On May 19th, John McCain held a fundraiser at New York's posh Regency Hotel. The New York Observer's Jason Horowitz reports:

“What kind of a country do we want to be?” Mr. McCain asked his audience, walking around in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped table as he proceeded to answer his own question.

He cautioned against ghettoizing immigrants, which he noted has brought about disastrous results in France, and criticized elements in his own party as “nativist” before lambasting the punditry of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage for helping to “fuel the problem,” according to two of the sources.

A week later on the Senate floor, a stuttering and indignant McCain responded in these terms to Senator Jeff Bingaman's (D-NM) amendment to put a cap on the annual number of visas awarded under S.2611:

He [Bingaman] wants us to be like other countries, maybe France, maybe Germany [...] This is against family, this is against everything that America stands for.

McCain is right: nobody in their right mind would want to model immigration policy on Europe's example. The problem is, that's exactly what McCain and his allies in Congress are proposing.

Here's why:

• The centerpiece of S.2611 is a guest-worker program that lays the foundations for giving citizenship to the millions of illegals already here as well as the millions more who will soon follow. Woops! That's precisely how Europe got its restive immigrant population in the first place.

  Between the mid-fifties and the mid-seventies, Europe imported millions of ill-educated foreign workers from former colonial holdings in North Africa and the Mideast. They were supposed to go home once their jobs were finished. They didn't. The result was that, when European economies tanked in the mid-seventies, these guest-workers, now unemployed (and, increasingly, unemployable) quickly set about reproducing all the worst traits of urban ghetto life. In the meantime, they had become citizens.

  By opening the path to citizenship for guest-workers, S.2611 makes temporary labor flows permanent, with consequences that are sure to be just as destructive -- if not more so -- than those which Europe is now experiencing.

• The Senate bill will also lead to an immense increase in the annual number of legal immigrants granted entry to the US -- some 66 million over 20 years. Woops again! If France and Germany have trouble "digesting" their large immigrant and immigrant-descended populations, it's because new waves of immigrants are constantly arriving, settling in the same towns and neighborhoods as their predecessors. Over time, these have become self-sustaining islands of ethnic difference.

  S.2611 sets the stage for exactly the same thing in the US. In both places, mass immigration plus birth-right citizenship plus family reunification are and will be a recipe for social disaster.

• S.2611 is integral to the supra-national project dear to the Bush administration and Chambers of Commerce everywhere. But if it's hard to control your own borders, it's even more difficult to control those of your neighbors. Once again, Europe leads the way. By providing for the free movement of citizens between member states, the European Union puts every member state at the mercy of all the others, effectively removing immigration policy from the hands of national governments.

  Poland won't control immigration to Britain's liking. Is there any reason to suppose that Mexico will do so to ours?

The legislation now before Congress follows the European example to the letter. With one exception: the scale of immigration provided for by S.2611 is several orders of magnitude greater.

Don't want the US to be like France and Germany, Senator McCain? Fine. Then enforce our borders, reduce immigration, and start acting like national sovereignty and national security come before the unholy alliance of "Chambers of Commerce, unions, and Hispanic groups" you so arrogantly serve.

That, after all, is your job.