Buzz About A North American Union?

Opinio Juris has been receiving a significant number of hits in recent days from Google searches for “North American Union.” The hits relate to a post by Julian Ku regarding last year’s report by the Council on Foreign Relations on a proposed North American Community.

All this traffic made me quite curious as to what was generated the buzz about the North American Union. I have done a little research and it appears most of the recent news relating to this topic is generated by a conservative commentator Jerome Corsi of Human Events Online. (Corsi is most famous as one of the authors of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.) Apparently some conservatives see in recent immigration reform proposals a genuine threat that the United States is moving toward a North American Union to replace the United States. Why there’s even a Wikipedia entry about it so that must make it so.

Specifically, Jerome Corsi sees in the proposed immigration reforms a stealth move by President Bush to establish a North American Union. In an article entitled “North American Union to Replace USA” he wrote in May that “President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada. This was the hidden agenda behind the Bush administration’s true open borders policy.”

Then in an article “North American Union Already Starting to Replace USA” he wrote three weeks ago that “What we have here is an executive branch plan being implemented by the Bush administration to construct a new super-regional structure completely by fiat. Yet, we can find no single speech in which President Bush has ever openly expressed to the American people his intention to create a North American Union by evolving NAFTA into this NAFTA-Plus as a first, implementing step.”

Then earlier this week in an article entitled “North American Union Would Trump U.S. Supreme Court” Corsi wrote that a court to be established by the North American Union would trump the U.S. Supreme Court. “A key part of the plan is to expand the NAFTA tribunals into a North American Union court system that would have supremacy over all U.S. law, even over the U.S. Supreme Court, in any matter related to the trilateral political and economic integration of the United States, Canada and Mexico.”