I have already posted on the little-discussed legal immigration provisions of Senate bill S.2611, now moving inexorably toward passage.

The major and most immediately measurable consequence of these provisions will be a dramatic increase in America’s yearly intake of immigrants. According to a revised impact analysis issued last week, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act will add an additional 66 million (and possibly as many as 90 million) legal immigrants to America’s population over the next two decades. Add these figures to Census Bureau projections of natural population growth [PDF] over the same period (+34 million) and you wind up with a net gain of 100 million people.

The most recent Census Bureau estimate puts the US population at over 296 million. Should S.2611 become law, that figure will rise to 396 million between now and 2026.

As usual, the devil is in the demography. For the US population is already undergoing rapid and profound transformation due to the combined effect of ongoing mass immigration, relatively low native birth rates, and relatively high immigrant ones. As a year 2000 Census report noted:

Among women 40 to 44 years old in 1998, only Hispanic women, with an average of 2.4 births each, had exceeded the level required for natural replacement of the population (about 2.1 births per woman). African American women (2.0 births per woman) and Asian and Pacific Islander women (2.0 births) had fertility levels not significantly different from the replacement level, while White non-Hispanic women (1.8 births) were significantly below replacement level.

Or, as Gregory Spencer, Census Bureau chief of population projections, put it:

'The main thing is migration. We have over a million additions to our population through migration. [...] When you think that many are young and of child-bearing age you can expect what's going to happen. They're going to have children and that keeps multiplying the effect'.

And that was two years ago! Were immigration cut off, the Census data suggests that the US population would actually begin to shrink in line with most Western European countries. Instead, it is growing rapidly. Throwing another 66 million newcomers into the mix will only accelerate these trends.

Demographers have a term for this: it's called replacement migration. Relatively low native-born birthrates plus relatively high immigrant birthrates plus a never-ending stream of new arrivals means that, in twenty years, America will be, literally, another country.

While no one disputes these projections, open borders advocates are quick to slam those who worry over them as nativists and worse. This response is just further evidence of their total lack of historical imagination. Solidarity is the foundation of nations. But it is built, not invented.

As the great French historian Ernest Renan remarked in a famous 1888 lecture to the Sorbonne:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.
[…]
A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

What are the prospects for a nation in which the ties to the past have been severed? What are the chances that, tomorrow, Americans will still desire to live together?

These are the questions, it seems to me, that all Americans, whatever their political orientation, need to be asking themselves. The Senate is playing a dangerous game. Should S.2611 be signed into law, we shall all pay the consequences.