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While the federal government holds the line on its previous promise of 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next three years, provincial, religious and community leaders continued to apply political pressure this week — calling for regulations to be waived and planes to airlift refugees to Canada, where the necessary interviews can occur.

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The pictures are heart-rending, the crisis is acute, but the dilemma isn’t purely humanitarian. It’s also historic and has been visible on the horizon for some time. In popular literature, an early appearance popped up in Jean Raspails dystopian novel, Le Camp des Saints. Published 1973, the speculative fiction book was set in the not-too-distant future when migrants from the Third World inundate the First World with catastrophic consequences.

Raspails book was a fantasy, but not too many years later, in Oriana Fallaci’s 2006 pamphlet The Force Of Reason, one comes across this paragraph:

“In 1978, I remember it well, (Muslim migrants) were already occupying the Historical Centre of Florence. ‘But when did they get here?!?’ I asked the tobacconist of piazza Republica where they assembled with particular delight. He spread his arms and sighed: ‘God knows. One morning I woke up and here they were’.”

The Force of Reason was the second of the fiery Italian journalist’s book-length pamphlets that had created a publishing sensation in Europe. The first volume, The Rage and The Pride, published in 2002, had 16 printings in two years. But the phenomenon didn’t occur exclusively in Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, writing about a demonstration of illegal Mexican immigrants protesting a proposed U.S. law that would sanction employers who hire undocumented workers, columnist John O’Sullivan offered this description: