The more acrimonious the immigration debate grows, the more we wish that President Bush would talk about America’s population shortage. We’re all for enforcing the law, but let’s skip for a moment the question of whether people got here legally or illegally or are native born. The broader point that needs to be made is that people are good – life is good – for America and for any nation. This point is understood at almost every level by our religious leaders. It has been pressed with particular clarity, though by no means exclusively, by the members of the Council of Torah Sages and the theologians of the Catholic Church. It has not, however, been pressed with any clarity by our political leaders.

On the contrary, one of things that makes the current debate so bitter is the failure of our leadership to confront ideologies hostile to population growth, no matter what its source. Some are economic theorists, such as the Malthusians. Some are movements such as Zero Population Growth. Some mix xenophobia and environmentalism, like the Sierra Club. There are the birth control and abortion movements, and all the left-wing economists focused not on growing the pie but dividing it. Then there are the racists, who are either hostile to blacks or Hispanics or Asians or Arabs or Jews or other minorities. The wonderful thing about the understanding of life that has been given to us from Sinai is that it trumps every one of these points of view and holds out a hopeful, unifying vision.

We are not, after all, so very far from the day when the world could be facing a dwindling population. This was the thesis put forth a few years ago in an article in the journal Nature, in which three scientists warned that this is the century in which the number of people on the planet is probably going to stop growing and may even start to decline. They reckoned that there is “around an 85% chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century” and held out a chance that by the end of the current century the world’s population would be lower than when the century began. That is a prospect that strikes us as far more alarming than, say, global warming.

There have been a number of illuminating pieces written on this in recent years, but none more so than a series issued back in 1994 in the Far Eastern Economic Review in conjunction with the United Nations population conference in Cairo. The Review illustrated one of its editorials with the cover of a book published by John Robbins in 1959 under the title “Too Many Asians.” It quoted the Robbins dirge as saying, “It is easy to imagine the United States, or Canada, or Brazil, or even – with somewhat more effort – France supporting twice its 1960 population at a reasonably decent standard of living. It is not possible, on the other hand, to imagine double the number of Asians thirty years from now, contented with their lot, producing enough food to keep themselves strong, and living at peace with one another and with the rest of the world.” It then pointed out that since Robbins wrote, Asia “well more than doubled in size and set off a new industrial revolution.”

The Review did not object to family planning by individuals acting of their own volition. But the Review, issued on a continent where abortions were sometimes forced as a matter of state policy, did object to the United Nations exhorting people to “limit their children on the basis of a false assumption” that “more children thwart a nation’s development, that catastrophe lurks just around the corner.” The editorial articulates one of the most important lessons gained from decades of newspaper work. It may be that waves of immigration can cause dislocations and that illegal immigration can undermine the respect for law. There is no doubt that a president’s premier constitutional obligation is to faithfully executive America laws. But a halt to population growth would be a catastrophe for any nation, including America. This would be a good moment for Mr. Bush to seize for the Republicans the idea that population is good and America needs more.