But isn't it something of a large step from giving amnesty to illegal immigrants or not closing the borders to actually erasing the United States as a country?
The argument I make is that the loss of sovereignty occurs incrementally, just as it did in Europe. So as examples I point to, just take a look at the comprehensive immigration reform debate. There are 12 million illegal aliens in the United States today that the government admits to. The number is probably much larger than that in reality. About three-quarters of the illegal aliens have come here during George Bush's [presidency]. And what we then get presented with is an argument advanced by both parties in the Senate that we have to pass some kind of a law which will give legal status to the illegal aliens here. And the argument is, "Well what are you going to do, round them up and send them home? You can't do that."
Of course, that's a straw man argument. There's no one really arguing to round everybody up, the illegal aliens, and send them home. The argument is to close the borders, to enforce our employment laws, and through attrition many of the illegal aliens would return because the economic advantages to being here are significantly reduced. And by securing the borders, fewer will come to increase the numbers. But by advancing the straw man argument, and saying we have no alternative but to grant some kind of a legal status, what we have is one of every 10 people born in Mexico living in the United States today as a Mexican citizen, with that number projected to advance to one out of every five people born in Mexico living in the United States as a Mexican citizen by 2010 or 2015. So we already become a dual country, and we allow Mexico to establish 30 or 40 consular offices whose purpose is to protect the civil rights of their Mexican national citizens living in the United States. That's how we begin to lose sovereignty instead of enforcing our laws, securing our borders and demanding employment laws to be enforced, reducing the social welfare benefits that are given to illegal aliens, and demanding that those who are here come here to become U.S. citizens, not to retain their Mexican citizenship.
I'm not quite getting the connection yet between there being a substantial population of Mexican citizens here and actually erasing the United States as a country.
First of all, let's start with what you just said -- erasing the United States as a country. I'm not making the argument that the United States goes away as a country, no more than Italy goes away as a country. But what Italy is today, under the European Union, in terms of its sovereignty, is considerably less than what Italy was 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, Italy and the Italian legislature passed laws without consultation with the European Union's super-regional structure. Today the super-regional structure dictates the law that the European legislatures can pass. Fifty years ago, Europe did not have a regional currency and Italy was using the lira. So it is not that Italy's gone away, but Italy has fundamentally given up sovereignty -- not completely but in major ways -- to the super-regional government. I'm saying that the same thing is happening here as we allow one out of every five Mexicans born in Mexico to live in the United States as a Mexican citizen. That's a significant compromise to our sovereignty from where it was before that happened.
But the title of your book is "The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada," and I'm also looking at a quote from you from 2006 where you say, "Why doesn't President Bush just tell the truth? His secret agenda is to dissolve the United States of American into the North American Union."
In both of those, dissolving the United States into the North American Union is the same way that I'm talking about dissolving Italy into the European Union. In other words, it's a loss of sovereignty issue that I'm concerned about, not that the United States would be not existing in some form, but a much reduced form when you consider the issue of sovereignty. And I'm pointing to, consistently, in the articles I've written that you quoted from and in the book, issues such as the NAFTA Chapter 11 tribunals, which can today overturn a U.S. law if it adversely affects a NAFTA investor. That's a loss of sovereignty. It's empowering a regional judicial structure to overturn a law passed by a U.S. state or the federal government because of a regional business interest in NAFTA.
At one point in the book, you ask, "[W]ill the US Bill of Rights be among the laws that have to be 'integrated' and 'harmonized' with Mexico's and Canada's?" and I'm wondering: How does that question jibe with the Supreme Court decision in Reid v. Covert [which 50 years ago affirmed the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution to any treaty]?
Well, the whole issue is that what the Security and Prosperity Partnership is doing in our administrative law structure is to take laws and regulations that were U.S. in nature and change them. "Integrating and harmonizing" means changing so that they accord with the laws in Mexico and Canada. Now those changes, if you take a look at the 2005 and 2006 Report to the Leaders on the SPP.gov Web site, they mention something like 250 memorandums of understanding or other agreements that the bureaucrats have reached, our bureaucrats have reached with their counterparts in Mexico and Canada in these bureaucratic working group structures ... [T]hey create, for instance, a North American transportation policy, or North American border crossing policy, North American environmental policy, North American energy policy, North American steel policy.
OK, but you were specifically asking whether the Bill of Rights had to be harmonized and that Supreme Court decision I was referring to specifically says, "The Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty." It also says, "It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution ... to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions."
What I'm pointing out to you is that while that case says that, there are other cases, including the one that dealt with the Mexican trucks and the environmental standards, where our courts have increasingly reached to international considerations, here under NAFTA, to modify U.S. laws and their applicability ... I'm saying that that type of decision could increasingly become the trend or the standard as cases get brought up under these SPP guidelines and regulations, which will happen. As the agenda advances, it'll happen increasingly. We're now going to allow Mexican trucks to come across the border through this Department of Transportation demonstration project, and they're going to be able to go all through the United States. Inevitably, that's going to lead to a series of issues that involve litigation of one kind or another, either through trade issues or accidents or any number of other circumstances that could occur. When those cases get presented, either to our courts or to NAFTA-created tribunals, it's going to present the pressure to have either more NAFTA-created tribunals, which are under discussion, or our courts are going to have to examine whether the SPP-integrated and -harmonized laws apply as compared to a strict U.S. law that was passed by Congress, but now redefined under SPP.
Next page: "Mexico's strategy seems to be [to] transfer their impoverished masses to the U.S."