Today's Washington Times reports:

The Senate yesterday easily approved an immigration bill that allows 10 million illegal aliens to become citizens, doubles the flow of legal immigration each year and will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $54 billion over the next 10 years.

54 billion. The sums involved are hardly the only problem with the Senate bill. Sill, while we await the House response, it's useful to consider the politics of such immense transfer payments.

In a much-remarked 2004 essay (see here), Prospect editor David Goodhart examined diversity and the welfare state in contemporary Britain. The gist of the essay was that sharing and solidarity – and thus the public’s willingness to finance the social state – are in conflict with high degrees of ethnic diversity.

“The left's recent love affair with diversity,” Goodhart warned fellow progressives, “may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.”

The article continues:

We share public services and parts of our income in the welfare state, we share public spaces in towns and cities where we are squashed together on buses, trains and tubes, and we share in a democratic conversation - filtered by the media - about the collective choices we wish to make. All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse that common culture is being eroded.
[...]
In the rhetoric of the modern liberal state, the glue of ethnicity ("people who look and talk like us") has been replaced with the glue of values ("people who think and behave like us"). But British values grow, in part, out of a specific history and even geography. Too rapid a change in the make-up of a community not only changes the present, it also, potentially, changes our link with the past [note: I less elegantly make the same point here]. As Bob Rowthorn wrote in Prospect in February 2003, we may lose a sense of responsibility for our own history - the good things as well as the shameful things in it - if too many citizens no longer identify with it.

The less we have in common, the less generous we are likely to be toward our fellow citizens, the less willing we will be to support transfer payments to the less well-off.

The bill passed by the Senate, in this respect, is a recipe for welfare state meldown.

Some on the right will no doubt rejoice at this prospect. They shouldn't. The welfare state won't be the only thing swept away by the coming immigrant tsunami. National identity, political stability and common civility are also on their way out.

The numbers proposed by the Senate bill -- at least 66 million over twenty years -- are simply too vast. That we've completely given up on assimilation and happen to share a long border and troubled history with the principal immigrant soucre country doesn't help either.

Should all this come to pass, it may also mean the end of the two major parties. But then they will be the least of the new bill's victims.