The other day The New York Times did a piece on the grass-roots opponents of the great compromise immigration bill. The accompanying photos showed a bunch of snaggletoothed retards living in trailers on the outskirts of town near the dump.

Thus the message is conveyed that if you want to identify yourself with right-thinking mainstreamers, you will be in favor of this bill. Episcopalians are, Harvard-educated reform Jews are, Roman Catholics who favor a woman’s right to choose are, so get with the respectables and let your legislator know you love this bill.

As we all know by now, the first great stumbling block is what the bill’s opponents call amnesty. They cannot stomach the thought that if enough people enter the country illegally there is not a goddamn thing you can do about it but give them and all their relatives and their relatives’ relatives citizenship. For many it is the pluperfect example of public impotence. It drives some people wild that, for whatever motive, a person can waltz into the country in violation of our laws, squat long enough and then have the cheek to declare that he has a right to citizenship.

The only answer thus far given to the snaggle people is that it is impractical to deport the estimated 12 million illegals thought to be living among us legals. The pro-legislation side adds that any attempt at mass deportations would be shameful and inhumane, all of which is undoubtedly the case.

The snaggle people know the background of all this is the previous amnesties and what has amounted to governmental indifference to the integrity of the borders on a scale so large that one wonders if the United States is able to control who comes in and what happens to them once they are in. If those who hate the bill and the amnesty which it contains are to be mollified, they need to have their trust in Washington’s will to keep its word and its competence to deliver on its promises restored.

When Washington has demonstrated that it has closed the borders, something which might, incidentally, discourage the rampant drug trade, it will be in a better position to bring forth some kind of program to legitimate the 12 million squatters or illegals or undocumenteds. Call them what you will.

The program currently included in the bill has as little a chance of succeeding as you have of finding a large farm or construction project in California or Texas that is not crawling with illegals. The program in the bill is so complicated that it might not be possible to carry it out by an effective civil service, and we, presently, are stuck with the one we saw swing into inaction when Katrina struck.

The regaining of control of the borders and the effective supervision of visa entrées is the work of five years or more. The thought of limiting immigration to a small number of highly trained workers for such a long period seems almost impossible, but it has been done before, albeit in a different era.

After the first World War, immigration to the United States was drastically cut back, and it stayed cut back for about 25 years until after World War II. You might call it the Grand Pause after the previous 45 or 50 years during which immigrants poured into the country by the millions.

The reasons Congress all but ended immigration in the 1920’s had nothing to do with any thought of a planned caesura in the inflow of alien arrivals, but, regardless, the Grand Pause brought with it beneficial effects no one foresaw. It gave the nation a chance to digest the huge new addition to the population it had already received and it gave the millions who had arrived during the previous half century the time to assimilate.

During a new pause no amnesty is needed, nor mass deportations. The advocates and agitators for the undocumented will have to accept that people who come here illegally, whether one by one or by the millions, have no right to citizenship. On the other hand, they are here, they have, they are and they will be establishing families and having children who are American citizens.

In the meantime, we might want to do some thinking about our nation’s future, although planning ahead does not seem to be an activity this society is crazy about. Even so, we might wish to ask ourselves whether the time for welcoming vast numbers of new people may have passed.

Merely raising such a possibility brings on shouts of protest—America is a nation of immigrants and my parents came through Ellis Island and so forth and so on. We hear this speech given as though it follows that what was done in the past is what ought to be done in the future.

This is not the 19th century nor the early decades of the 20th, when huge populations conferred power on a nation. In the 21st century, large populations are a drag. Population growth is a burden.

The idea of growth has been so hammered into our heads that the thought of a no-growth prosperity is inconceivable. Make the pie bigger and we each will get more. It has not occurred to us that another way to get more is to have the same size pie but fewer people demanding a slice.

In the light of our global-warming worries, bigger may be worse than a bummer. If the per capita use of water, oil, electricity, noxious chemicals, etc. stays the same as the population grows significantly, we will kill ourselves. We are already worried that the growing populations of India and China use and pollute as we have done and still do, so how can it help us to spur population growth either by having too many children ourselves or by importing population?

Closing down immigration for a generation will create many problems for which we have no immediate answers. New thinking will be demanded and new thinking is what we must do, because the compromise immigration bill is a continuation of thoughtless growth that will lead us first to a bigger mess than we have now, then to a nightmare and finally to disaster.