It was the union that in the 1940s won him a one-penny increase in the amount he retained of the price of a paper. When papers cost five cents, this was a significant increase.

My father's long workweek earned him about $25-30 in 1938 when he and my mother married and perhaps $65-70 in the postwar era. On this he and my mother were able to buy into the American dream. They could afford the $58 monthly payments on a three-bedroom stucco bungalow house. Sundays we enjoyed drives to near-by San Gabriel Valley farms and orchards or a day at an uncrowded, unpolluted beach. My mother used to say, thanking God, "Where else can working folk live like this?"

Throughout the long strike against the Herald-Examiner my father received benefits, up to the day he retired in 1972.

I wish today's union's leaders cared to investigate why this halcyon world has vanished for all of us, not just working folk. I wish they were committed to restoring it for future generations.

Instead, the AFL-CIO leadership has just simultaneously displayed both egregious naivite and the crassest opportunism. Its call for another round of amnesties for millions of law-breaking illegal aliens is fueled by a vision of millions of potential new union recruits. (It also is tantamount to renouncing national sovereignty, an act that ought better to originate within the electorate.)

It is not motivated out of concern for the best interests of common working folk, this nation's future or, oddly enough, that of the sending nations.

The low cost of living, the unparalleled beauty of the natural setting my father's generation enjoyed were direct consequences of living in a community within ecological limits. In 1940 the state's population was 7 million people. According to ecologists, by 1950 our 10 million people were up against our sustainable maximum. Nearly a third of these were clustered in water-deficient metropolitan Los Angeles.

In a mere fifty years Los Angeles, population has grown five-fold; the state's 3 1/2 times. Population growth in the 1950s was fueled by migrants from other states and by the postwar baby boom. Low Depression-era fertility and the stringent immigration quotas that prevailed 1920-1965 meant that prime working-age men (the preferred workers in that sexist era) were actually in short supply.

In a tight labor market lesser-skilled workers gained bargaining power, unfavored women and blacks saw employment barriers crumble. It was no accident that the 1960s saw the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or that Cesar Chavez almost achieved unionization of farm workers. But 1965's demographically-unaccountable immigration law changes and a population explosion in neighboring Mexico spawned a new population influx, half of it California-bound.

The flood of largely illegal workers short-circuited the process of rationalizing the use of farm labor. With a tight supply of farmworkers, growers would have been forced to raise farm wages. Yes, and then they would have looked for ways to increase the productivity of their workers to justify those wages--and restrict their use of now more-expensive labor.

Fewer, better-paid, better-treated farmworkers are what a developed economy wants and needs. Well-paid, highly-productive labor is a keystone of post-industrial society, essential to paying for its underpinning of high-quality public services, including education.

Low-wage workers equal poor people. People who earn below a "living wage" necessarily depend upon subsidies from the public sector. Of course employers welcome them: in economist jargon they have successfully "cost-shifted" part of the true costs of using this labor.

If the AFL-CIO's allegiance is to the well-being of American workers present and future, its leaders better stop right now and rethink its goals. Supporting more growth of a national population already nearly double our ecologically-sustainable maximum will not benefit the American worker. Nor will it benefit a world that already rightfully assaults our voracious resource appetite and preeminent contribution to global warming.

Without a drastic change in immigration policy the U.S. Census Bureau warns within one century we may resemble today's China. Of course, our physical environment will collapse first. This is not a desirable way to arrest population growth.

Union leaders should revisit the lessons imparted on Earth Day, 1970. ALL countries as well as the globe itself are finite. Wise governance starts with this reality and strives to maximize the well-being, qualitative not just quantitative, of its populace while safeguarding the environment for posterity. Open borders give the wrong signals to sending nations while boosting resource consumption and environmental degradation in the receiving.

I want for the average working family the affordable housing, the manageable-sized cities, the accessible open space that a U.S. with a sustainable population could guarantee in perpetuity.

Why should our union leaders wish to subvert this?