The State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.(Book review)

• Author: Gottfried, Paul
• Position: 155873241
• Pages: 61(7)

THE STATE OF EMERGENCY: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America

by Patrick J. Buchanan

(New York: St Martin's Press, 2006)

Hardback: 320 pages

Pat Buchanan's latest book, on the problem of unchecked immigration into the U.S., and particularly through its Southern border, is an exhaustively documented and historically contextualised brief. Although by trade a political journalist, TV controversialist, and occasional presidential candidate, Buchanan has produced here a factually compelling case against America's present immigration practices.

One may conclude, from the noteworthy facts that his book has topped the New York Times bestseller list and is now enjoying brisk sales at our local Kmart, that Buchanan is reaching an exceedingly wide readership. Despite his futuristic nightmare that "in 2050 America will have become a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural conglomerate--a Balkanised Brazil of 420 million, a Tower of Babel, a replica of the Roman Empire after the Goths and the Vandals had passed over", ordinary Americans, who stand by and large to the left of this prophet of gloom, are running to buy his jeremiad. And to those who still believe that significant differences exist within America's political class, Buchanan offers this response:

"Consider the feebleness of the American government. Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower would have halted this invasion cold. Without apology. George Bush has persuaded himself the invasion is benign and the progressive thing to do is to welcome it. On this, there is not a dime's worth of difference between [supposedly conservative Republican] George Bush and [leftist Democrat] Teddy Kennedy." Much that appears in Buchanan's bestseller has been culled from mountains of books and material that has been previously devoted to the immigration explosion in the U.S., a situation that has resulted in over 10 per cent of the U.S. population being foreign born, most of them coming from the Third World, and almost half from Central America. Buchanan did not have to delve deeply into the existing immigration literature to document the higher crime figures, the disproportionately high reliance on public assistance, and the staggering illegitimacy rate among legal and illegal immigrants, with special attention being paid to the Hispanics. His numbers given toward the end of the book have long been available for those who are interested. And for those who seek historical perspective, Buchanan points out:

"In 2006, we have as many illegal aliens inside our borders, 12 to 20 million, as all the German and Italians, our two largest immigrant groups, who ever came in two centuries. Our illegal population alone exceeds all the Irish, Jewish, and British immigrants who came." And so the revelations go on, which are breaking through despite the pro-immigrationist stands of the media and the leadership of the U.S.'s two national parties.

What does not have to be stated, because it is all too obvious for those of us who have encountered such material before, is that immigration critics have been professionally marginalised and often vilified in the national press. The immigration-critic whose work has received the most notice after Buchanan is Peter Brimelow, whose engagingly written tome Alien Nation (1995) may have sold as many as 100,000 copies. While Brimelow has tried to fuel the debate on Third World immigration through his website www.vdare.com, which has already registered over 10 million hits, he has also been given fewer and fewer opportunities to write for major publications, despite his...