The proof? Despite a weak American economy and rising unemployment in the U.S. since 2000, immigration has significantly outpaced record levels of the 1990s and shows no sign of abating.

And so "the advocates of mass immigration who justified the record-breaking immigration levels of the 1990s on labor-market demands during the high-tech, bubble-driven economy of that era" were totally wrong, says Dan Stein, executive director of FAIR. When the bubble burst, the people just kept coming. "The past two years prove conclusively that immigration today is wholly unrelated to economic needs and conditions in this country."

The FAIR report also noted that mass immigration, which until recently was focused mostly in the border states, particularly with Mexico and the Caribbean, has now become a nationwide phenomenon. North Carolina, Colorado, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan all saw current rates of immigration increase by more than 100 percent during the 1990s, with North Carolina, which is actually losing its traditional furniture and other industries, having a 355 percent increase.

What this means, in contradistinction to what immigration advocates insist, is that American taxpayers are footing the bill for industry's desire for cheap labor (at any cost to the nation), for the academic left's ideas about diluting traditional Americanism, and for the average American's desire not to look racist -- or to take any position that seems unpopular.

"Mass immigration has nothing whatsoever to do with the economic and social well-being of the United States or the American people," Stein went on. "There is no longer even a fig leaf of national interest to cover the explicit agenda of those who promote mass immigration."

The conservative libertarian idea that the economy is everything and the market rules all -- and that even small market changes will cause automatic adjustments in the political, cultural and demographic areas of the country -- just doesn't work. The "magic" of free trade -- and the idea that it needs no propping up in order to adjust everything -- cannot work when there are terrible discrepancies between countries like the U.S. and Mexico. It can only work between countries that have close to parity of incomes.

Translated to here and now, that means that so long as there are these economic, social and cultural differences between countries and between peoples, the immigrants will just keep coming.

The FAIR report is important because it is the first of such magnitude on the subject. Its findings are backed up by virtually every serious scholar of immigration in America -- by George Borjas of Harvard University and Vernon Briggs of Cornell University, to name only two prominent and respected names in the field.

The explosions of 9/11 were expected to parallel an explosion of concern over illegal immigration and its consequences. Instead, in these two years, the situation has worsened, with America essentially having given control of its population to anyone who wants to walk across the border.

In the end, it is not only the libertarians with their wishful thinking, not only big industry with its voracious appetite for cheap labor, not only the far left with its utopian ideas about transforming America, and not even the cynical Hispanic advocacy groups driven by their own bureaucratic ambitions. What happens rests upon what individual, average, concerned Americans will do as their country changes before their eyes -- and ultimately, with their compliance.