H.G. Wells once wrote a science fiction story entitled "When the Sleeper Wakes" about a man who goes to sleep and wakes up in the distant future.

After 30 years of denying, ignoring and outright lying about the impact of mass immigration on this country, some long-term sleepers in today's chattering class also seem to be starting to wake up. But what they are finding when they do is not science fiction.

As evidence of the wake-up, the Los Angeles Times Magazine last week published a cover story about immigration's effects on California, Exhibit No. 1 in the case for open borders because that's the state that has long enjoyed the invigorating contributions of most of the Third World immigrants the Open Borders Lobby loves so much.

As the story, written by Lee Green, concludes, Exhibit No. 1 is a flop. (Infinite Ingress, January 25, also available here)

The story's subheading tells you the brunt of message:

"A human wave is breaking over California, flooding freeways and schools, bloating housing costs, disrupting power and water supplies. Ignoring it hasn't worked."

Mr. Green details the effect simple human numbers—the unprecedented population growth that mass immigration fuels—will have on the state:  its traffic, its infra-structure, its administrative and fiscal burdens and its environment.

"Barring the long-overdue mother of all earthquakes, a tightening of federal immigration policy, or the Rapture," Mr. Green writes, "California's population, currently at 36 million, likely will double within the lifetime of today's schoolchildren. A close look at the numbers suggests that the 1990s began a pattern in which California receives more new residents each decade than it did the previous one. The 2020s will witness the greatest 10-year increase in state history, and the numbers in the 2030s will be greater still."

Well, now, you say, but this is just more whining about population. It has nothing to do with immigration. Wrong. Mr. Green notes that when we're talking about population growth in California (and just about everywhere else in this country), we mean immigration.

"The root" of the population problem, he writes, "is immigration. It would be better if this were not so, because it sets up an us-versus-them tension that debases everyone within its reach, but the raw numbers leave little room for debate."

Immigration accounted "for  virtually all of" California's population increase of 4.2 million people between 1990 and 2000: "The net gain generated by the native population was just 90,000, fewer than attend each year's Rose Bowl game."

"Immigrants—specifically Latinos, who constitute the majority of the state's more than 9 million immigrants—inflate the population not just by coming to California but by having children once they're here. While the combined birthrate for California's U.S. citizens and immigrants who are not Latino has dropped to replacement level, the birthrate for Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America averages more than three children per mother."

Mr. Green's case against immigration is entirely what is sometimes called the Numbers Argument, which carefully avoids discussion of the impact of immigration on such matters as the economy, politics, or (most of all) American culture. Talking about those effects can often be misconstrued as "racist" or (as Mr. Green says, "us-versus-them"), so therefore just point to the numbers alone and their impact on resources, the environment, congestion, etc.

But of course the Numbers Argument, as Mr. Green's discussion of it makes clear, ultimately comes down to a cultural argument anyway—the point is that massive numbers of people (them) inviting themselves into this country (us) means we are not able to live the way we prefer to live, that we have to shell out money we'd rather use for other things to accommodate the immigrants and their descendants, and that as our resources dwindle, our traffic is more congested, our schools more over-crowded, our housing more expensive, our environment more polluted, our society less attractive, and our—well—culture is endangered. 

Sooner or later—I'm sorry, but this is the way it is—the issue of immigration comes down to whether "we" do what we want or "they"—immigrants—make us do things the way their numbers will force us to do them.

Mr. Green and other sleepers now waking up to what they and we have allowed to happen to California won't like that conclusion, but they need to understand that recognizing that immigration is at bottom one of us and our society versus them and their impact on it doesn't mean we should hate, harm or harass the immigrants.

We just need to have the will to tell them to stop coming to our country because we can't handle any more.

Maybe in another 30 years or so, the sleepers will start waking up to that conclusion as well.

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. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred's review.]