Immigration & integration.(free trade brings economic reform in Europe)

Open any international business college textbook these days--granted, this isn't something that an average person would do in his spare time for fun--and one will likely find some discussion about a topic called "regional integration." Sounds innocuous, doesn't it? That's how it is portrayed in the halls of modern academia--intertwined with such labels as "free trade," "falling trade barriers," or "lifting all the boats."

Well, we Americans are about to find out the hard way just what this is all about--unless we change course. The Europeans got sucked into a common market "free trade" proposal that morphed into an economic union and is now morphing into a full-blown political union--a regional government. The United States is being pushed through the same process. However, whereas the European nations took 50 years to go through it, the internationalists in our government intend to complete their plan much sooner--as in two decades.

How does regional integration work? Picture, if you will, a cross section of an onion, with its several layers. At the center is the core that starts the process: a free trade area. My trusty textbook says that in "a free trade area, all barriers to the trade of goods and services among member countries are removed." That's how NAFTA was sold--and that's what Americans who supported NAFTA thought they would get. What we really got was something else.

The next phase is to create a customs union. My textbook continues: "A customs union eliminates trade barriers between member countries and adopts a common external trade policy." It is certainly not insignificant that Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Robert Pastor pushed this idea before Congress in 2005 in a proposal entitled "Building a North American Community," wherein Mexico, Canada, and the United States would adopt a common tariff. The scheme also calls for the integration of Mexican and Canadian personnel "into the Department of Homeland Security," among other things. How fun.

The third phase is a common market. A common market "allows factors of production to move freely between members. Labor and capital are free to move because there are not restrictions on immigration, emigration, or cross-border flows of capital between member countries." This is exactly what is behind the Bush administration's fanatical zeal to implement its "guest worker"/amnesty program. By granting amnesty to the millions of illegals already here, the floodgates would be swung wide open for many more illegals to cross our borders.

A consequence of battering down our nation's borders by permitting illegal immigration would conveniently lead us into the fourth phase, which is economic union. This ...