Giant pickles and broken borders.

"Never follow an animal act or child act," TV legend Johnny Carson famously counseled. That sage advice from the king of late-night variety shows was weighing heavily on this reporter's mind nearly two decades ago as I sat in the "green room" waiting for my cue to go on stage.

No, it was not The Tonight Show on NBC; it was a popular local show on one of the network television affiliates in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was on a speaking tour sponsored by the John Birch Society entitled, "Out of Control: The Immigration Invasion," which was also the title of a video documentary I had just completed for the JBS. And here I was getting ready to step into the spotlight not following an animal or child act, but--a giant pickle!

Actually, it reportedly was the "world's largest pickle." The prize specimen--nearly three feet long, if memory serves--was enclosed in a clear, acrylic, brine-filled case and was accompanied by two engaging college-age fellows who were on a mission to show the giant green vegetable to the world. They had already logged an impressive globe-trotting tour, photographing themselves with the glorious gourd on the Statute of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, and other iconic world landmarks. And, their vega-photographic meanderings had won them a coveted slot on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. This was big-time stuff!

To make matters worse, 1 learned shortly before going on the show that the host was something of a zany, liberal-left shock jock, whom I'll simply refer to as Mad Marx. Oh great, I thought, I'm toast: caught between a fire-breathing, quasi-Marxist comedian and the Pickle Squad. And I'm supposed to deliver a serious message about the crisis on our borders amidst this madcap hilarity? Yeah, right.

But a funny thing happened. After the expected opening salvo of jokes and jibes aimed at me, the JBS, and my topic by both Mad Marx and the pickle guys, Mad Marx said: "Let's roll some of your video here and see what you've got." The tape was cued up to a series of short clips that I had filmed along the U.S.-Mexico border from California to Texas over the previous 36 months. In scene after scene, illegal aliens were pouring across our border--by the dozens, hundreds, even thousands--virtually unimpeded. Mad Marx and the pickle guys were at first amused, then shocked. "Where's the border fences and the Border Patrol?" they wanted to know.

They were incredulous when they saw scenes from the area of the Otay Mesa next to San Diego known as "the soccer field," where thousands of illegal aliens from all over the world frequently would gather to begin their northward journey. You mean all these people can simply walk into the United States'? They were stunned. Well, I explained, that's what we "extremists" tried to tell you during the protracted battle over the fraudulent and badly misnamed Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which was finally passed and signed into law in 1986.

Now here I was nearly two years after the passage of IRCA, and there had been no immigration reform and certainly no immigration control. Our borders were more broken than ever, our Immigration and Naturalization Service was overwhelmed with millions of IRCA amnesty applications, and our Border Patrol was still hopelessly undermanned and more overrun by illegal aliens than ever--as the video emphatically showed.

Mad Marx, to my surprise (and the utter amazement of local conservatives who thought him incorrigible), was impressed enough to cordially invite me to do a reprise of my TV appearance on his radio show as well.

As I continued my tour, I was pleasantly surprised to see similar reactions of drop-jawed shock and alarm from many other "liberals" whom one might have expected either to shrug off, or even to applaud, the tsunami of border crashers. The images and the numbers were just too disturbing. I was repeatedly asked by baffled reporters, TV anchormen, and radio talk-show hosts questions like: "Didn't the 1986 legislation fixed that?"; "Didn't the government put a whole bunch of new Border Patrol agents down there?"; "How can it still be this bad without us knowing about it?"; and "Why don't we see more clips like this from our news feeds?"

Why indeed? Obviously, I explained to the nonplussed newshounds, they had better do battle with their network overlords, who were keeping them in the dark, feeding them instead diversionary folderol (like giant pickles, Madonna's latest video, and the bedding practices of Hollywood celebs).

We are in grave danger of losing an opportunity to finally, after all these years, take the first modest steps toward addressing our immigration catastrophe and regaining control of our broken borders. With the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks approaching, isn't it about time'? However, the White House and congressional leaders and their media accomplices are intent on diverting public attention from our border crisis so that they can pass another disastrous amnesty bill like the 1986 IRCA. We must not allow that to happen.