The saddest part of the rising hysteria over immigration has been the sight of the political class turning, in all its bovine stupidity, to join the stampede. Where once nativism was the province only of the fearful and the ignorant, it has now been taken up as the cause of the aristocratically half-witted, to the point that Sergio Marchi would be defying elite opinion if tomorrow he merely left immigration levels where they are.

Mind you, the new arguments against immigration are not built on the same charming self-contradiction as the old "they'll take our jobs and sit on welfare" complaint, or even the weird, global claustrophobia of Paul Ehrlich and other population-control zealots. Oh sure, the new restrictionists still think we're taking in too many people. But it's the quality, not the quantity, that most concerns them.

The new line is that too many family members and refugees, and not enough "economic" immigrants, are being admitted. Where once immigration helped the economy, the argument runs, the declining quality of the immigrant stock has lowered the cost-benefit ratio. Leave aside the moral implications of judging immigrants strictly according to how useful they are to us. What are the facts?

First, is immigration high? Are we, as a hugely influential paper for the C. D. Howe Institute by journalist Daniel Stoffman warned, being subjected to a "social experiment" in "mass immigration"? We are not. Even at a target level of 250,000, the current rate of intake is 0.86 per cent of the population. Our historic average is slightly more than 1 per cent, or about 20 per cent higher than present levels. The 150,000 Mr. Stoffman refers to as our postwar "average" is strictly numerical, rather than proportional to population.

Are immigrants a burden on the rest of us? Restrictionists like to cite the cost of resettlement and language programs, as if that were all there was to it. (Even at that, the 1991 census shows only 371,000 Canadians who speak neither official language - hardly a great burden.) But surely we need a fuller accounting than that.

According to a 1989 study by economist Ather Akbari of Saint Mary's University in Halifax, immigrants earn more than native-born Canadians (so much for systemic discrimination) and pay more in taxes. They also used more public services (some services, anyway; immigrants were 23 per cent less likely to draw unemployment insurance than native-born Canadians). However, not only did they pay more than twice as much in taxes as they consumed in services, but the margin was wider than for non-immigrants. In sum, immigrants transfer income to current residents. Admittedly this was based on 1981 census data, but later studies have found much the same results.

If anything, the "quality" of immigrants has risen since then. While the overall rate of participation of immigrants of working age in the labour force is less than that of native-born, that's a function of earlier arrivals, not later: A disproportionately large number of those who arrived before 1961 are now of retirement age. Immigrants who came to Canada in the 1960s, 70s and 80s have higher participation rates than the average. Immigrants are also, on average, more likely to hold a university degree than those born in Canada: 14.4 per cent compared with 10.5 per cent. Here, too, the gap has tended to widen in recent years: Of those arriving between 1981 and 1991, 17 per cent had a university degree, compared with 9 per cent of those arriving before 1961. That's not all. According to Statistics Canada, immigrants are more likely to be married (66 per cent to 52 per cent). They are 22 per cent less likely to be divorced. Fewer children of immigrants live with only one parent: 12 per cent, in 1986, compared with more than 14 per cent. Perhaps because of this stronger family structure, immigrants are less likely to be in jail, accounting for barely half as many penitentiary inmates in 1989 as their share of the population would warrant. Maybe they have better lawyers. Or maybe they commit fewer crimes. Either way, the ratio of taxpayers to prisoners is that much higher.

Let's review the bidding. An immigrant to Canada is more likely, on average, to have a degree, less likely to come from a broken home, more likely to hold a job, and less likely to wind up in jail than the people who, on the sole qualification of having been born here, are baying to keep him out. It seems a peculiarly blind form of selfishness.