The Future of America.

The current rant of perennial ranter Pat Buchanan likens America's present immigration issues with those of the Romans, some 1530 years ago. We are told that so many people wanted to immigrate to the Roman Empire, the population of true Romans was seriously diluted. Even the mighty Roman Army had enlisted so many persons whose loyalties lay elsewhere, that army had no stomach for the fight that confronted them when the Barbarians invaded the empire in 475 A.D.

The Roman empire ceased to exist, institutions of civilization were destroyed and the world fell into the "Dark Ages" for the next thousand or so years.

Is that beginning to happen to America, as Buchanan warns? Perhaps.

But there is a more certain cloud hanging over our future.

In his excellent book "How The Irish Saved Civilization" (Doubleday, 1995), historian Thomas Cahill causes us to seriously consider our future beyond Buchanan's predictions.

In 1995, Cahill wrote: "As we, the people of the first world, the Romans of the twentieth century, look out across our earth, we see some signs for hope, many more for despair. Technology proceeds apace, delivering the marvels that knit our world together - the conquering of diseases that plagued every age but ours and the consequent lowering of mortality rates, revolutions in crop yields that continue to feed expanding populations, the contemplated "information highway" that will soon enable all of us to retrieve information and communicate with one another in ways so instant and complete that they would dazzle those who built the Roman roads, the first great information system.

But that road system became impassable rubble, as the empire was overwhelmed by population explosions beyond its borders. So will ours. Rome's demise instructs us in what inevitably happens when impoverished and rapidly expanding populations, whose ways and values are only dimly understood, press up against a rich and ordered society. More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine. If the world's population, which has doubled in our lifetime, doubles again by the middle of the next century, how could anyone hope to escape the catastrophic consequences - the wrath to come?"

The Buchanans of our time may build a fence along our border. Such a fence could stop dozens of people trying to cross our borders on any given day. But what happens if that number swells to hundreds? To thousands? To hundreds of thousands? And, suppose those people are not just trying to find work or peddle some drugs. Suppose instead that they are desperately hungry, armed and determined?

Will that happen in fifty years? One hundred years? Will it happen at all in the future of America?