I think that it was about 20 or so years ago that I read Jean Raspail's book The Camp of the Saints. (The title, by the way, came from the Book of Revelations). I've brought up the book on the air several times since then.

Last evening I discovered a story on Bloomberg.com that brought "Saints" back to mind. More on that story in a minute ... but first let's cover Raspail's book.

In simplest language, the book presents that Europe and the western world would face if suddenly millions of third-world refugees ... for whatever reason ... showed up off European shores in thousands of boats demanding to be admitted and cared for. What happens to all of the wonderful liberal rhetoric about open immigration policies and caring for your fellow men when they show up at your doorstep in the millions.

Here's how Wikipedia explains the plot of The Camp of the Saints.

       

The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and the consequences thereof. In Bombay, India, the Dutch government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is soon reversed after the Dutch consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children. An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, it is not just the people of France that befall this fate. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating Switzerland as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.

Got the plot? Do I need to tell you how much liberals absolutely hated this book?

Fine ... Now this is from the story that appeared on Bloomberg.com several days ago:

       

Biblical Exodus' From Africa Feeds Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

       

By Flavia Krause-Jackson -

       

As boats carrying hundreds of Africans set sail for a better life in Europe, they were met on Italy's Lampedusa island with two words by a 5-foot, 8-inch blonde: go away.

       

"They cannot be allowed on the shore," Marine Le Pen, the 42-year-old leader of France's anti-immigration National Front, said in a March 15 interview in Rome after a three-hour visit the previous day to Lampedusa. "Send boats out to feed them. But they must not set foot on land."

       

The island, a speck in the Mediterranean Sea closer to Tunisia than Sicily, is experiencing first-hand an immigration surge poised to spread to the rest of Europe and drive a deeper wedge in a north-south divide already tested by the sovereign- debt crisis.        

       

"It's evident that Italy has been abandoned by Europe," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in Brussels on March 10 after a meeting with his European Union counterparts. "We can't be the policeman of Europe."

       

The month-long civil war in Libya between Muammar Qaddafi's regime and rebel forces in the oil-rich east has left 6,000 people dead, driven crude prices to a 2 1/2-year high and unleashed what Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, the country's most popular politician, called a "biblical exodus."

       

North of Rome, a backlash has already begun as Italy warns its neighbors that 70 percent of Africans washing up on its shores are headed to France and Germany to seek work.

       

Back on Boats

       

One solution proposed by Chantal Brunel, a lawyer of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement, was to "put them back on their boats." While she apologized for her March 8 remarks, her stance reflects the will of governments outside the Mediterranean rim to keep refugees at bay.

You can read the rest of the Bloomberg story here. Then you might want to go to Amazon.com and get a copy of The Camp of the Saints to read. Then go back to the queston: Is Camp of the Saints actually happening?