The dystopian, anti-immigration book The Camp of the Saints is really racist. So why are a bunch of smart conservatives praising it?

You can still stand athwart the Statue of Liberty and yell stop to the huddled masses. Just don't do it while waving this scatological screed.

Refugees are escorted through Slovenia.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

It was inevitable that the waves of Syrian refugees fleeing a civil war that has submerged their nation for five long years would also create nativist sentiment in Europe and America. Indeed, the rise of Donald Trump is nothing if not one big nativist spasm.

What's really disturbing isn't that this nativism exists, but that this spasm is increasingly spreading beyond the fringe into respectable conservative circles. Exhibit A is the rising interest among conservatives in The Camp of the Saints, a sick dystopian book penned by French novelist Jean Raspail in 1973 that predicts the demise of the West by unfettered Third World migration.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.