After spending three days in Nashville, it looks to me like the central driving force behind the Tea Party movement truly is a desire for less government.

I went to observe and to make my case that for those who want to shrink government it isn't possible without reducing overall immigration (especially LEGAL). 

And the role of immigration in driving up the numbers of the uninsured is a glaring case in point. 

Nobody hanging around the Opryland Convention Center would have missed the fact that probably all of the 600 activists gathered there revile the health insurance overhaul that has been proposed and pushed for the last year.  They see it as a huge power grab of a federal government that already is too big and too involved in most aspects of Americans' lives.

I reminded the audience that NumbersUSA only deals with immigration and doesn't take a stand one way or the other on the healthcare debate.

But I asked them if they thought Congress would have come to the point of considering such a huge new federal involvement in the healthcare system if there had been no or little growth in the number of people in the country without health insurance.  Certainly, the growth in the uninsured was one of the two or three main factors fueling the urgency of this debate.

Then I delivered this incredible statistic discovered by the Center for Immigration Studies from government data:

85% of all additional U.S. residents without health insurance since 1999 were foreign-born (immigrants and illegal aliens).

If not for our system of mass immigration over the last decade, there would have been virtually no growth in the uninsured.  And the debate about health insurance today would be far different.

Just one more example of how current immigration policies create huge pressures for larger and larger government programs and expenditures. 

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA