More to come.

WITH the recent publication of the Rand Corporations long-awaited report Immigration in a Changing Economy: Californias Experience, a significant paradigm shift in economists thinking about immigration is complete. Traditionally, economists have taken a (mildly) benign view of immigration. But the new consensus is that this does not apply to the particular influx accidentally unleashed by the 1965 Immigration Act. The reasons: the paradoxes of the current selection system, which has produced an uncontrolled, largely unskilled, non-English-speaking flow; and the perverse incentives of massive transfer programs for health, education, and welfare. The solution, according to Rand: reducing immigration to "a moderate range around the 550,000 a year envisioned by the Jordan Commission in 1995 and embodied in the ill-fated 1996 Smith - Simpson bill. Instead, the influx is likely to be double or triple that range as far as the eye can see.

The Rand study comes four months after the equally devastating National Academy of Sciences report (see NR, "The Week, June 16). The NAS found that the infinitesimal macroeconomic benefits to Americans of the current immigration presence estimated at $1 to $10 billion in a $7.5-trillion economy were being swamped by a net fiscal cost estimated at $15 to $20 billion. In California, this net fiscal burden amounted to an astounding $1,174 tax for every native household. America had a revolution over less.

NR can modestly say that this new academic consensus represents a complete triumph for us and a fatal reproach to our numerous critics, including too many friends in the conservative establishment. We first reported the emerging paradigm shift in a June 22, 1992, cover story by Senior Editor Peter Brimelow, who developed this and other arguments in his 1995 book Alien Nation.

We do differ from the Rand authors. Their conclusions are in some ways even more radical than they realize. For example, they think that immigration is actually displacing American workers that about 1 to 1.3 per cent of Californias native population is currently unemployed because of immigration. So they recommend that immigration be treated as a labor-market issue and the numbers permitted to enter be varied by executive action according to economic conditions, instead of being fixed by statute. Additionally, the Rand authors want to improve immigrant skill levels including English proficiency, which would sharply reduce the inflow of Hispanics. They suggest too that the 100,000-a-year refugee program, which has been hijacked by ethnic factions and turned into a subsidized fast-track immigration program, be incorporated under the lower ceiling, which would slash it.

These are all sensible suggestions, which is why NR has already made most of them. But the 1996 debacle in Congress suggests that the ethnic and business special interests that now control Washington are simply too selfish, unscrupulous, and entrenched to allow any such detailed reform. If that is so, they must be met head-on with an immigration moratorium for several years. It will take that long for Americans to debate and decide how many immigrants should be admitted annually, on what terms, and possessing what skills. A moratorium would also give the special interests a real incentive to agree to sensible reform: namely, the prospect of getting the moratorium lifted. Finally, it would have useful (and important) side effects: reducing the need for expensive emergency educational and social programs that Rand thinks is entailed by the current policy.

Although NR and the immigration reformers have won the intellectual argument, we have clearly lost the political argument for now. We know this because the Wall Street Journals Paul Gigot has told us so. In an August 22 column, he blamed us for alienating the Hispanic immigrants he sees as otherwise clamoring to cut the capital-gains tax and vote Republican. Was Mr. Gigot taking the day off? Not only did Hispanics vote overwhelmingly Democratic long before immigration became an issue, but they are also now (thanks to that paradoxical selection system) a poverty population with a direct interest in transfer programs.

"The debate should be over, Mr. Gigot instructs us. What debate? The Wall Street Journal editorial page has not run an article opposing its open-borders zealotry in years, while NR has repeatedly published immigration enthusiasts like Ron Unz and Julian Simon. The Journal has yet even to report the existence of the NAS report or the Rand study. Surely Mr. Gigot does not want to be classed with the multicultural censors at, say, the San Jose Mercury, which in its editorial on the NAS report said, amazingly, that "there is some news in this report that becomes alarming in the wrong hands. (Italics added.)

We agree, of course, that congressional Republicans are in full flight on immigration. Recently, only the heroic Rep. Lamar Smiths last-minute intercession with Sen. Phil Gramm stopped Sen. Connie Mack and Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart from smuggling through a measure that could have amnestied another million illegal immigrants. Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Frank Wolf have a well-intentioned religious-persecution asylum bill that could nonetheless bring in tens of millions.

But so what? The congressional Republicans are in full flight on everything. We prefer to follow the example of Robert Bork and Milton Friedman, who defied the conventional wisdom of their day on antitrust policy and floating exchange rates, respectively and unexpectedly prevailed. Reason is on our side.

So is the inexorably rising numbers of immigrants though they are not on Americas.