The war on aliens: the Right calls the shots.

The story begins with fleets of ships anchored off the coasts of Europe and the United States. Crammed with ragged, starving refugees from the Third World, and trailing a terrible stench of human waste, the rusty, creaking vessels form the front lines in a massive invasion of the North. The European and American governments are paralyzed by the emergency - unable to fire a shot at the unarmed invaders, and hopelessly mired in political debates about what to do. To make matters worse, the Western liberal media denounce as "racists" all those who propose defending the borders, and issue utopian proclamations of brotherly love, thus preparing the way for an unprecedented assault on Western civilization....

This is a scene from The Camp of the Saints, a French white-supremacist novel by Jean Raspail. Left-wing antiracists are the villains of the story - traitors who throw open the doors and make it possible for the "invasion" of the West to take place:

"One would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean white sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children. Another would preach unlimited sex, in the name of one, single race of the future.... Still another would turn our supermarkets over to the barefoot, swarthy horde: |Can't you see it now! Hundreds of thousands of women and children, smashing their way through those gigantic stores, stuffing their mouths with food, beside themselves with pleasure.'"

Raspail wrote his book in 1973 - well before news stories about Haitian and Chinese refugees spurred a flurry of concern over "uncontrolled migration," before Europe tightened its asylum policies, before polls showed that most Americans think immigration is "bad for the country."

In July, Newsweek illustrated what it called the "immigration backlash" with a cover depicting the Statue of Liberty up to her nose in a rising tide of boat people. Earlier in the summer, a similar graphic appeared on the cover of the right-wing magazine Chronicles, with a horde of pointy-eared, demonic creatures scaling a wailing Liberty, under the headline Bosnia, U.S.A. Pictures of the Statue of Liberty in distress have rapidly become an op-ed-page cliche, as have water metaphors, with so many waves of immigrants flooding, inundating, leaking in, seeping through, and drowning the nation.

In just the last few months, what were once considered right-wing views on immigration - that the United States is being "invaded" by the Third World, that immigrants pose a threat to the American economy and way of life, and that the borders need military fortification - have become part of the accepted wisdom. Politicians are running to get ahead of the trend. Senator Barbara Boxer, the liberal Democrat from California, has proposed bringing in the National Guard to help seal the border with Mexico. California's Republican governor, Pete Wilson, has proposed a constitutional amendment that would deny US. citizenship and social services to the children of illegal immigrants. And President Clinton has announced a plan to tighten the asylum process and beef up the Border Patrol.

In the current anti-immigration climate, America's newcomers have become the lightning rod for almost all of our nation's anxieties and ills.

How has Raspail's dystopian vision moved from the lunatic fringe into the mainstream of the immigration debate?

Part of the backlash against immigrants results from the simple facts of increased worldwide migration, a constricting U.S. economy, and a series of high-profile news stories showing refugees and terrorists coming into the United States. But the current anti-immigration climate also owes a lot to the calculated efforts of conservative individuals and groups.

John Tanton has probably done more than any other individual to shape the current anti-immigration movement in he United States. An ophthalmologist who lives in Petoskey, Michigan, Tanton provokes strong reactions. Friends describe him as "eclectic" and "brilliant." Opponents consider him a menace. A conservationist who was once president of Zero Population Growth, Tanton has built a network of more than a dozen organizations whose overlapping aims include conservation, population control, restricting immigration, and making English the official language of the United States.

In 1978, Tanton broke with Zero Population Growth to pursue his interest in the connection between population and immigration, and set out for Washington to found the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) - the most visible group in his network.

Regularly cited in the media as an expert source on immigration, FAIR provides statistics and data on immigration to members of Congress. The group lobbies for tighter security on the borders and a cap on annual legal immigration, and it was a driving force behind the 1986 legislation mandating employer sanctions for those who hire undocumented workers.

In July, the media watchdog group with the same acronym, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting - which has taken to calling itself "the good FAIR" to distinguish itself from the anti-immigration group - issued a report pointing out that Tanton's Federation for American Immigration Reform receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded in 1937 by a millionaire who advocated sending American blacks back to Africa, and who promoted the work of Nazi eugenicists in Germany. Today, the Pioneer Fund bankrolls most of the major eugenics research in North America - including a study at the University of Western Ontario of comparative cranium and gonad size and IQ distribution among blacks, whites, and Asians.

FAIR's executive director, Dan Stein, is irked by the suggestion that receiving money from the Pioneer Fund compromises his group. "I don't give a shit what they do with their money," he says. "My job is to get every dime of Pioneer's money.... And if they don't like what Pioneer is doing with the other grantees - you know, whatever their name is [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] - why don't they take it up with Pioneer? Why are they picking on us?"

The news about the Pioneer Fund is not the first scandal to plague Tanton's groups. In 1988, trouble erupted at U.S. English - a group he helped found to press for English as the official language of the United States - over a memo in which Tanton posed a series of hypothetical questions, referring to what he called "the Latin onslaught." "Will Latin American immigrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.?" Tanton wrote. "Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?... On the demographic point: Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!"

Then-director of U.S. English Linda Chavez and board member Walter Cronkite both quit, citing what Chavez called Tanton's "repugnant" and "anti-Hispanic" remarks. Chavez was also upset to discover that Cordelia Scaiffe May, the heiress who supports the Tanton network, had paid for the first U.S. reprint of Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, which some staff at U.S. English were reading. Chavez called the novel "without doubt the most vehemently racist book I have ever read."

Today, Tanton stands by everything he wrote in his memo. "In fact, it seems mild given what has happened since then," he says. Charges of racism annoy Tanton - they distract attention from what he considers to be the urgent issues of population growth and environmental degradation confronting Americans. "The charge of racism is really a move for cloture," he says. "That is, it's designed to silence people and to cut off debate."

But it is precisely the racial aspect of Tanton's work, and of the current anti-immigration climate, that is so troubling. To argue that we should bar the door against the Third World "onslaught" is just a short step from the outright racism Raspail unabashedly expresses in his novel.

"You'd almost have to say he was prescient," says John Tanton, who read The Camp of the Saints around the same time he founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "I remember seeing pictures of the Albanians in their boats about two years ago, and it was just like Raspail described, with people hanging off the sides and spilling overboard. And the images of the boatloads of Chinese refugees were the same thing.... As revolting and disgusting as some of his descriptions were, Raspail was ahead of his time in that he was able to see the results of demographic trends."

Flipping through a glossy FAIR publication entitled "Crowding Out the Future," Stein, who often appears as the group's spokesman on television and radio shows, points to charts, graphs, and computer-enhanced satellite photographs that illustrate connections among immigration, population growth, and the depletion of the United States' natural resources.

FAIR's central argument, that immigration is causing overpopulation in the United States and wreaking havoc on our environment, has broad appeal. Well-known ecologist Garrett Hardin is on FAIR's board of directors, Stein points out. And a number of sister organizations with names like Negative Population Growth and Carrying Capacity Network are pushing for immigration restrictions. Even the Sierra Club is currently divided over whether or not to adopt a "replacement-level" immigration policy along the lines that FAIR promotes, to stabilize U.S. population.

"Extreme Right ideology has been sifting into the environmental movement for some time," says Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It doesn't surprise me, because within the environmental movement there has always been a kind of Malthusian wing. In the last few years in Germany there's been a rebirth of what we call the Green Nazis. The problems they talk about are real. But their solution is to put rifles on the border. It is essentially a military, white-supremacist solution."

Over the summer, FAIR ran a series of radio advertisements in major cities around the United States connecting immigration to a variety of urban problems. In Chicago, the ads provoked a response from the Chicago Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Protection. "By attributing economic ills and environmental degradation to immigrants, FAIR is playing on people's most basic fears and prejudices," says David Marzahl, the coalition's executive director.

In 1990, a pilot ad in Houston caused a similar stir among Latino leaders there. According to the Houston Chronicle, the ads linked the flow of immigrants to homelessness, drug smuggling, and traffic congestion. "In one ad, a man stuck in a traffic jam wonders aloud, |Look at all these people, where do they come from?'" the Chronicle reported. "His companion answers, |Traffic is awful, and it will get worse if those politicians have their way. The paper says they want to let in millions more immigrants. Millions!'

"|What?' says the man. |Where are we going to put them? Who's going to feed them? Look at this traffic!'

"|Yes, millions more immigrants,' a woman says. |We have got more homeless than we can feed now! What about jobs, health-care costs? Where's the housing? It is just not fair!'"

When I asked Stein about the ads, he confirmed that a new version was playing in radio markets around the country. He called the ads "innocuous" and dismissed criticisms of them. "It was the usual coalition for whatever - they were just bitching - the usual complaints. They just want to silence all voices but their own. Their opinion is all that matters and everything else is un-American." But Stein declined to let me hear the new ads or see transcripts of them.

Frank Sherry, executive director of the National Forum for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, sees FAIR's talk about protecting America as divisive. "When you get through all the sound bites and statistics," he says, "you get to the theme: There are too many people in the world. Too many of |them,' and |we' have got to do something about it."

This "us-versus-them" theme - the idea that "we" must protect America before the immigrants destroy it - runs through the anti-immigration movement. Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, the author of legislation restricting immigration, says Americans suffer from "compassion fatigue." As resources become scarce and times get hard, Simpson and other conservatives argue, Americans have grown tired of embracing the down-trodden; they realize it's time to draw the wagons in a circle.

Along with resource depletion, among the most frequently invoked arguments against immigration is the idea that American culture is falling apart. A theme that emerges over and over is the ethnic warfare raging in the former Yugoslavia. Bill Anderson, the current director of U.S. English, uses Bosnia as an argument for having an official language in the United States.

"Certainly there are people in Sarajevo who wish someone had thought about language a long time ago," he says. "Had they had a common language they would have been able to talk those things through and resolve them by conversation rather than by confrontation and guns."

This point is dampened somewhat by the fact that people in the former Yugoslavia actually do share a common language. Still, the idea that Bosnian-style ethnic warfare threatens the United States has captured the imaginations of many Americans who oppose immigration.

"The melting pot is melting down," says Robert Goldsborough, founder and president of the far-right Americans for Immigration Control in Virginia. "The ethnic strife is tearing the country apart. Now you have Asian and Hispanic gangs in Long Beach, California, doing drive-bys and killing each other.... You've got Chinese heroin and cocaine gangs being operated by a major drug lord out of Red China. This is destroying the social fabric of America. It's causing ethnic warfare."

Nowhere has this feeling reached a more fevered pitch than in California.

Bette Hammond is a resident of Marin County, California, who sells New Age products for a mail-order company. Last January, she and a group of her neighbors, disgruntled by the migrant workers standing around on the street corners of San Rafael, formed a group called STOP-IT - Stop the Out-of-control Problems of Immigration Today.

STOP-IT's headquarters are in Hammond's home - a modest apartment in suburban Novato, where Hammond has a separate STOP-IT phone line and fax machine, and a letterhead that shows a weeping Statue of Liberty holding up a stop sign. Lately, Hammond has become something of a local celebrity, entertaining a steady stream of reporters in her living room. When I visited in August, she was cordial and eager to talk - showing me her cats, and chatting while she poured me a cup of coffee. But when she began talking about "the illegals" her expression hardened and her voice rose to an alarming pitch - punctuating every few sentences with the words "stop," "stop the insanity," and "stop it."

"We're against illegal aliens. They don't belong in our country. Just by being here they are criminals," she says. "We believe we're being invaded and we're out to stop it."

As Hammond sees it, illegal aliens have caused a range of problems for California, from the Los Angeles riots to crime, pollution, and the drought. Her group is part of a movement that is responding to this crisis.

"The indomitable American spirit is being awakened," Hammond says. "Americans don't like the graffiti in their neighborhoods. They don't like the traffic and overcrowding and the crime. American citizens don't like some of the neighborhoods in Southern California being taken over by illegals.... I have to stop our members from taking up weapons," she says. "We're out to stop the bloodshed. But I'll tell you, I have a feeling the reason there haven't been any more riots in L.A. is because so many people lined up to buy guns. White American citizens got guns to fight back against the illegal aliens and the criminals."

The whole state of California is facing an almost existential crisis, as military bases close and military contractors cut back their work forces. Fear, resentment, and social pathology are on the rise in white, middle-class communities as optimism about the future recedes. Violent antipathy toward immigrants is one result of this decline.

STOP-IT's membership has doubled over the last six months, and now includes 483 people, according to Hammond. She attributes the increase to publicity about illegal immigration. Articles in Time and Newsweek, as well as a blurb on STOP-IT in Borderwatch, a magazine associated with the Americans for Immigration Control, all brought in new members.

Dan Stein's FAIR - in spite of its moderate reputation - has also been of assistance in organizing the group, Hammond says. "They help us out. If we have a meeting, they'll distribute notices. We all work hand-in-hand. It's good."

At Hammond's suggestion I visited San Rafael. She scribbled a map for me that took me past suburban houses with manicured lawns and palm trees, a few well-maintained apartment complexes with Mercedes and Saabs parked outside, and acre upon acre of strip malls - picture-perfect white America.

Except that along the curb by the freeway entrance, a group of about five Latino men in baseball caps sat waiting for work trucks. And further in, among the apartment complexes, a Mexican woman in a frilly white dress carried a pail in one hand, holding onto a small child with the other. These are the migrants invading suburban California.

On May 4, someone broke into the eleventh-floor offices of the Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services in downtown San Francisco, and wrote on the walls in black marker, USA - Love It or Get the Fuck Out Bitch.

Emily Goldfarb, the director of the office, had already received a series of threatening faxes in April. The most menacing came from a group called the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, to which STOP-IT belongs, and which claims a total membership of more than 10,000 "from the Bay Area to the Border."

"It may take some time," the fax stated, "but eventually you, the illegal, the devious, the underhanded who hold the laws of this great nation in contempt, will be purged from our midst as will the treacherous elected officials who have betrayed our trust!"

Such threats call to mind the messages distributed by paramilitary groups in Latin America - a comparison not lost on the Salvadoran refugees in the office.

"Of course, we are from countries where we have experienced political persecution," says Clara Luz Navarro, "so it is very alarming." Navarro was a nurse in her home town in El Salvador. She fled to the United States in the 1980s when the death squads began targeting health-care workers. Today, she organizes a Latina women's group called Mujeres Unidas y Activas in San Francisco. Navarro is proud of her group's community projects, such as a gardening class and beautification effort in the public parks, for which the city has donated land. With support from the Coalition, the group also conducts education and job training, sponsors entrepreneurial projects, and works to strengthen families, prevent child abuse, and improve life for immigrant women and their children.

"I came here just like them, and I had the same problems," Navarro says of the women in her group. "When you come to a new country and you don't speak the language, you feel very isolated and fearful."

Members of Mujeres are particularly concerned about Governor Wilson's announcement that he plans to shut off social services for illegal immigrants and deny citizenship to their children. "We're going to give a class and talk about what people can do if they decide to exclude the undocumented from health care." says Navarro. "What will happen to sick children? That is something that worries us."

Emily Goldfarb is also worried. Sitting in her office conference room, she fidgets and taps her feet. "It's been incredible the last few months," she says. "In the political arena, it's one thing after another. Each plan is more drastic than the one before. What worries us is that the statements by the governor and other political leaders are fueling resentment toward immigrants, and letting people know that it's okay to blame the person next door for all of your problems."

Goldfarb believes that efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants by cutting off social services will only make matters worse in California, creating an impoverished, outlaw underclass. "People need to understand the phenomenon of global migration," she says. "Immigrants come here because of conditions in their home countries, for reasons having to do with politics, economics, and war.... No one really believes that if we take away all their rights and services, that will change immigration."

Goldfarb also challenges the notion that immigrants are responsible for the problems with the California economy. "The problems the state is facing are very complex," she says. "It's obvious to me that this is just cynical, political rhetoric."

The economic data on immigration are hard to sort out. Figures produced by immigration advocates claim that all immigration, legal and illegal, is a net economic benefit to the United States; anti-immigration groups say that immigrants are costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

The economic statistics cited by FAIR, and by almost every other anti-immigration group, come from a study by Dr. Donald Huddle, an economist at Rice University. Huddle's figures, which show that immigrants cost the United States $54 billion a year in social services, have been widely cited in the news as facts.

"We've been trying to get the full report that Don [Huddle] did, but all we get is a kind of press kit from a group called the Carrying Capacity Network," says Dimitri Papadimitriou, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "I cannot evaluate the figures until I see the full report."

Papadimitriou authored a recent Labor Department report on the economic impacts of immigration. "The assumptions about illegal immigration are extraordinary," he says of FAIR's claims. "The analysis is geared toward making a political statement. The real experts in the field make much more guarded and nuanced statements than FAIR."

The Carnegie Endowment is now working on another report on immigration, due out in November, Papadimitriou says. But the stodgy and careful analysis Carnegie's economists produce will not likely compete with FAIR's media campaign. "They are the only game in town," says Papadimitriou. "What I would hope journalists would stop doing is parking their judgment at the door and accepting any figure as legitimate unless it is dismissed by a legitimate person."

As for arguments about immigrants taking jobs away from Americans, "all of the evidence, both real world and econometric, suggests that there is virtually no displacement of American workers by immigrants," says Papadimitriou. "This is the consensus of the discipline."

While there are temporary displacements in given localities, Papdimitriou explains, there is no trend toward Americans becoming unemployed due to immigrant labor.

Similarly, costs in social services are disproportionately incurred in communities where there are large numbers of immigrants. But the net economic effect of all immigration - both legal and illegal - is to add wealth to the country, according to the Labor Department study. The solution, Papadimitriou and others argue, is not to clamp down on immigration, but rather for the Federal Government to redistribute the wealth in taxes and income from immigrant labor, and compensate localities that pay the costs.

With the national trend toward limiting immigration, and the political clout wielded by California, Washington is clearly moving to the Right on immigration policy.

"What pleases me is to see the liberals and conservatives finally getting together," says Senator Simpson, who has long advocated a more restrictive immigration policy. "I know someone from one of the [immigration advocacy] groups and I used to say to him, |Button your shirt, your heart fell out.' He said to me, |You know, it's really no fun to defend terrorists anymore.'"

One member of the Clinton Administration, a former advocate himself, told me that public perceptions have had a powerful effect on the Administration's immigration and asylum policy. "If we didn't introduce the legislation that we introduced, they would now be working on the Simpson bill," he says, "and if you don't think our Democratic friends in the Senate read us that message loud and clear, then you don't understand what's going on here."

The same official, who declined to be identified, seemed tormented by charges that the Administration is bowing to political pressure to adopt a conservative line on immigration. Rather, he says, it is the advocacy groups who are making the Administration's job hard: "My only plea to them is to recognize some of the good things we are doing," he said, "because if you don't, part of the incentive to fight for those things is diminished."

Duke Austin, the spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization service appointed under President Reagan, is pleased with the way the immigration debate is working out.

"Just a few years ago, it wasn't politically correct to talk about immigration," he says. "Now not only are they talking about it, they're fighting about whose partisan issue it is."

Austin, who is considering going to work for FAIR when he retires, is gratified by Clinton's plan to give more funding and staff to the INS.

An Army colonel in the Vietnam war, he feels a special affinity for the Border Patrol. A large poster hanging next to his desk shows uniformed agents on horseback, wielding guns, and driving motorcycles and speedboats. The public misunderstands the Border Patrol in the same way Americans misunderstood the troops in Vietnam, Austin says. "People are coming to understand the war now. Public opinion has changed. And I think in the same way, they're coming to understand the immigration problem," he says. "It's not the Border Patrol's fault."

Roberto Martinez, who runs the U.S.-Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee, is appalled by this shift in public perception. Martinez has monitored Border Patrol abuse over the years, including beatings and shootings of border crossers and harassment of U.S. citizens who simply look Latin.

"There are some real psychopaths in the Border Patrol," Martinez says. "And they already have M-16s. Now they want to send in the National Guard, who would bring bazookas.... It's insane."

Muriel Watson, the widow of a Border Patrolman in San Diego who devotes herself to the agency's cause, had me follow her out to the border at night. Suit jacket flapping as she dashed out of her car, she raced back to where I was pulling in behind her. "Turn off your lights, honey," she said as I got out. She pointed up the hill to a bonfire. "The aliens are massing up there," she said. "They're getting ready to charge." I could see a few figures silhouetted against the border wall - not the thousands I'd been told come over the border every night - perhaps ten people milling around in the dark.

Watson, who is running for the State Senate, is the founder of a group called Light Up the Border. At one time she organized hundreds of cars to drive out here and shine their headlights into Tijuana. "I call it the silent invasion," she says. "The hemorrhage of Mexico into the United States. My family in Minnesota calls to ask me, |Gee, what's going on down there, Muriel?'" She let out a short laugh and waved at the darkened hills around her. "All hell is breaking loose!"

Light Up the Border was disbanded last year after people in the community did not respond favorably to the idea of targeting the Latin Americans coming across the border and shining headlights in their eyes. "They called us all kinds of nasty things - we were racists, we were bigots," says Watson. "Then the Chinese landed and Washington panicked."

Today, Watson is feeling more optimistic about her efforts. After she started Light Up the Border, stadium lights went up along the fence that closes off San Diego's border area. Watson would like to see a bigger fence, more patrol cars, and lights all along the border.

Many of Watson's fellow protesters are ranchers who feel abandoned by the Government, alone on the frontier, at the mercy of the smugglers and illegal immigrants who cross the border every day.

"The state of California estimates that they spend $2 billion on the illegal alien problem - that includes invasion of our hospitals, our schools, and welfare," says Ted Power, who took part in Light Up the Border. "In San Diego, known illegals have received assistance costing $1.4 million last year."

The ranchers are used to watching illegal immigrants come across their land, and they see it as an example of Government negligence that the border isn't better guarded. "The problem is higher up. The U.S. Government doesn't want to stop the illegals," says Kim Silva, a member of the citizens' group. "They like all the cheap labor coming into the United States."

"The inevitable result is it's going to be a border war," says Power. "We're very serious about our sovereignty here and our families. If our government don't do something, by God we will."

Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, on the shores of Lake Michigan, Dr. John Tanton runs U.S. Inc., a non-profit foundation he set up to handle the phone-calling and paperwork for his various interests. To the extent that other people are now paying attention to the issues he's been working on for so long, "that's all to the good," says Tanton. But his outlook, like Raspail's, is still not optimistic. "This is not a fairy tale that has some happy ending," he says. "It's going to be a very difficult time for mankind."

Raspail's story ends, inevitably, with racial warfare. A few courageous whites are the doomed heroes, holding out in the last unoccupied village of France until they are finally overrun by the "swarthy hordes." Before the final assault, an assimilated Indian who lives in Europe tries to warn the Western governments not to open their borders. "You don't know my people," he says. "The squalor, the superstitions, the fatalistic sloth they've wallowed in for generations. You don't know what you're in for if that fleet of brutes ever lands in your lap! Everything will change in this country of yours.... They'll swallow you up." Which is exactly what happens at the end of the book.

The same apocalyptic nightmare looms in America's future, according to anti-immigration groups - unless we shut our doors. "We've always said if reasonable people can't sit down and solve these problems, it will end up in the streets," says Stein.

But the idea of saving ourselves by building a higher wall around our borders, fortifying it with more guns, and hunting down the "aliens" in our midst is a lost cause. It will not change the global economic and political problems that send people fleeing here from other countries. And it will certainly not win us a more peaceful society. It is ironic that the anti-immigration groups invoke the example of Yugoslavia. With its divisive rhetoric and undercurrent of racial hate, the anti-immigration movement promotes the very ethnic divisions its members warn about.

Immigrants have always been part of this country. In the end, what we do about immigration depends upon what kind of society we envision for ourselves. If we want to live in a humane society, we must resist OUT worst impulses to turn our backs on the rest of the world.

"We're at the beginning of having to organize a movement strong enough to withstand the fear of foreigners and people of color building in this country," says Frank Sherry. "It's an enormous challenge. Right now a betting person would bet for the restrictionists and the racists."