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Camp of the Saints is no longer fiction. The Biden administration has made it reality along the U.S.-Mexico border. Right before our eyes, the government of the United States is deciding that, in fact, the United States doesn’t really exist at all.

In Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, a vast horde of starving Indians commandeers a flotilla of decrepit ships in the harbor of Calcutta. The flotilla sets sail for Europe, and slowly creeps around the Cape of Good Hope, past Sao Tome, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and finally descends upon southern France. As the fleet approaches, French society is first convulsed first by political infighting, then by panic, and finally by collapse.

Six months ago, Revolver listed Camp as one of eight books to read while you still can. We wrote then:

The thesis of The Camp of the Saints is simple: That the very traits that made the West so successful and so widely-imitated would eventually be its undoing. The West’s openness and egalitarianism led to widespread prosperity. But those same moral sensibilities, Raspail argues, mean that while the West could easily vanquish a normal military threat, it will be politically unable to justify its own success. If the impoverished, backwards masses of the Third World demand the wealth of the West, the West will submit even if it ultimately means the loss of its prosperity, its independence, its culture, its very existence. Nearly a half-century later, with Western elites eagerly waving in caravans from Central America and literal boatloads from Africa, Raspail’s foresight looks remarkable.

Six months ago, Raspail was prescient. Today, his vision is so accurate one wonders if he was a time traveler.

You may have heard a few months ago that there was a “crisis” at the border. Even The New York Times admitted it, all the way back in February. Since then, the border situation has receded from public attention, except for the occasional flare-up when a video goes viral or Fox News pays attention for a few days. For years, Americans have been poisoned by ever-more-rapid news cycles, by a cable and Twitter ecosystem that grows bored with stories in a matter of days or even hours, and then discards them for a new novelty. Riots in South Africa flare up and hundreds are killed. How did that all end? Who cares! Another U.S. athlete choked at the Olympics and Donald Trump said something wacky! (That said, for those wondering: South Africa is still screwed).

But make no mistake: The crisis has never abated for one moment since Joe Biden took office. It has only gotten steadily worse, day after day. In February, 101,000 migrants streamed over the 1,954-mile line on a map that is ever-less-accurately described as a “border.” In March, the migrant count surged to a record 170,000, and that records has been broken every month since. In July, it cleared 210,000. More than a million illegal immigrants have entered the country in the past six months. And they are still coming.

And remember, paradoxically, these are only the documented “undocumented”. Despite the wide open door with welcome mat the U.S. is offering, thousands of migrants are still sneaking past the Border Patrol the old-fashioned way. And then there are the thousands of phony vacationers and visa overstays who are once again pouring into the country through its airports as well. By the end of the year, America may very well have increased its total illegal immigrant population by several million.

As migrants pour in, the U.S. Border Patrol has transformed into border processing. So long as a migrant knows the right things to say (claim to be a minor, or to have an asylum claim), U.S. officials will only handle the new arrival long enough to transfer them into the American interior unsupervised as quickly as possible. It may not be shown on CNN or reported much in The Washington Post, but every day, the churn continues.

In the border city of McAllen, Texas, officials have frantically thrown up tents to house the hundreds of people who inundate the small city every day.

In a frantic bid to at least slow down the torrent, in July Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order barring anyone other than federal or local government officials from transporting migrants. When it comes to enforcing American immigration laws, the U.S. court system can lie moribund for decades. But the moment Abbott sought to hold up the systemic evasion of those laws, the courts leapt into action:

A federal judge Aug. 3 temporarily blocked an order issued by the governor of Texas to halt transportation of migrants by anyone other than local or federal authorities following an incident involving a Catholic nonprofit.

Judge Kathleen Cardone of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso granted an emergency request from the Department of Justice, which said the order was “dangerous and unlawful.”

The department filed a lawsuit July 30 against the state of Texas, trying to stop enforcement of the order, which gives troopers the ability to pull over and impound a vehicle, if needed, that is suspected of transporting migrants.

…

“The executive order causes irreparable injury to the United States and to individuals the United States is charged with protecting, jeopardizing the health and safety of noncitizens in federal custody, risking the safety of federal law enforcement personnel and their families, and exacerbating the spread of COVID-19,” the judge said in granting the emergency block of the executive order. [Catholic News Service]

None of this is a natural disaster. It is a choice. In President Trump’s final year, the border was basically secured. Tens of thousands of people lined up in Mexico awaiting Biden’s arrival, banking that he wouldn’t be willing to continue Trump’s success. And they were correct.

All of these migrants pour in without limit and without end. The United States is being overrun, trampled by a human wave from abroad. If this wave were armed with tanks and jet fighters, it would be hurled back into Mexico. But precisely because it is so helpless, this invasion is perhaps the most successful mass-migration of people in human history.

The man who saw this coming was Jean Raspail. In Camp, he characterized this exact kind of invasion thusly: “Some new, sophisticated form of warfare: A pathetic enemy, who attacks without firing a shot, and who counts on our pity to protect him.”

“The West thinks it has great, powerful armies,” another of Raspail’s characters utters. “Well, it hasn’t. It has no armies at all anymore.” The United States doesn’t have the will to say that its border is real. It is too morally cowed to prevent foreign masses from crossing it at will, armed only with desperation or the children they brandish in front of them.

In Raspail’s fable, the French president plays a critical role, evocative of the one President Biden now finds himself in. As the migrant flotilla approaches, the president addresses the nation. He lays out the consequences of letting the flotilla arrive: The end of the French nation as it has existed for 1500 years.

“Five hours form now, as day dawns on this Easter Monday morning, we shall either have lost or preserved our integrity as a nation, so jealously guarded for a thousand years and more.  … As your President, elected by the nation, I cannot fail to act. I know, of course, that most of our people consider it inhuman and unthinkable to throw armed might against a weary, starving, and defenseless opponent. Yes, I know how they feel. And yet, my friends, the fact is this: cowardice toward the weak is cowardice at its most subtle, and indeed, its most deadly.”

And yet, at the decisive moment, the president falters. Instead of ordering the French military to halt the arrival of migrants, he leaves the decision up to every soldier’s conscience. With the president having abdicated leadership, the army soon folds as well: The migrants arrive, and sweep through the whole country up to Paris, where they inaugurate a new regime revolving around the dispossession and punishment of France’s historic population.

Today, President Joe Biden represents the same abdication of leadership. In March, his message to migrants was “don’t come.” In the 2000s, Biden bragged about voting for the Secure Fence Act and talked about the need to punish employers who hired illegal immigrants. He said he would crack down on sanctuary cities and deny illegals drivers licences. And of course, he vowed to boost funding for the border patrol.

Of course, Biden never really intended to be strong on immigration. The remarks above were clearly designed to lull voters into complacency with the old convivial centrist act.

The following clip is a more honest reflection of Biden’s true agenda, if his present actions are any indication:

By all accounts, Biden’s submission to the open borders cult is even more feeble and pathetic than the one shown in Raspail’s novel. In Camp, France is overrun because its leaders are not willing to kill to preserve their country. In real life, America is being overrun because leaders aren’t willing to look mean. 

Having a real border means staring at impoverished, helpless people at your front door and saying “Sorry, no.” It means finding them at their places of work, yanking them out, and punishing their employers. It means deporting people back to their home countries, even if they cry or scream or make viral videos of sobbing children. It means not falling apart the moment you see this listicle on Buzzfeed:

The American regime is incapable of passing this basic test. And now, the secret is out: Show up to America’s front door, and you’ll be rewarded. The country with the world’s most powerful (or at least most expensive) military will allow the largest incursion by foreign peoples in world history.

In the introduction for the 1985 edition of his novel, Raspail elaborates on how his novel diverges from the future reality he actually foresaw:

In Camp of the Saints … everything takes place within three days along the shores of Southern France. … In actuality the unraveling will not take place in three days but, almost certainly, after many convulsions, during the first decades of the third millennium, barely the time of one or two generations. … At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us. … The petty bourgeois, deaf and blind, continues to play the buffoon without knowing it. Still miraculously comfortable in his lush fields, he cries out while glancing toward his nearest neighbor. “Make the rich pay!” Does he know, does he finally know that it is he who is the rich guy, and that the cry for justice, that cry of all revolutions, projected by millions of voices, is rising soon against him, and only against him[?]

Where did Raspail err? Only in one place. A half-century ago, Raspail at least had his migrants arrive in flotillas of commandeered boats. Today’s actual migrants benefit from the innovation of free jet travel.

That’s a real charity. Stroll on over to miles4migrants.org and you too can donate some miles to sponsor free flights from the Third World into America for asylum seekers.

Forty-eight years ago, Jean Raspail envisioned Western nations simply giving up on existence, unwilling to accept and sustain a reality where they are rich and other nations are poor and backwards. Now, his vision has come to pass.

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