No Americans need apply: something for everyone.

Mr. Robb is senior analyst of The Social Contract and author of the study, Affirmative Action for Immigrants: The Entitlement Nobody Wanted.

WHAT liberals wishing to save the affirmative-action system did not need was the growing realization that some of the biggest winners in race-preference schemes are not Americans at all. Consider: The prestigious University of Texas Law School maintains a minority set-aside admissions program for blacks and what it terms "Mexican- Americans." However, because the school does not inquire about citizenship, "Mexican-American" in reality means anyone of Mexican heritage who is not in the U.S. illegally. "There's no philosophical objection" to foreign nationals receiving the preference, said Stanley Johnson, who heads the schools' admission committee.

As unlikely as it may sound, millions of immigrants and foreign visitors are eligible for -- and many are actually using -- affirmative-action benefits to get a head-start on U.S.-born minorities, not to mention white Americans. In effect, they are getting off the plane and moving right to the head of the line.

How is this possible? In the late 1960s, it simply never occurred to government planners that there would be so many aliens in the U.S. or that so many would be considered minorities.

The results can be startling. Take, for example, a company that has a goal to hire ten blacks. Nothing says these have to be African Americans, and they well may not be. All ten may be people who until now spent their entire lives in another country.

The fact that foreign citizens routinely get special consideration as if they shared a history of U.S. discrimination with blacks and select other native minorities does not distress sociologists and most affirmative-action bureaucrats. "To make the connection that affirmative action should only be for native-born Americans seems kind of ludicrous to me," commented Larry Hardy, who is affirmative-action officer for the Office of the President of the University of California system.

Hardy's mission, he said, was to get the pool from which new University of California employees are chosen to match the ethnic and gender makeup of the surrounding area's market as closely as possible. "Whether [potential employees] come from Africa or were born here, it's irrelevant," he told me.

It's small wonder the regents voted in July to shut down affirmative action on their nine campuses. But affirmative-action programs remain entrenched elsewhere, particularly in the Fortune 500 corporations. And the evidence is strong that these companies heavily extend their "minority preferences" to non-Americans.

Rita Reining, manager of affirmative action for Pacific Bell, admitted to me that her company does not even check whether prospective employees are citizens, much less attempt to reserve affirmative-action benefits to Americans. Bell is not unhappy with the idea that non-citizens may help round out its affirmative- action goals. "If [newly hired immigrants] happen to be a racial or ethnic minority, they get counted that way," Miss Reining said.

The use of foreign citizens to fill minority slots may be most prevalent in university faculties and in high-tech fields. Of all science doctorates awarded in the U.S. in 1993, 46 per cent went to foreigners. Ten science PhDs were awarded to non-citizen Asians for every one awarded an Asian-American. Similarly, more science PhDs are awarded to foreign blacks than to American blacks, and more to foreign Hispanics than to American Hispanics. Since about two- thirds of these newly minted scientists plan to remain in the U.S., each Asian-American must compete head to head with seven non- citizen Asians in an affirmative-action hiring pool. In addition, most new legal immigrants are considered to be ethnic minorities once they arrive here, and many of them are educated enough to enter high in the mainstream work force. Hence companies can more easily meet their affirmative-action goals without compromising the quality of their workforce.

EVEN if corporations wanted to stop giving affirmative-action benefits to immigrants, they would be unable to do so because Congress has made barring immigrants from affirmative action illegal. This happened when legislators passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made it illegal to bar immigrants from employment solely on the basis of their nationality. What Congress didn't count on was that in the course of forcing employers to hire qualified legal immigrants, it was forcing them to treat the immigrants exactly as they would any other employees in other respects. If an employer ran an affirmative-action program, and if an immigrant happened to be an ethnic minority, he had to be included in that race-preference program.

The great irony is that the immigrants have not asked for this special treatment. Most immigrants come to this country to get a fair chance, not a socially engineered head-start.

Whatever the long-term fate of affirmative action, Congress and the Administration should act now to put a stop to this bizarre extension of the program. A mere paragraph or two of legislation and a short executive order could end affirmative action for immigrants -- the entitlement nobody planned and hardly anyone wants.