PERSPECTIVE ON POPULATION : Wanted: Leaders to Say ‘Enough’ : Both parties ignore public concerns about growth, environment. We need a new party for these critical times.

Cities with 15 million to 25 million people? Welcome to mid-21st century America as both major political parties envision it. Both renounce scrutiny of the long-term effects of their proposed policies on immigration, reproductive health, environment and land use. When, within a generation, we find ourselves in a society so unlike the one we aspire to and ask how that came to pass, we need look no further than to the sheer disregard by Republicans and Democrats alike for the views of American citizens.

Consider the overwhelming consensus on the need to stop population growth. Across decades of public opinion polling, Americans say they prefer small, manageable cities and accessible, uncrowded wilderness areas. In a 1992 Roper poll, only 27% nationally and 11% in California believed that their states could handle an increase in population. Indeed, 28% of all respondents nationally felt that their state’s population was already too large--as did 69% of Californians.

The congressionally mandated Commission on Population and the American Future warned in 1972 that no goal in American life would be furthered by continued population growth and that immigration policy had to respect this reality. Yet a columnist in The Times recently claimed that “there is no consensus that legal immigration needs to be slowed, except among the fringe groups.”

Demographer Leon F. Bouvier, co-author of the 1994 book “How Many Americans?,” calculated that post-1970 immigration accounts for nearly all recent and future population increase. Despite this information, an inability to link immigration with population growth extends to our most respected political advisors. Consider the late Barbara Jordan, who chaired the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. While calling for tougher controls on illegal entrants, she nevertheless wrote: “[The] United States has been and should continue to be a nation of immigrants.” Yet this tide of immigration has been mainly responsible for turning a nation with 200 million population in 1970 to one with 260 million today and plausibly 500 million by the year 2050 and 800 million by 2080.

A proposal now in Congress to curtail immigration from its current annual rate of 800,000 legal immigrants to a “mere” 550,000 by the year 2001 (other categories of entrants would easily add another 50%) does not square with an ecologically viable and livable United States in the 21st century.

The same can be said of the Republican Party’s gutting of environmental regulations and family planning funding. The “contract with America” is a clear misreading of the public’s mood and needs. In 1990, nearly three-quarters of the respondents to the annual General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, said that we spend too little on the environment. The 1988 National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Public Health Service, found that more than half of all live births were unwanted at conception or unplanned. Hence it is understandable that 55% of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll last August said the country needs a new political party.

What we need is a “Long-Term Party.” Its leaders would ask, “What are the most serious issues affecting our future?” and not divert us with less important matters. The new party would fashion an integrated, demographically consistent policy on population and environment requiring a stringent immigration policy (with an annual maximum of 150,000 entrants), a program of comprehensive sex education with free contraceptives and abortion services and a massive social education campaign calling on civic leaders of every high fertility group to redefine responsible childbearing and appropriate women’s roles.

Among the few politicians whose records demonstrate an awareness of these contentious issues and the courage to debate their long-term repercussions are former Govs. Richard Lamm of Colorado and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and former Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. Discouragingly, their joint efforts to explore the running of an independent presidential candidate have collapsed, although our future more urgently demands this option.

Can a party that stresses a coherent long-term population-control agenda win elections? No one can say. But the track records of both main parties have already alienated a majority of America voters. All the Long-Term Party would have to do is to persuade disgruntled voters that it offers not just the best but the only chance for achieving the demographic future that Americans see slipping from their grasp.