But we should all be able to agree that at least the government ought not make the health insurance problem worse. Unfortunately, federal immigration policy is doing just that. New research shows that recent immigrants and their young children accounted for nearly 60 percent of the growth in the uninsured population in the mid-1990s. And if current trends continue, immigration will likely add 5 to 6 million people to the ranks of the uninsured over the next ten years.

 The new report, based on Census Bureau data and prepared by the Center for
Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank, found that about one-third of immigrants and their young children have no insurance -- almost two and half times the rate for natives. As a result, the nearly 12 million uninsured people in immigrant families now represent 26 percent of the nation's uninsured, even though immigrant families account for only 13 percent of the nation's total population.

 Whatever approach one supports to extending health coverage, Washington's
immigration policy is clearly making it more difficult and costly to deal with the problem. For example, in 1997 Congress created the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) at an annual cost of $4 billion. About 1 million poor children have been enrolled in the program so far. But in the just the last few years immigration has increased the number of uninsured children in the United States by 700,000, offsetting
most of the gains made under SCHIP. Because of mass immigration, our attempts at reducing the number of uninsured are like running on a treadmill -- you spend a lot of energy but don't get very far. 

 The primary reason so many immigrant families are uninsured is that a large percentage of immigrants have very little education. The limited value of most immigrants' labor in our information-driven economy means that they often work at jobs that do not provide health insurance, and their low incomes make it difficult for them to purchase insurance on their own.

 As for illegal immigration, the study found that only about one-fourth of the uninsured in immigrant families were in the country illegally. It also found that the 1996 welfare reform law seems to have had little effect on rates of insurance coverage.  Moreover, immigrant families continue to use Medicaid -- the nation's health insurance program for the poor -- at higher rates than natives.

 Lest you think that all this is just the immigrants' problem, it's clear that a larger uninsured population affects us all. Americans who do have insurance end up paying higher premiums, as health care providers pass along some of the cost of treating the uninsured. Taxpayers also pick up some of the bill. Many public hospitals around the country are going broke trying to provide care to an ever-growing uninsured population. The total cost to taxpayers of treating the uninsured is perhaps $30 billion a year
-- not including the more than $150 billion spent on Medicaid. 

 Perhaps most troubling is that by dramatically increasing the size of the uninsured population, mass immigration makes it much more difficult to provide care for the uninsured already here, immigrant or native. A recent study by the Institute of Medicine concluded that hospitals and clinics caring for the uninsured are at greater risk of failure that ever before, partly because of the growing size of the uninsured population. Clearly,
there is a high cost to cheap labor.

 None of this is to suggest that individual immigrants are to blame. On the contrary, the sole responsibility for immigration's exacerbation of the uninsured crisis rests with a federal policy which imports 700,000 to 900,000 people per year, generally with little education or skill, and consciously avoids the measures necessary to reduce illegal immigration, resulting in the settlement of more than 400,000 illegal aliens annually.

 There is room for constructive debate over how to expand access to health care, but there can be no doubt that our immigration policy is complicating this task. Sensible reforms leading to a pro-immigrant policy of low-immigration are a necessary precondition of any plan to extend health coverage to all of America's people.

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Norwood is a congressman from Georgia and a leading Republican spokesman on health care; Lamm is former governor of Colorado and former chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission, and now director of the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver.