A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that new immigration and births to immigrants now account for nearly 90 percent of U.S. population growth, and that half the loss of U.S. rural land in recent decades is attributable to population growth. If you're bothered by crowding now, well, maybe you'll be dead by the time our population hits 500 million in 40 years or so.

While our children and grandchildren will pay a heavy price for our nation's irresponsible immigration policy and de facto open borders, for now, American workers and taxpayers pay a heavier price than they seem to realize.

The raid continues with no end in sight. Recently, Americans were treated to the Orwellian sight of hundreds of police-protected illegal aliens/lawbreakers marching through towns and waving the Communist Party flag and the Mexican and other foreign flags while demanding their "rights." These marchers -- or rather, their organizers (an interesting lot, funded in great part with your money) -- called this display an "Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride" and compared it with the Sixties civil rights movement for blacks. No comparison, according to the thousands of average black Americans, many of them displaced workers, who signed petitions demanding enforcement of our immigration laws; opposing all legalization, including guest-worker programs, for illegal aliens; and calling for immediate deportation of illegal aliens.

I gathered many of those signatures. In Atlanta, the black Mecca, the Georgia immigration reform group had an overall signing rate of about 90 percent among people approached at random in various locations. The signing rate for blacks was nearly 100 percent. When members of our group stood on sidewalks outside post offices or anywhere else, black Americans in particular made it a point to cross parking lots or stop their cars in the street and ask to sign our petition. They told us repeatedly that the black political elite do not speak for them on immigration.

When I lived in Atlanta and led the Georgia group, I got calls in the middle of the night from some of our black members, begging me to do something about the jobs being lost to imported cheap labor. The pain in their voices shook me to the core. One of those callers was Alvin, a Sixties civil rights activist, who has been trying to get a low-power radio station to broadcast "the truth" about immigration to the black community. I hope he gets that radio station, because the truth has been in short supply.

During the recent "Freedom Rides," small numbers of citizen counterprotesters stood peaceably calling for enforcement of our immigration laws and were threatened with arrest by police if they dared step off the sidewalk or do anything to "antagonize" the barely restrained mobs of lawbreakers marching down the street. Where was the new INS, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as border crashers -- marching with advance notice -- proudly proclaimed their illegal status? Where indeed was BICE? Missing in action, baby. Because that's the way your government wants it.

Illegal aliens have no moral claim to anything in our country. The only legal rights illegal aliens have here are the right to due process of law and to humane treatment as they are arrested, incarcerated, and deported. Failure to arrest and deport has resulted in millions of illegal aliens slipping/sneaking into legal status through a variety of ruses, some of which amount to our own good will and generosity being used against us. That is our fatal flaw, you know.

The result of all this irresponsibility has been an unending chain of migration that leaves the sending countries with no incentive to improve, while laying a heavy and undeserved burden upon American natives, and forecasting the eventual destruction of the United States as we've known it.

Our nation has been entrusted with critical planetary responsibility. We are at a pivotal point, a crisis point. The fate of humanity itself rides on the decisions we will make. That's the true Freedom Ride. Americans have a choice. You can speak up or not. Act or not. In any event, all of us will get the nation and the future that most of us deserve. And I guarantee you our sins of omission will be visited upon our children.