[Click here to order Sam Francis' new monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future]

Hooray, Hooray! Federal judges, in their wisdom, mercy and benevolence, have now ruled that the people of California may indeed hold the election and recall that they decided to hold several months ago.

It's just like democracy, isn't it, where the people themselves rather than unelected magistrates get to determine such matters?

Nevertheless, after the staged debate among the candidates in California last week, maybe the judges were on to something the first time.

Despite the obvious truth that mass immigration, legal and illegal, has been at least a major and probably the main reason for the state's fiscal and other problems, there was no intelligent discussion of the issue at all. What passes for such discussion has now shriveled to whether illegal immigrants should be able to get driver's licenses. There is virtually no discussion, let alone concerted opposition, to illegal immigration itself and absolutely no mention of the much larger and more serious problem of legal immigration.

There is no discussion of these issues because both parties and all candidates (except a few minor ones) now accept the premise on which mass immigration is based—that the old American society and its homogeneous population of British and European people were bad, something we must reject and try to overcome, and therefore that mass immigration from the non-white, non-Western Third World is necessary and desirable.

It was Governor Gray Davis, the target of the recall, who perhaps has most explicitly invoked this premise or at least its immediate corollary, as he did in a remark cited by the New York Times last week. Campaigning in Sacramento, Mr. Davis pronounced,

"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state."

Aside from Mr. Davis' apparent ignorance of what a planet is, the presupposition of the statement is that there is something wrong with the non-diverse society and people of the old California.

But Mr. Davis is by no means alone unique. Almost every significant political figure (and many insignificant ones) has said something like this in recent years.

Thus, Bill Clinton, in a 1997 interview, remarked of mass immigration, "This will arguably be the third great revolution in America," proving that we can live "without in effect having a dominant European culture. We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society. We're not going to disintegrate in the face of it."

Only two years later in 1999 Gen. Wesley Clark, then in command of U.S. troops in Serbia and today the most recent Democratic presidential candidate, remarked to a CNN reporter, "There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That is a 19th-century idea, and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states."

Nor is the rejection of homogeneity, ethnic and cultural, confined to Democrats.

In a campaign speech in Miami in 2000, George W. Bush declared,

"America has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey ... and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende. For years our nation has debated this change—some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America."

There are few Republicans today who would express any disagreement.

The premise common to all these statements is that the old, homogeneous society and people of America are problems to be overcome and deplored and that the mass immigration that the national political class—both parties and all major candidates—is the way to overcome them.

Yet it was precisely that old, homogeneous society and people that created the real, historic America—every major person, event, and institution that occurred in American history down to the 1960s.

It's one thing to recognize that the old America and its population said, did, and believed some things we now don't believe or approve of, but if you reject them the way the leading political leaders of our time do, then you are rejecting the nation itself as well as the people who created it.

The bolder leaders who utter these remarks would not deny that, but the Americans who vote for them need to know what they have said and what their remarks mean.

What they mean is that the mass immigration that they welcome is not just a mistake but a deliberate weapon in the destruction of an entire civilization and people.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns,

America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website.]