The Bush amnesty for 8 to 12 million illegal aliens is more than a dereliction of his constitutional duty to enforce America’s laws. It is an admission by President Bush that the Third-Worldization of America is inevitable and unstoppable.

For what Mr. Bush is saying is this: We cannot stop the invasion. We can no longer defend the borders. It is hopeless. So let us make the best of it by pardoning the lawbreakers and gate-crashers, legalizing the coming invasion, and welcoming the entire family of any “guest worker” who can find a job.

Mexican President Vicente Fox may be yowling for open borders. Bush is delivering them. Amnesty means not only that all the millions of illegals already here stay, but also millions more will be coming now that they know America’s gates are unguarded and no one gets sent back. By 2050, America will be a different country.

What will she look like? Like the California of today—only much more so. Americans of European descent will be less than half the U.S. population and a rapidly shrinking minority. As late as 1960 they were about 90 percent.

America’s southern border will be effectively erased. In the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, Latinos with roots in Mexico, whose first loyalty is there, will be the new majority, as is already true of California’s public schools.

With near-zero immigration from Europe, with birth rates among immigrants the highest in the nation, with every child of a guest worker entitled to U.S. citizenship and all the benefits of our welfare state, America will be a Third World country not only in its ethnic and racial composition but also in the socioeconomic profile she presents.We will look less like the Affluent Society of 1957 of which J.K. Galbraith wrote, than like Brazil with its huge disparities of wealth. For, as with California, the native-born who are pouring out of the Golden State each year are taxpayers, and the immigrants, legal and illegal, who are crowding in are tax consumers.

With their wages at or near the minimum, these immigrant poor will depend on government for health care, food stamps, earned-income credits, welfare, rent supplements, legal services.

Mass immigration, and its social and economic ramifications, is what has bankrupted California and why she may have reached a tipping point from which there is no return. For her taxpayers are fleeing for two reasons, neither of which is likely to change.

First, the state no longer looks like the golden land in which they grew up. The social change has been too rapid, too radical. So they pack up and move to places where they feel more at home.

Second, the influx of immigrant poor and the exodus of the middle class means repeated hikes in tax rates and continuous cuts in social services, making life ever harsher for middle-class folks who stick it out. So they too soon head for the highways out.

In Bush’s last budget, he was forced to include $20 billion to help states balance their books. Just as many Third World nations would go belly up without regular transfusions of IMF and World Bank money, many states may come to depend on federal bailouts.

Consider education. Americans are puzzled as to why test scores fall each year, no matter how much we spend to improve schools. There is no secret to it. The students entering those schools are less and less equipped to succeed academically.

In California, a majority of the children in public schools are now of Hispanic descent. They come to school less proficient in English. Many come from immigrant families with no tradition of learning. Their aptitude for educational achievement, measured by test scores, is far below that of the average American school kid.

As these children make up ever increasing percentages of the entering classes in our public schools, average test scores will continue to fall, no matter how much we spend.

Then, there is growing potential for the disuniting of America of which Arthur Schlesinger wrote.

The old immigrants came here to become Americans. The tough-love country to which they came demanded they do so. In those melting pots of Americanization, the public and parochial schools of the early 20th century, the young were immersed in our language, literature, history, heroes, traditions, customs, faith, myths—and came to know and love them.

Nothing like that takes place in multicultural America, where the old heroes are trashed as genocidal racists, the old history has become one long recital of America’s sins, Christmas and Easter become winter and spring break, and July 4th gives way to Cinco de Mayo. Courtesy of Bush and the Big Tent Republicans, it is Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.