Invasion of a Certain Kind: A big question for the West.

In February, a rusty, decrepit freighter named the East Sea ran aground on the Cote d'Azur near Saint-Tropez. Its captain and crew fled, and when police and medical teams arrived on the vessel, they found 900 people-250 men, 180 women, and 480 children-cooped up in the hold. Mainly Iraqi Kurds, they had paid gangs approximately $4,500 per adult and $2,000 per child to be smuggled into Western Europe. In return for this money, they had squatted in a hot, filthy, pitch-black hold, with no ventilation and almost no food or water, for a voyage of eight days. About a dozen swam ashore and disappeared. The rest were abandoned to the attentions of French immigration authorities, most asserting that they were political refugees seeking asylum, many that they were heading for Britain, which has (by European standards) relatively liberal asylum laws.

If these details sound dramatic, the event itself was no more than an everyday occurrence on the borders of Western Europe from the Baltic to Sicily. The Mediterranean trade in refugees has already produced far worse tragedies than the East Sea: Smugglers in fast boats have thrown babies overboard in the Adriatic to divert their pursuers; and a Dutch truckdriver has just been sentenced to 14 years in prison for murdering 58 Chinese illegal immigrants, found dead-of suffocation-in a container in Dover last June.

Robert Fox of London's liberal Evening Standard estimates that there are between 10 million and 20 million illegal immigrants in Western Europe-the large discrepancy depends on whether you calculate that one known illegal immigrant equals three or five unknown ones-and the number of new arrivals is increasing as the smugglers hone their skills.

Western Europe is not, of course, exceptional in this regard. The recent Census suggests that the illegal-immigrant population in the U.S. is 11 million people-almost double the previous official estimate. The borders with Canada and Mexico are notoriously porous; a combination of smuggling rings, liberal asylum laws, cheap air travel, and sympathetic ethnic diasporas ensures that the trade is hard to stop, both practically and politically.

Most of the time, therefore, it is ignored. It takes the beaching of an East Sea, or of the ships carrying Chinese migrants to Vancouver in the summer of 1999, or of the Golden Venture off Queens in New York in 1993, to shake us out of our complacency; and even then the effect is transitory. The Golden Venture held 300 Chinese migrants who had paid $20,000-$35,000 to criminals for their passage; it was the twenty- fourth such ship known to have reached America this way (many more make it without being discovered by the INS). Most of the illegal arrivals sought asylum, and-because their plight is truly a tragic one-we do not have the heart to deport them. None of those on the Golden Venture has returned home; none of those on the East Sea will do so; all will reach some haven in the First World. And because their friends and relatives back home know this, a slow, gradual, peaceful invasion of a wealthy First World by an impoverished Third World will proceed essentially unhampered-exactly as Jean Raspail predicted in 1973, though not exactly in the manner he predicted.

Raspail is a distinguished French author whose novel, The Camp of the Saints, was published in 1973. (The English translation has been recently republished by the Social Contract Press of Petoskey, Michigan.) Set at some point in 1973's future (about now, in fact), it tells how the impoverished Calcutta masses spontaneously board rusty old freighters and sail off to find the earthly paradise of Western Europe-more precisely, the Cote d'Azur. As their long voyage drags out, the Western powers, in particular the French government, anxiously debate how to keep them at bay-in vain, because the huddled masses on the leaky tubs are wielding the one weapon against which the West is defenseless: its own sense of common humanity. Only a handful of Frenchmen (including a naturalized Indian from the former French colony of Pondicherry) have the ruthlessness to defend France and Western civilization by firing on the unarmed Indians and their local hippie fellow-travelers. The political, cultural, religious, and media elites comfort themselves with universalistic slogans ("We're all from the Ganges now"). Ordinary Frenchmen swallow these placebos complacently until the truth dawns; and when it is too late to halt the inflow, they flee inland. The Calcutta masses arrive, sweep all before them, and eradicate the "Camp of the Saints" where a few armed resisters have gathered. These perish, gaily singing "Je ne regrette rien" as they are bombed by the new collaborationist government's planes as well as overwhelmed by the alien horde. At the end of the novel, France and the West have succumbed to a kind of ethnic Marxism in which "anti-racism" is the governing ideology and a multicultural society wallows in a combination of Soviet inefficiency and Eastern fatalism.

Raspail's novel got what are politely described as mixed reviews. The New York Times gave it two dissections, the first comparing it to a "perfervid racist diatribe" and dismissing it as "bilge," the second giving a slightly more measured verdict ("preposterous," "banal," etc.). Other hostile notices were "a fascist fantasy . . . a disgusting book" (Newsday) and "a psychotic fantasy" and "a dull and stupid book" (Providence Journal). The friendlier reviews generally saw it not as a realistic novel, but as a nightmare of symbolism and a novel of ideas: e.g., "a terrifying nightmare and a sedulous polemic" (Louisville Courier-Journal). But even many of the friendly reviewers were troubled by the thought that Raspail's vision, however profound, was tainted by racism.