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Posted on 12/13/2001 4:11:24 PM PST by DakotaKid

Ever since Sept. 11, the immigration issue has been lurking dangerously just beneath the surface of political debate like the title character in "Jaws." As in the movie, the authorities have tried to calm public fears by denying its existence. Both political parties firmly support high levels of unskilled immigration to the point of seeking to grant an amnesty and rights of residence to millions of illegal aliens.

But the people see fins cutting ominously through the water. In particular, they have noticed that all 19 terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were legally present in the United States and that some immigrants in the growing Muslim diaspora sympathize with the denunciations of America voiced by radical Islamists. The public's fear that lax immigration policies were making life easier for terrorists has also begun to be expressed.

In the last few weeks three very different writers have pointed to immigration as one of the great transforming issues of U.S. politics.

1. Writing in the broadly liberal New York Review of Books, Christopher Jencks, the independent-minded professor of social policy at Harvard, examined America's 30-year immigration experiment. He concluded that mass immigration had worsened the living standards of low-paid Americans, promoted the "downward assimilation" of many unskilled migrants to the U.S. underclass, fostered ethnic enclaves that helped new immigrants not to learn English, massively increased the U.S. population (threatening to double it between now and 2050), and placed severe strains on such environmental resources as water, clean air and living space. But he also thought that the curious coalition of right-wing libertarians, left-wing ethnic pressure groups and corporations seeking cheap labor would succeed in keeping America's borders relatively open--unless Sept. 11 shocked the public into demanding otherwise.

2. A rarefied sign that this might be happening came in the form of "The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy"--a study published by the Center for Immigration Studies but written by Stephen Steinlight, formerly director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee. His essay sought to persuade Jewish Americans (who have traditionally supported open borders) that current levels of immigration might eventually balkanize America into a patchwork quilt of ethnic pressure groups--and that this in turn might threaten America's liberal tolerance on which Jewish Americans depend.

3. And in his New York Post column for Nov. 28, the Democratic political strategist and former Clinton White House adviser, Dick Morris, cited polls showing that Americans demand much lower levels of immigration by very large majorities. In particular, they favor "temporarily sealing U.S. borders and stopping all immigration in the U.S. during the war on terrorism" by 90 percent to 11 percent; and they want tougher limits on immigration from countries ''thought to be connected to terrorists" by 85 percent to 11 percent.

How should immigration levels be cut back? Should there be a general moratorium or selective cutbacks? The logic of Jencks' argument seems to be that the United States should cut back selectively but on unskilled immigration from all parts of the globe. The other writers make directly political points--that, in addition to any general reduction, there should be a particular cutback in immigration from countries "identified . . . as linked to terrorism" (Morris) or "from Islamist countries" (Steinlight).

There is a precedent for selective restriction. A 1917 law restricted immigration from the "Asian barred" zone--very roughly, the same countries identified as linked to terrorism by the U.S. State Department in recent times. But Americans today are rather more nervous of making distinctions between people on the basis of national origins than they were in 1917. Thus Peter Brimelow, the author of the lively immigration polemic, Alien Nation, says the reason he and others had advocated a temporary moratorium on all immigration was that a cutback based selectively on national origins "would open up a Pandora's box of ethnic disputes."

The White House might also object. Selectively targeting Muslim nations for immigration cutbacks, while making no reductions in the numbers of Latin American, African, European or other Asian arrivals, would target the one minority that votes Republican.

In other words, now that the "Jaws" of immigration reform is rising hungrily to the surface, it finds the GOP doing a lazy backstroke half a mile from safe land. Why am I not surprised?

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