Normally, the Census Bureau releases its Current Population Survey on a Tuesday, late in September, at the National Press Club. This year, the survey was released Friday afternoon, at the Census Bureau suburban headquarters in Suitland, Md.

When you see the numbers, you can appreciate why Karl Rove would want to get this behind us and move on.

• In 2002, median household income in the United States fell for the second year in a row, from $42,900 to $42,409. The national decline was 1.1 percent, but among Hispanics, the fall-off was 2.9 percent.

• The poverty rate – below $18,392 for a family of four – rose from 11.7 percent to 12.1 percent. But, among African-Americans, poverty rose from 22.7 percent to 24.1 percent of the population.

Certainly, the recession of 2001 and the "jobless recovery" go far toward explaining what the New York Times ominously described as "the second straight year of adverse changes in both poverty and income, the first two-year downtown since the early 1990s."

Like the Times, we all remember who was president in the early 1990s, as does George W. Bush.

But there are mega-trends in society that have been working for decades to keep the poverty numbers high and median incomes low. And though they feed the endless expansion of Big Government and prevent any downsizing of the Welfare State, these trends have been endorsed by a GOP Establishment that seems to be committing suicide in broad daylight.

The mega-trends are two: the deindustrialization of America, the direct result of a globalism preached and practiced by Bush Republicans, and mass immigration, also preached and promoted by Bush Republicans.

If you think these marginal changes in the Census Bureau's poverty and income figures are dramatic, consider these September statistics from the Center for Immigration Studies:

• During the 1990s, the immigrant Hispanic population in the United States doubled – to 14 million. Total immigrant population grew from 19.6 million to 31 million.

• The immigrant population from South Asia rose by 141 percent, and from sub-Sahara Africa by 174 percent.

We have in America today a nation within a nation, inexorably expanding, of peoples from continents and countries who have never been fully assimilated into any Western or First World country before.

Many of these folks arrived poor and unable to read, write or speak the English language. Almost all arrived with incomes well below the median of American families.

Their inclusion in Census figures must invariably pull the numbers downward. These numbers then serve as grist for the mills of those who say we must raise taxes for social programs to assist the newly poor among us.

Immigrants consume social services – welfare, food stamps, housing subsidies, free schools, prison cells – at rates far greater than our native-born. And as long as the immigrant poor continue pouring in, the great American Welfare State will be endlessly replenished with new recruits, and that Welfare State will never disappear.

That is as America's statists and liberals mean it to be. But why are conservatives and Republicans going along?

Under President Bush, perhaps 2.5 million immigrants, legal and illegal, entered the United States, as an identical number of factory jobs vanished. As we export factory jobs abroad, foreign nations export their poor here – to be fed, housed, medicated and schooled by U.S. taxpayers.

This is what they call "free trade."

Consider education.

With our native-born population stable, there is no need for new schools, except to replace old schools. New schools, the cost of which is paid by property taxes, sales taxes and state income taxes, are being built by taxpayers primarily for immigrant children, legal and illegal.

In 1960, when America was 97 percent native born, scholastic test scores rose every year. But as children from Third World countries arrive, less prepared linguistically and academically to learn, their test scores drag down average scores. And when the average test scores fall, the education lobby demands more funding "to get the test scores up," even as it demands open borders, which keep the test scores down.

And so the game goes on.

Then, when immigrant kids grow up to become U.S. citizens, they register and vote Democratic. In 1996, first-time Hispanic voters went for Clinton over the Dole-Kemp open-borders ticket 91 percent to 6 percent.

"The Tories are the stupid party," said John Stuart Mill. Wrong on many counts, J. S. sure nailed that one.