On a recent Thanksgiving trip to Washington, relatives of mine had their car stopped near the Capitol and subjected to a "bomb search" by—somebody or another, the local cops, the federal cops, the Homeland Security cops, the UN cops, who knows and who can tell anymore?

There was no bomb of course (not even my relatives carry them in their cars) and there is no "horror story," except for the horror to which we have all become so habituated that nobody even notices it—that perfectly innocent, law-abiding Americans are stopped, their time consumed, and their property pawed over by government parasites who have no better way to justify their presence at the public trough.

For the real horror of the week you have to go to Long Island.

There, the New York Times reports, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, after listening to a rising level of anger from voters about the impact of immigration on their community,

"floated a proposal to deputize some Suffolk County police officers, giving them the power to detain people found to be in the United States illegally after being taken into custody on other charges. Right now, Suffolk police and corrections officers say, they are prohibited from asking immigrants whether they are in the country legally." [L.I. Clash on Immigrants Is Gaining Political Force, By PATRICK HEALY, November 29, 2004]

The plan went nowhere, mainly because local police unions objected to it (no reasons given), and of course the professional aliens lobby didn't much care for it either.

"But advocacy groups and residents of Suffolk and Nassau Counties say the proposal is a sign of the times. They say the issue of illegal immigration is rapidly gathering political force in Long Island's patchwork of historically white suburban hamlets, and as the complaints grow, politicians are responding with get-tough rhetoric, crackdowns and new laws."

The issue of illegal immigration is rapidly gathering political force in places like Suffolk because such places have not enjoyed all the glories of mass immigration the Open Borders Lobby has promised them for so long. The issue will come to many, many more such places as those glories fail to arrive there either.

What has come to Suffolk, the Times reports, is "a commensurate strain on public services like schools, garbage collection and sewer systems in an area where residents pay some of the highest taxes in the country" and citizens' complaints that "the influx of immigrants has brought noise violations, littering, people drinking and urinating in public and driveways crammed with cars."

Suffolk is not alone. "Communities across the nation—from Mesa, Ariz., to Hoover, Ala., to Freehold, N.J.—have faced similar struggles. Day laborers have been shut out and demonstrated against, and have become the targets of political campaigns."

But the emerging political issue is not what is really noteworthy in the story. What is noteworthy is the utter indifference of most of the governing authorities to the "day laborer problem" at all. Of course there is no "day laborer problem"—the people of whom President Bush smugly remarked a few days ago, "We'd much rather have security guards running down terrorists or drug runners or drug smugglers than people coming to work." 

The problem is immigration and the refusal of public authority at any level in the country—from the White House to the county cops—to deal with it.

As noted, local law enforcement is not permitted to ask if an immigrant is legally in the country, but the federals don't ask at all. Ever since the Clinton administration, immigration authorities have abandoned "interior enforcement"—if you make it a few miles over the border, you need have no fear of being busted for violating federal immigration statutes because the authorities don't even try to enforce them.

The horror is that despite the obvious harm of mass immigration on the daily life of American communities, authorities are not willing to take any even elementary steps to control or check it. Their reluctance obviously doesn't extend to snooping around law-abiding Americans who have to put up with random "bomb searches."

But the reason we have to have bomb searches at all is that the authorities for decades have refused to enforce existing immigration laws, so that we now have imported a massive potential fifth column able and willing to wage terrorism against us.

What President Bush doesn't get (among much else) is that "coming to work" can be as much an act of warfare as setting bombs and is often a rather more effective weapon with which to destroy a nation.

The price of mass immigration is not only cultural disintegration but also the gradual construction of a police state that becomes the only force able to hold the country together once mass immigration has come to work.

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.