State of Emergency

By Patrick J. Buchan

Thomas Dunne Books, First Edition, 2006: 270 pages

State of Emergency, like Tom Tancredo's In Mortal Danger, is a shouting-from-the-rooftops examination of immigration and the depletion of the American Idea as it once stood. I enjoyed Buchanan's book and agreed with virtually all of his ideas, but that whole thing about politics making strange bedfellows is particularly dangerous on the subject of America's immigration policy in general and its southern border in particular.

It has been my belief since 9/11 that a wall should have been built on our southern border. It is an illegal immigration issue, yes, but to me it has always been much more than that. Buchanan's various theses can be seen right here in New Mexico, where media en Espanol are just as numerous as those in English, where the street signs are primarily in Spanish, where it is not unusual to ask to "speak to the manager" and find that the manager does not speak English. It can be frustrating. It is part of the local color, certainly, and Santa Fe, America's oldest capital, has never been much more than an American colony, but still: Santa Fe and those who inhabit it are entitled to all the benefits of being American.

Buchanan sees La Reconquista as a serious national threat, not in the sense of guns and riots, but in the sense that our national culture is being swept away by a tide of illegal Mexican immigration. The products of this can already be seen in south Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the lower half of California, and like it is slowly creeping north and west. Buchanan details how history is taught in Mexico, and that a bulk of Mexicans believe that half their nation was literally stolen from them several hundred years ago, and they intend to get it back.

Remember that line in Braveheart, when the English king states that 'the problem with Scotland is that there are too many Scots.' The idea of breeding out people you don't want around is what Buchanan believes is happening right now, and it certainly seems to be Mexican policy at the moment. Half of all Mexican recently polled stated that they want to live in America, almost as alarming as the fact that one-sixth of all Mexicans now live in America.

Racist. Xenophobic. Isolationist. That's the way people who agree with Buchanan on this issue are painted. For people in public office, there is nothing more devastating to a career than being called a racist. Bill Clinton fondled an intern, harassed innumerable women and allegedly raped a woman, yet he is revered as almost a god among half the American voting public. And make no mistake, Bill Clinton was never called a racist. That would end his career in a heartbeat.

It would be false to say that Buchanan, like Tancredo, is fighting a lost cause. Poll after poll shows that an overwhelming number of the vox populi - including almost one in two people of Mexican descent - believe that our border situation and the illegal immigration it is allowing is beyond out of control. It is an issue of education, crime, national security, the environment, and - for some reason this one's always whispered rather than shouted - American sovereignty. For some reason, Americans have become ashamed to say that 'no, we don't want you here.' It's not that Mexican immigrants are bad people, it's just that, at least in these parts, they have refused to assimilate. The assimmilation issue - anything but xenophobia - reared its strange head in the immigrant protests in May, when the silly bastards protested under Mexican flags. A great many have no intention of becoming American, and that should be the most troubling aspect of this whole debate.

That, and, like, the, er, security issue.

***

Yet, there is also what we could call the Buchanan Factor. Wasn't it Buchanan who said something about Hitler in theory being good for Germany? Isn't it Buchanan who sort of hates Israel? Isn't Buchanan sort of a wild card?

Yes, he is. The beauty of Tom Tancredo is that, unlike Buchanan, he doesn't have various kook skeletons in his closet. He cares dearly about the border, and that's his issue. WIth Buchanan, I believe his sincerity and I agree with what he's saying, but his cheerleading for the border issue - one he's been cheerleading for a long, long time, calling for a border wall as early as 1991 - has the potential to derail the movement in the ultra-PC times. It's not that Buchanan is wrong - he isn't - it's just that having him as an ally could destroy the border wall movement altogether.

What does Pat say, exactly, in his new book?

Buchanan, forever the history buff, believes that the force which brought down Rome - too many unassimilated visitors - is what will fell America as we currently know/knew it. "This is an invasion, the greatest in history. Nothing of this magnitude has ever happened in so short a span of time. There are 36 million immigrants and their children in the United States today, almost as many as came to America between 1607 and 1960. Nearly 90 percent of all immigrants now come from continents and countries whose peoples have never been assimilated fully into any Western country."

This early passage, found on page 5, is the overall theme of the book. Aside from the fact that we are overflowing with immigrants, most of them are coming from places that do not speak English, do not understand what living in the Western world means, and are destined to become wards of the State.

Like Tancredo, Buchanan lays waste to this absurd notion that "these people do jobs Americans don't want to do." Buchanan actually does this in convenient chart form, nothing that, for example, illegals constitute a quarter of the workers in drywalling, landscaping and housekeeping, and far less than a quarter of roofers, slaughterhouse workers, food manufacturing workers, and service workers. (The numbers come from Jeffrey Passel's Unauthorized Migrants: Nubmers and Characteristics published by the Pew Hispanic Center.)

What President Bush is after with this bullshit talk about "guest workers" and "jobs that Americans won't do" is beyond me. As Buchanan, Tancredo and virtually every other slightly rational human being on the planet understands is that if you get "guest workers" to work for wages below the rather low minimum wage, you hurt everyone involved, and the poor first. I'm not an advocate for the poor, but I do know that our least-educated people with the fewest prospects are hurt the most by a pool labor that is virtually slave-like in renumeration.

President Bush and his fellow leaders, in short, are selling the nation down the river. God, how I and so many I know want a third-party candidate, one who does not carry the political baggage of Buchanan. Current polls suggest that a legitimate third candidate in the '08 election who ran on the promise on the construction of a three-level fence running along the entire southern border combined with the elimination of all taxpayer-funded services to illegal immigrants (save emergency medical services) would have a serious chance to win the White House. No other issue is more important to the bulk of Americans right now than the border. Not the war, not gas prices, no, not even abortion (which is important to a very absurd few). The border and, the baby that comes with said bathwater, immigration, is by far the most important issue to American right now.

Will someone please listen?