Osama bin Laden has done us more damage than we have yet realized. The thousands of lives lost and families decimated and the destruction of the World Trade Center are themselves a terrible blow. But by focusing our attention on terrorist havens abroad, bin Laden has assured that our own borders will be overrun even as we invade others.

The Bush administration and, it seems, every neoconservative are focused on the war on terrorism. The press is filled with speculation about which Muslim country we will next attack. All the while, the silent conquest of the United States by third world aliens, both legal and illegal, continues apace.

Three decades ago Jean Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints, a story about France and then all of Europe being overrun by millions of Indians who arrive in decrepit ships and walk ashore unopposed. Something like this is actually happening to the U.S., although the Mexicans don't need ships to cross the Rio Grande.

Apparently, there are 33.4 million Hispanics in the U.S. Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska sees them as cultural emissaries, if not conquerors, who are imposing Hispanic culture on the U.S. and forcing the native born citizens to learn Spanish. She has a point. Not being bilingual can hurt you in many job situations and leave you unemployed.

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes speaks of the "silent re-conquest of the United States" and calls an emerging new language "Spanglish." [VDARE.COM note: But he says it in pure Castilian Spanish. See Allan Wall's Spanish and the New Conquistadors.]

Mexican President Vicente Fox speaks [Castilian again.] of his country exporting the Spanish language to the U.S. He says it is the patriotic duty of Mexican immigrants to continue to speak Spanish, to preserve their culture, and to maintain their ties to their home country.

As there is not even a pretense at assimilation, why is it that we don't realize that we are undergoing a nonmilitary invasion—just like the one in Raspail's book?

Why can't Americans recognize a threat unless it comes with a bomb? Why is hijacking an airliner worse than hijacking our language, culture, and territory? When will Americans wake up and realize what it will mean to be submerged in a sea of "protected minorities," who have been taught to see us as hegemonic oppressors?

Don't get me wrong. It's liberal white males who are the "diversity" ringleaders, and it is liberal white males who are teaching "people of color" to hate white people. It is Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley professors, not Mexicans or blacks, who have rewritten history to turn it into a saga of white oppression of "minorities."

White liberals are banking on ruling with the votes of immigrant minorities. But once they have the numbers, immigrants won't need the white liberals. I can hardly wait until the California Mexicans rise up and throw out Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Gray Davis.

I would gladly trade the entire Northeast and West Coast liberal populations for any country's people. I would rather have the Taliban in the U.S. Senate than Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of third world immigrants have better morals and more integrity than Bill Clinton or Tom Daschle. Many of them work harder than spoiled Americans.

But the fact remains that we, as a country, are being overrun and are extremely passive about it.

Diversity mongers try to portray concerns with immigration as "racist." They use this bogus charge to suppress legitimate concerns that the "melting pot" is broken and the U.S. is suffering cultural imperialism. Many Mexican leaders say that the millions of Mexicans who have come here have not come to assimilate. It is a certainty that Islam does not assimilate.

What immigration is bringing us is not new citizens but foreign cultural enclaves. The U.S. is becoming a Yugoslavia, an artificial grouping of different ethnicities who will one day be at one another's throats. The fatuous politicians in Washington and the "open borders" ideologues are importing a bloody future for Americans.

The Camp of the Saints is prescient. You should read it. It could be your future.

Paul Craig Roberts is the author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

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