“If you continue to believe that the illegal alien invasion is the biggest threat to America, you will never understand that there is something far more dangerous to our country called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” said Daneen Peterson at a small rally in Washington, D.C. last Friday. Peterson explained that “the overwhelming human tsunami of illegal aliens and MS-13 gang members” will cause “complete anarchy,” which in turn will “allow the shadow government to step forward and visibly take over this country. They will use martial law to install a fascist One World Order, dictatorial government in plain sight instead of operating clandestinely as they do now.”
Peterson’s warning is familiar to a significant faction of the anti-immigrant movement, who believe that President Bush, an obscure college professor, and the Council on Foreign Relations are secretly plotting to create a European Union-style government in North America. While the supposedly well-advanced march to a “North American Union,” featuring a new flag and a unified “Amero” currency, has not been taken seriously outside of far-right and nativist web sites and news sources, the theory has had major backing from “Swift Vet” co-author Jerome Corsi, CNN host Lou Dobbs, Phyllis Schlafly, Judicial Watch, Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, long-shot Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and the grandfather of right-wing conspiracy-mongering, the John Birch Society.
And while Peterson called the immigration debate a “diversion” from the “North American Union” scheme, many activists see them as of a piece: Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Virginia), who has introduced a resolution to oppose the vaporous plot, has also stated that immigration reform is just the first step: “It will lead us on a path to likely have a North American currency, will further break down the borders between our countries, and it really undermines the concept of the United States of America in favor of something called North America.”
Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan have made similar testimonies. Warning that immigration reform would lead to “deep integration” involving “superhighways and railroads,” Buchanan said the legislation “is about the merger of nations into larger transnational entitles and, ultimately, global governance.”
Goode himself appeared at the rally alongside Daneen Peterson to warn that meetings between the leaders of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada “will send us on a glide path to the destruction of our sovereignty, and I always want the United States to be the best country in the world as it is today, and it won’t be if we’re part of a North American Union.”
Tomorrow, Judicial Watch is holding a panel on the subject, featuring Schlafly, Rosemary Jenks of the anti-immigrant group Numbers USA, and Robert Pastor, the obscure college professor universally cited as at the center of the mysterious scheming among the global elite.
As debate over comprehensive immigration reform continues and the anti-“North American Union” community simmers online, opponents of immigration reform are increasingly linking legalization of undocumented immigrants to an impending clandestine merger of the U.S. and its neighbors. When congressmen arguing against reform cite the “North American Union,” it goes a long way toward legitimizing the fringe operation currently organizing around the conspiracy, but it’s fair to predict that those politicians or more mainstream commentators “connecting the dots” to this conspiracy theory will only make their anti-immigrant cause less credible.
