According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy can be expected to produce about 22 million new jobs over the next decade. We have about 35 million young people turning 18 during this period, of whom 17 million will be entering the job market.

According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, we will also admit about 13 million immigrants; 6.5 million will be adults needing jobs — which leaves about 1.5 million people in excess of the available jobs.

Obviously, jobs will be more scarce in the next decade, and we are not the only country facing this possibility. Within the next 25 years, 3 billion young people will enter thle job market worldwide, a number equal to the entire population of the world in 1960. There will be no shortage of people seeking jobs in the U.S. economy.

The arguments for a limit of immigration have to do with the long-range employment projections and social stability of our society, and they have nothing to do with the ethnic origin of the immigrants themselves. But unfortunately, anyone making a case for the moratorium has had to confron a barrage of accusation about racism and zenophobia. And once the accusations are made, it is difficult to get even well-meaning politicians and journalists to look at the information with an unprejudiced mind.

A coalition of environmental and immigration organizations will be pressing this Congress to enact a five-year limit on legal immigration with a yearly ceiling of no more than 100,000. This number would allow us to accept more than our share of political refugees, and most important, this “time out” will allow the most recently arrived immigrants a chance to get on their feet and into the labor market.

Because 36 percent of the adult immigrants coming into our country do not have a high school diploma and the median level of education is less than the ninth grade, a much less educated group than we have accepted in the past, many of these immigrants are finding it takes longer to learn English, acquire the job skills needed to participate in our economy, and free themselves of costly support services.

In a country which already has 26 million functional illiterates and is sending former welfare recipients into the job market, it simply doesn’t make sense to pursue a policy which brings in millions more.

If we fail to plan for the social stability of our society, then we will pay for the chaos: 25 percent of the felons in our federal prisons are foreign born as it is, costing about $50,000 a year per inmate. When you create a system which requires an increasing number of young men to sell their labor at stagnating or falling wages in a desperate competition for unskilled jobs, then we shouldn’t be surprised by the growth in our prison population and the violence in our urban communities. I am not suggesting that high immigration alone accounts for the increasing poverty and social chaos in our cities or the stagnant wages of unskilled labor, but certainly it has not helped.

Since 1970 immigrants and their descendants have added 30 million people to our population. This is the equivalent of absorbing the entire population of Central America. We have accepted more immigrants than all of western Europe combined, and we are the fastest growing developed country in the world. With a scarcity of well-paying jobs, increasing budget deficits, a crumbling infrastruture, a shrinking middle class, and increasing wage and income disparity.

America looks more and more like a Third World nation, and we conduct our public policy with about as much foresight as one. According to the U.S. Census Bureau our population will increased by more than 130 million in 50 years, and 90 percent of this increase will be due to immigrants who arrived after 1970.

Blacks have probably experienced the most competition from immigrant labor, as they did during the great wave at the turn of the century when Booker T. Washington begged American industrialists to shut the doors on cheap foreign labor and hire native blacks. Despite the civil rights movement, the percentabe of blacks entering the middle class has come to a virtual halt since 1970, and this is especially surprising when you consider that between 1940 and 1970, when immigration averaged only 178,000 ayear, the percentage of blacks earning middle-class wages rose from 22 percent to 71 percent.

Exploding immigration is not the only reason black progress has come to such a startling halt, but it has definitely had an impact. Not one of our industrial competitors pursues an immigration policy which gives away jobs the way we do, and so ruthlessly destroys the options of low-skill workers.

Despite numerous national polls which show that the majority of Americans in all ethnic groups favor serious immigration limits, Congress and special interests have effectively derailed every effort over the past 30 years to bring immigration back to traditional numbers.

A comment by the late Professor Barbara Jordan, chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, is revealing: “Immigration is not a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to everyone and anyone in the owrld, who wishes tocome to the United States. It is a privilege granted by the people of the United States to those whom we choose to admit.” A comment like this from a woman of Jordan’s stature should cause us all to wonder: what has happened to our immigration policy that such a statement even needed to be made?

Jonette Christian lives in Holden.