Influx Of Mexican Migrants Crippling American Culture, Says Pat Buchanan

America is going the way of the Roman Empire and will be extinguished by illegal immigration, Patrick Buchanan, the Right-wing firebrand, writes in a new book.

In State of Emergency — The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, the provocative Mr Buchanan jabs at one of America’s raw nerves — the influx of Latin American immigrants across the Mexican border.

Latest estimated figures put the number of illegal immigrants at 11 million, compared to 8.5 million in 2000.

The former Republican presidential adviser calls for a deportation programme and a new Berlin Wall along America’s Mexican border.

He accuses Republicans and Democrats of being so paralysed by guilt over past racial injustice that they are unable to create an effective immigration programme.

Mr Buchanan is on the Right of the Republican party but is still considered a serious political figure. A presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996, he worked for Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Mr Buchanan accuses George W Bush of being the president who will lose the south-west to Mexico.

“As Rome passed away, so the West is passing away, from the same causes and in much the same way,” Mr Buchanan writes. “What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilisation no longer defended. The children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West.”

Mr Buchanan alleges that one in every 12 people entering illegally into America has a criminal record. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics concentrated in America’s south-west and between 10 and 20 per cent of all Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean people have already moved to the US, he says.

Mr Buchanan accuses the Mexican government of a conscious campaign to use America as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed.

The policy is to achieve “La Reconquista”, winning back lands lost in the Mexican-American war between 1846 and 1848.

America too has been complicit in the influx, according to Mr Buchanan, erasing its borders in order to merge the US and Mexico into a “North American Union”.

In an interview with Time magazine, Mr Buchanan said: “I’m predicting that America will no longer be one nation but more like the Roman Empire — a conglomerate of races and cultures held together by a regime. The country I grew up in was culturally united, even if it was racially divided.

“We spoke the same language, had the same faith, laughed at the same comedians. We were one nationality.

“We’re ceasing to be that when you have hundreds of thousands of people who want to retain their own culture, their own language, their own loyalty.”

The immigration issue has become one of the most sensitive in American politics, with immigrants taking to the streets in protest to point out that America is a country built on immigration, and that Hispanics provide the labour for a booming economy.

The publication of Mr Buchanan’s book coincided with new census data revealing that white people will soon be a minority in 35 of America’s 50 largest cities.

Between 2000 and 2004, the white non-Hispanic population dropped below 50 per cent in Phoenix, Tucson and Denver, according to William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Mr Frey predicted that, within the next four years, whites will become a minority in Las Vegas, Austin, Charlotte and Arlington.

Of the nation’s 361 metropolitan areas, 111 registered declines in white population from 2000 to 2004, with the largest absolute losses occurring in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The decline in the white population was greatest in economically stagnant parts of the country.