In the past few days, a number of commentators have remarked on the striking parallels between the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which the Senate is set to pass any day now, and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

As Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese pointed out in yesterday’s New York Times:

Like the amnesty bill of 1986, the current Senate proposal would place those who have resided illegally in the United States on a path to citizenship, provided they meet a similar set of conditions and pay a fine and back taxes. The illegal immigrant does not go to the back of the line but gets immediate legalized status, while law-abiding applicants wait in their home countries for years to even get here. And that's the line that counts. In the end, slight differences in process do not change the overriding fact that the 1986 law and today's bill are both amnesties.

A difference of semantics, then, but also of numbers. The 1986 amnesty regularized the status of 5 million aliens. The present amnesty, which would have never seen the light of day had any of the governments of the past twenty years kept their promises, proposes to regularize between 12 and 20 million of them. Meese isn't hostile to the idea of a guest-worker program but sees enforcement as a necessary firs step. As in 1986, amnesty will only compound the problem of illegal immigration unless it is preceded by a rigorous crack-down on those who employ illegals as well as immediate (and real) enforcement on the border.

Fair enough. It's clear that amnesty will only encourage yet new waves of border crashers. It's also clear that the Bush administration wants it this way. Meese is right to demand that the administration end its double-talk on the issue. In the absence of genuine border enforcement
(studiously avoided by the Senate bill), Bush’s “guest-worker” proposal will only fuel the spread of the parallel economy. Instead of two economies, we will have three: the legal, the semi-legal, and the illegal. In ten years time, we will be back where we started, and then some.

But there's another problem with the guest-worker idea and, more generally, the vast expansion of legal immigration envisionned by the Senate bill: what happens to immigrants and their children when the economy they've come to service changes?

Consider the case of France and Germany. Between the mid-fifties and the early seventies, both countries imported millions of peasants from remote corners of Turkey and North Africa to make up for temporary labor shortfalls. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. And yet, when European economies tanked in the mid-seventies, neither the guest-workers nor their children, now largely unemployed, opted to leave. For both countries, the result has been a huge drag on unemployment benefits, health care and education. In the meantime, the very fabric of national identity has reached a snapping point, with increasingly embittered immigrants exacerbating a siege-mentality among ethnic Germans and French.

The European experience gives the lie to those who see importing foreign labor as the magic solution to domestic labor shortages. Former Wall Street Journal editor William P. Kucewicz, for example, who argues in the most recent number of NRO that Hagel-Martienz is "the next best thing" to native-born demographic growth:

While it’s too late to change the boomers’ baby-mating habits, policymakers can do the next best thing: that is, import as adults via liberalized immigration policies the children who were never born. Working-aged immigrants would do just as nicely as native-born Americans in terms of maintaining a viable ratio of workers to retirees.

Perhaps they would -- in the first generation. But what if most of those workers are themselves , like so many Mexican immigrants, dependent on social services? And what happens when they retire? Who's going to pay for Medicare then? I'm not an economist but it seems to me obvious that such Kucewicz-type "solutions" are stop-gap at best, disastrous at worst. What's being proposed here is a recipe for indefinite immigration-driven population growth -- unsustainable in the long-term, undesirable in the short -- followed by social collapse and political convulsion.

Once again, the European case is instructive. Europe's demographic crisis is, if anything, far more grave than that facing the US. At the same time, the European social model is far more generous than ours. For years, mass immigration has been central to European government strategies for propping up the welfare state. But does it work?

A little remarked year 2000 UN study [PDF] gives a hint:

In contrast to the migration streams needed to offset total or working-age population decline, the levels of migration that would be needed to prevent the countries from ageing are of substantially larger magnitudes. By 2050, these larger migration flows would result in populations where the proportion of post-1995 migrants would range between 50 percent and 99 percent. Such high levels of migration have not been observed in the past for any of these countries or regions. Moreover, it seems extremely unlikely that such flows could happen in these countries in the forseeable future.

That last sentence, it seems to me, is an understatement. Like much of Europe, postwar America erected a social welfare system founded on an illusion of permanence. That illusion has since been shattered. The solution is not to desperately prop up the system at whatever cost. The solution is to recognize the problem, change the system, and hope for better times.

Markets and demography are transient. Immigration is not. Should the President and Senate have their way, we will be paying the price for the rest of our lives.