Anti-Immigration Movement Finds an Articulate Voice

STATE OF EMERGENCY

The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press,

308 pp., $24.95

Man, is Pat Buchanan mad. He is virtually sputtering with rage. He can hardly contain himself. The subjects of his ire are the immigrants -- nearly 2 million a year, about 500,000 of them illegal -- crossing the country's borders and the bumbling or unpatriotic elite who are letting them in.

It's not just any immigrant that sets Buchanan's blood a-boiling. It's the brown, yellow and black ones that make up 90 percent of the new arrivals. While some people, including President Bush, may view these newcomers as decent, hardworking people whose desire is to provide for their families, Buchanan sees them as something much more sinister -- a threat to United States.

"We are witnessing how nations perish," he writes in his latest book, "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America."

"We are entered upon the final act of our civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted."

His list of grievances is long -- and stark. The United States cannot absorb the sheer mass of migrants. They are driving down wages and ratcheting up crime. They are endangering the Republican Party and conservative, small-government ideology. They are threatening U.S. sovereignty. But, for Buchanan, perhaps the most unforgivable sin is that they challenge the supremacy of white European culture.

"Can anyone say today that we Americans are 'one united people?' " he writes. "We are no longer descended from the same ancestors. The European core of the country -- almost 95 percent of Americans as late as 1965 -- has fallen well below 70 percent and will be less than half the nation by 2050."

One has to give Buchanan credit. He is a muscular writer, fully in command of the English language he feels is under siege. He is adept at linking history, statistics and the writings of philosophers and economists to proffer forceful arguments.