This is a "mind-boggling concept," exploded Lou Dobbs. It must cause Americans to think our political and academic elites have "gone utterly mad." What had detonated the mild-mannered CNN anchor?

Dr. Robert Pastor, vice chair of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on North America, had just appeared before a panel of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations -- to call for erasing all U.S. borders and a merger of the United States, Mexico and Canada in a North American union stretching from Prudhoe Bay to Guatemala.

Under the Pastor-CFR plan, the illegal alien invasion would be solved by eliminating America's borders and legalizing the invasion. We would no longer defend the Rio Grande.

"What we need to do," Pastor instructed, "is forge a new North American Community. ... Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders, we ought to provide them with a secure, biometric Border Pass that would ease transit across the border like an E-Z pass permits our cars to speed through tolls."

The Pastor-CFR project, for "economic integration" of Mexamerica, is on the drawing board. North-south highways and railways would be built to weld us together as the American Union was welded together by the Northern Pacific, Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and Ike's Interstate Highway System.

Speaking in Madrid in 2002, Mexican President Vicente Fox declared: "Our long-range objective is to establish with the United States ... an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes as important as ... the freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and persons. The new framework we wish to construct is inspired in the example of the European Union."

Critical element of the Fox post-NAFTA agenda: absolute freedom of movement for persons between Mexico and the United States -- a merger of the nations. Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Debrez put it succinctly in April 2005. What Mexico is about is "complete integration" of the two nations.

To appreciate what Fox, Debrez, Pastor and the CFR wish America to merge with, consider a few excerpts from the State Department information sheet on Mexico.

While hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens marched beneath Mexican flags in U.S. cities on May Day to demand amnesty, Mexico's constitution "prohibits political activities by foreigners, and such actions may result in detentions and deportations."

"Crime in Mexico continues at high levels, and it is often violent, especially in Mexico City, Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo (and) Acapulco," State warns U.S. travelers. "Low apprehension rates and conviction rates of criminals contribute to the high crime rate."

"Women traveling alone are especially vulnerable. ... Victims ... have been raped, robbed of personal property or abducted and then held while their credit cards are used at various businesses and automatic teller machines. ... Kidnapping, including the kidnapping of non-Mexicans, continues at alarming rates."

When Fox proposed his merger of America and Mexico in a North American Union, Robert Bartley, for 30 years editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, declared him a "visionary" and pledged solidarity: "He (Fox) can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision ... this newspaper."

The American people never supported NAFTA, and they are angry over Bush's failure to secure the border -- but a shotgun marriage between our two nations appears prearranged. Central feature: a ten-lane, 400-yard-wide NAFTA Super Highway from the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, up to and across the U.S. border, all the way to Canada. Within the median strip dividing the north and south car and truck lanes would be rail lines for both passengers and freight traffic, and oil and gas pipelines.

As author Jerome Corsi describes this Fox-Bush autobahn, container ships from China would unload at Lazaro Cardenas, a port named for the Mexican president who nationalized all U.S. oil companies in 1938. From there, trucks with Mexican drivers would run fast lines into the United States, hauling their cargo to a U.S. customs inspection terminal -- in Kansas City, Mo. From there, the trucks would fan out across America or roll on into Canada. Similar super-highways from Mexico through the United States into Canada are planned.

According to Corsi, construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, is to begin next year.

The beneficiaries of this NAFTA Super Highway project would be the contractors who build it and the importers and outlet stores for the Chinese-manufactured goods that would come flooding in. The losers would be U.S. longshoremen, truckers, manufacturers and taxpayers.

The latter would pay the cost of building the highway in Mexico and the United States, both in dollars and in the lost sovereignty of our once-independent American republic.