No sooner had the ballots begun to settle in the Republican primary race in Utah`s Third District last week than the Open Borders battalions began flapping and crowing about their smashing victory over the forces of nativism and bigotry.

The facts, when disentangled from Open Borders fabrications and fantasies, are quite different.

In the fabrications and fantasies department, no one scores bigger than Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the neo-con Manhattan Institute and author of a learned tome called Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigration and What It Means to be an American.

When she wrote a piece on the Wall Street Journal opinion page last week about the Utah race, it was clear the Melting Pot was not all she had reinvented. [About Those Huddled Masses  Americans aren`t anti-immigrant—far from it, OpinionJournal.com, June 26, 2004]

The primary pitted veteran Republican Representative Chris Cannon, a strong conservative on most issues but very pro-immigration, against challenger Matt Throckmorton, also a strong conservative and very much for controlling illegal immigration.

Mr. Cannon supports the Bush amnesty and legislation to let more illegal aliens take American farming jobs, and during the campaign his aides solicited contributions from illegals.

Mr. Cannon has held his seat since 1996. He won the primary 58 percent to Mr. Throckmorton`s 42 percent, and Miss Jacoby is convinced this shows he "won decisively."

More importantly, she uses the victory to argue that voters really aren`t so "anti-immigrant" as the immigration control advocates who backed Mr. Throckmorton want us to think.

Well, now, but the brute fact is that Mr. Cannon, an incumbent of five terms, had to run and run hard to meet the challenge Mr. Throckmorton offered.

Miss Jacoby whimpers that the challenger spent "an estimated $100,000" to unseat Mr. Cannon ("big money in that part of the world," she explains, "that part of the world" presumably being Utah, a planet as strange as the moons of Neptune to Manhattanites like Miss Jacoby).

What she doesn`t say is that Mr. Cannon spent nearly ten times that much to keep the seat.

Declining in the polls throughout the race, Mr. Cannon almost certainly would have sunk beneath the 50 percent margin had the campaign lasted a bit longer.

If this race is representative of what voters think of the Open Borders lobby and its policies, they should be worried.

As for what voters do think about immigration, Miss Jacoby`s article is a masterpiece in distorting not only what happened in Utah`s Third but also what she acknowledges is the overwhelming evidence of opinion polls.

"No survey in 40 years has shown anything like a majority in favor of easing quotas" for admitting aliens for work visas, and that`s putting it mildly.

She later quotes Rep. Tom Tancredo, now the nation`s leading advocate of immigration control: "Every poll shows that over 75 percent of citizens support border security and strict enforcement of our immigration laws."

Well, they certainly do in "that part of the world," but not in the more wonderful world of Miss Jacoby and her Open Borders Lobby comrades.

Miss Jacoby never dares to use the word, but it`s clear that like her hero Mr. Cannon she favors amnesty for illegals.

The people she calls "strong proponents of immigration reform" are in fact proponents of amnesty. President`s Bush`s immigration plan of last January offered a "plan to bring illegal laborers out of the shadows." She means (but won`t say) amnesty.

And she winds up with the claim that enforcing the laws against illegal immigration and returning illegals to their own countries just won`t work any more:

"Only a policy that recognizes the reality of the flow and seeks to manage it with a combination of credible limits and better enforcement can hope to restore the order that the public so desperately craves."

What that means is also amnesty—"recognizing the reality of the flow" translates into giving up serious efforts to stop illegal immigration and send the illegals here back home.

Another brute fact is that the border with Mexico, the principal avenue for illegal immigration into this country, is a little more than 1,900 miles long.

Not all of it can be crossed at all, and if we took 10,000 U.S. troops out of Iraq or other exotic locales, retrained them for a few weeks and put them on the border, illegal immigration would cease.

Period.

Recall what I said about Miss Jacoby`s fabrications and fantasies.

As for what voters really think and the future of pro-amnesty incumbents like Mr. Cannon, I hope they read Miss Jacoby`s article and believe every word.

The more they ignore political as well as social and cultural reality and believe the voters really favor amnesty, the immigration invasion, and the reinvention of America the Open Borders Lobby demands, the sooner they are likely to leave office and find themselves a real job.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis` website. Click here to orderhis monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred`s review.]