BY SAM MANUEL 
“If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.”

So writes ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan in his latest book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Throughout the book Buchanan describes the massive immigration of the last half-decade, especially from Mexico, as an “invasion,” encouraged by the policies of Mexico’s government to "take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war.”

In the stock and trade of an incipient fascist politician, Buchanan rails against “Corporate America” and its drive for cheap labor in order to hold down wages at the expense of “American” workers.

“For the corporate elite,” Buchanan writes, “immigration means low-wage workers to replace high-wage Americans, while taxpayers assume the social costs—welfare, Medicaid, rent supplements, food stamps…. The Business Roundtable believes in socializing costs, while privatizing profits.”

Buchanan decries the support by U.S. president George Bush for a “guest worker” program as “economic treason against the American worker.”

The rightist politician describes the changes brought about as a result of the civil rights movement as “political correctness, political cowardice, political opportunism, a sense of guilt for America’s sins,” and argues these are the cause of a “paralysis” on the part of the White House and Congress to take effective action on immigration.

During the civil rights movement, discrimination against Blacks and other “people of color” came to be seen as the “original sin of Western man and its extirpation his highest moral duty,” Buchanan writes. “But it was the transference of this idea—that America has sinned unpardonably against equality and must make amends, no matter the cost—to immigration law that may spell the end of the United States.”

Europe faces a similar “invasion” of immigrants, according to Buchanan, with the Mediterranean being Europe’s “Rio Grande.”

In a chapter entitled "Eurabia" he infers that the millions of Africans, Arabs, and other Muslims who have immigrated to Europe are the source of the 2005 revolt by youth of African descent across France. He also refers to a second Moorish conquest of Spain punctuated by the March 11, 2004, bombings of commuter trains in Madrid; and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on the streets of Holland by a Dutch-born youth of Moroccan descent.

The book seeks to take advantage of the debate on “immigration reform” among bourgeois politicians to help build a cadre of an incipient fascist movement the capitalist class may need down the road if faced with a working-class radicalization that could threaten its rule.

In the final chapter of State of Emergency entitled, “Last Chance,” Buchanan outlines proposals to push for measures tougher than any of those presented to Congress so far in order to recruit rightists to his cause. Among them are: a 10-year moratorium on all immigration; opposition to any “guest worker” program or amnesty; building a 15-foot-high double wall along the entire 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border that would include sophisticated surveillance electronic devices and reinforced border patrols; revising the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States; limiting family members that immigrants can bring to the United States to their spouses and minor children; and ending dual citizenship.

Buchanan is fighting against the course of history. The recent massive immigration into the United States and the integration of these workers into the hereditary proletariat of this country has resulted in the irreversible strengthening of the U.S. working class, as was shown by the huge marches last spring and the May Day general political strike—the first such nationwide walkout in U.S. history—demanding legalization for all.

At the same time, the high sales of Buchanan’s book point to the danger this ultrarightist tract poses for the toilers and to the need to explain and win millions away from its insidious anti-working-class course.  
 
 
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