circular process, instead of having immigrants, once in, clinging like limpets to the rocks of the host country for fear of ejection.

[...] Second, every country needs to do what the French government has recently decided. Turning its back on previous remedies for high unemployment -- the 35-hour work week and early pensions -- it now wants to encourage native workers (including second-generation immigrants already settled) to work in domestic services like child care, cleaning, gardening and help for the elderly, the so-called McJobs that new immigrants usually fill. France appears ready to consider income support and additional welfare payments to make these positions attractive to native workers."

Power is quite right about the labor market. Despite all the Bush administration's nonsense about "jobs Americans won't do", the real issue is how to make those jobs more attractive to prospective employees. The measures cited by Power would go a good way toward solving perennial labor shortages in the short term. In the long term, the West needs to start seriously thinking about how to reverse its demographic implosion.

But no reform package will work should policy-makers adopt the first prong of Power's solution and open the borders to all comers.

The multicultural dreamworld of liberal elites notwithstanding, contemporary mass immigration is essentially an economic phenomenon: immigrants come, and will continue to do so, as long as the West remains wealthier and more generous than their societies of origin.

Opening the borders won't change that (at least not in the short run). What it will do is produce an explosive situation in which host societies are in short order flooded by new immigrants, creating further cultural strife and laying the foundations for a permanent black market in labor.

Meanwhile, the idea that any significant portion of new "guest-workers" will return home is uncertain at best -- and at odds with the experience of every country that has experimented with guest-worker programs in the past.

If you wanted to accelerate the economic and cultural collapse of Western societies, it would be hard to think of a better way of going about it.

The real solution is elsewhere -- and is perfectly obvious.

If the population immigration of the last few decades and its associated ills are to be brought under control, what's needed are tighter controls at the border, a clamp down on rogue employers, and a return to practices of cultural assimilation -- first and foremost by jettisoning the discourse of diversity and multiculturalism.

The only thing lacking is political will. That, sadly, will be something the voters will have to supply themselves. If political and cultural elites wish to avoid a rise in ugly extremist movements, they'd better start listening.