Amero coin design by Dan Carr, www.amerocurrency.com

The odds that King will buy into the greatest urban legend of all time greatly increased last month when he told constituents that he was connecting the dots on another popular conspiracy theory: the creation of a North American Union, a border-blurring confederation of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The North American Union theory takes various forms depending on who’s doing the talking or blogging. Some incarnations involve a “superhighway” linking the nations, others a common currency often called the “amero.”

Rather than dismiss the idea the St. Louis Post Dispatch calls an “urban legend” — as Republicans like U.S. Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri have done — King gives it credibility by saying he can see a case for the plan appearing, dot by dot.

“My own view is that if you look at all of the signals that are there, look at the evidence that exists and all the dots, and you connect the dots, you can draw that picture,” King said at an Aug. 19 town hall meeting at Cronk’s Cafe Restaurant & Lounge in Denison.

From the exhaustive Post Dispatch story on the North American Union theory:

Forget conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, black helicopters, Sept. 11, 2001. This is the big one.

We’re talking about the secret plan to build a superhighway, a giant 10- to 12-lane production, from the Yucatán to the Yukon. This “SuperCorridor” would allow the really big part of the plan to take place: the merging of the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico. Say goodbye to the dollar, and maybe even the English language.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul famously trafficked in doom-and-gloom predictions about a superhighway and a union of the three nations in the Republican presidential primaries. Federal and state trade and highway officials said Paul’s claims were a paranoid fantasy.

U.S. Rep. Steve King

A Boston Globe story about the North American Union’s emergence as an issue at GOP town hall meeting described it this way: “If you haven’t heard about the NAU, that may be because its plotters have succeeded in keeping it secret. Or, more likely, because there is no such thing.”

King acknowledged that such a plan, which would involve ceding some national sovereignty, would be hard to accomplish surreptitiously. But he said he sees signs of a developing union in official U.S.-Mexican counter-terrorism discussions.

“The idea is to not worry so much about our interior border but to take our security out to our ocean borders,” King said.

King said any notion he had of waving off the issue of a North American Union as a joke vanished about a year ago when he heard former Mexican President Vicente Fox speak at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake.

“I actually have notes in my briefcase out in the vehicle from Vicente Fox’s speech,” King said.

It is telling that — of all the papers on all the issues that a congressman sees — King would take these “notes” along on a campaign swing.

“He [Fox] painted a picture of a North American Union,” King recalled. “And I listened to it and I thought this is the first time I’ve heard somebody of that stature talk so openly about an idea that will be rejected by the American people.”

Fox, who served as Mexican president from 2000 to 2006, no doubt gave North American Union-believers grist for their mills. I covered Fox in Storm Lake last October and this how I reported that portion of his remarks:

In the bigger picture, Fox advocated an economic system for the Americas that he envisions as operating something akin to the European Union. He said the United States clearly has a labor shortage and that a younger Mexico with a “mature” United States, in the demographics of age, have complementary economies. What’s more, Fox said, many of the Hispanics working in this nation and hailing from foreign places just want to make enough to live more comfortably in their homelands and aren’t viewing America as anything more than a wage-earning weigh station.

But it is a stretch to go from big-picture, lecture-circuit, book-selling speeches (where Fox also sought to make news by endorsing Hillary Clinton) to King’s dot-to-dot conspiracy involving current lawmakers and bureaucrats in all three nations.

King even buys into North American Union blogger-conspiracy theorists’ beliefs that a distribution area is being built in Kansas City to facilitate a superhighway of tri-nation traffic (peddled by, for instance, Jerome Corsi).

“You look at the location in Kansas City that looks like it’s going to be a distribution warehouse that is port of entry, those things are pretty compelling,” King said.

In 1874, German immigrants in Carroll County launched The Demokrat,a  German-language newspaper, with the declaration that the publication would battle to preserve the interests of recently arrived immigrants against “nativisim and fanaticism.”

In her magisterial book on the administration of President Lincoln,”Team of Rivals,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out that vicious attitudes toward German immigrants were very much alive and well in the politics of the 19th century.

In fact, a man widely regarded as far more qualified for the presidency in his time than
Lincoln, William Seward, lost the nomination to Lincoln in no small part because he dared defend German immigrants.

Instead of seeing a version of their own family history in western Iowa’s Latino immigrants, too many in our part of the state buy into the same ugliness their forefathers endured from Protestants with roots in other parts of Europe.

When so many people in this area make heartbreakingly ignorant comments (and I’ve heard many) about Latino immigrants they may as
well be time-machining back to days of the Der Demokrat and slapping their own great-grandmothers.

This clearly isn’t the case with everyone.

Some people get the connection – and have for years.

“Most of us are not that far removed from people who emigrated from other countries,” former Carroll Mayor Tom Gronstal told me in an
interview in 2000. “Iowa’s been settled for only 150 years. None of us go back that far.”

Gronstal was part of then-Gov. Tom Vilsack’s 2010 Council, a bipartisan organization that said the state’s No. 1 goal should be to attract new residents and embrace diversity.

“We arrived at that conclusion by looking at the basic demographics of our state,” Gronstal said at the time. “We’re going to have to become welcoming to all kinds of people.”

Gronstal, whose family’s bank was known as the “German” financial house in the not-too-distant past, said then that Iowa hasn’t made immigration a priority.

Well, it is today.

But not for the reasons Gronstal and others with foresight desired.

For years, western Iowa’s agricultural economy has benefited from the back-breaking labor of Latinos, many legal workers, many illegal.

With that latter class, Iowa winked and nodded and let them into Denison and Storm Lake and Sioux City.

They contributed. They built lives.

As a matter of basic human decency, not to mention economic reality, we owe these immigrants a path to lawful residency and citizenship.

For years, western Iowa has known the score with what amounts to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to immigration.

Political leaders and the God-fearing, church-going everyman sat largely silent in Iowa as books like “Fast Food Nation” exposed the
horrors Hispanics faced on the kill floors of Midwestern meatpacking houses. One national magazine even carried a cover story on race in
Storm Lake.

At the time, there was no battle cry for a massive overhaul of immigration.

Western Iowa wanted an invisible underclass, one not heard or seen.

And for years this bargain worked.

Now, because caught between two cultures, some of Iowa’s Latinos fly two separate flags many want them branded as confederates, trucked away as felons, dismissed as would-be terrorists.

Conservative Republicans are nothing if not good poll-readers.

They see the president’s approval rating dipping to numbers that would send most Iowa gardeners outside to cover the flowers. They’re losing
the debate on character and competence and the war and economy.

They need new enemies, new images for television ads in the 2008 elections.

And they found at least some in Marshalltown.

Literally.

During a weekend news conference held as part of a two-day visit to Storm Lake, in northwest Iowa, Fox said the anti-immigration rhetoric from some U.S. public opinion shapers is not only driving a policy debate but fanning hatred and even violence. In fact, Fox singled out CNN’s Lou Dobbs, known for his strong views on immigration.

“There is confusion that immigrants are terrorists, which is absolutely false,” Fox said at Buena Vista University. “The decision process is being guided by the xenophobics, the Minutemen in Arizona, the violent, and I’m sorry to say violent like Lou Dobbs.”

Fox, who served as president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, said language used by some anti-immigration forces spawns more violence than what results from those who, in Fox’s words, would be “using the stick.”

“There are many using violent words like Lou Dobbs, which is moving public opinion to divide, which is bringing in violence to local communities,” Fox said.

In other remarks during his time in Storm Lake, Fox said the effect of building a wall along the Mexican border is “terrible” for the image of the United States.

“I couldn’t conceive anything worse than building a wall,” he said.

Fox added, “Walls don’t work. The Chinese Wall didn’t work against their enemies. The Berlin Wall didn’t work against freedom. The West Bank wall is not working and this one won’t work. We should be building bridges instead of walls.”

A recent report shows Iowa is in desperate need of more workers. Meanwhile, U.S. Census data reveal that a Latinization of some cities in western Iowa is the primary reason for their growth, and that other communities, without the Hispanic influence, are aging dangerously where commercial and industrial matters are concerned.

If ths clear need for workers were being met with Canadians or Germans would Americans have such a level of negative reaction?

“No, they would not,” Fox said.

Fox wonders what happened to the United States of globalization and free trade and competition.

“The champion and the leader today isolates from the rest of the world, now that we learn to compete,” Fox said.

Over the weekend, Fox spoke four times on the campus of this northwest Iowa private college. Fox is another in a long line of distinguished speakers to visit the campus as part of the William W. Siebens lecture series. In the news conference, he fielded questions from Iowa Independent and other reporters, most in English but one in Spanish from the western Iowa newspaper, La Prensa.

Lorena Lopez, editor of the western Iowa Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa, said Fox’s remarks, while motivating for many in the Hispanic community, were clearly aimed at “Anglos.”

“It’s not much, every year, every day, that a president from Mexico comes to the United States and speaks English,” Lopez said. “I think it is important that he let people know that Mexico and the United States are neighbors and need to work together. He just confirmed that immigrants come here to work and improve their lives and they don’t want to be here forever. I liked what he said. He said we need one another. The United States needs part of that labor from workers from another country. Immigrants need the good money that is paid here.”

Fox has been in the United States in recent weeks in large part to promote his book “Revolution Of Hope.”

“The book is addressed to my heroes, to my beloved Mexicans that are here in the United States, making this economy prosper, bringing in quality of life to every home, making the economy productive and competitive in front the Asian challenge, China’s challenge,” he said.

Fox said here are some obvious reasons the United States and Mexico are “complementary” economies.

Mexico’s average income is one-sixth of that in the United States, and America needs more labor to see continued economic growth, Fox said.

“As long as we have that difference, that gap, people will be looking for a better life and people will be trying to come here,” Fox said.

Fox said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told him that city would “collapse” if it weren’t for the Latino immigrants.

Fox’s book contains several references to President George W. Bush, including one in which he referred to the Texan as a “windshield cowboy.” Fox suggests in the book that Bush is actually afraid of horses.

“It’s my first candid impression,” Fox said in Storm Lake.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox virtually endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a Friday speech in Storm Lake. When asked about U.S. presidential politics, Fox replies, “Maybe the lady that is campaigning here will deliver. We hope so.”

Fox’s remarls came during a provocative speech/panel discussion before an estimated crowd of 900 students, faculty and others at Buena Vista University, Fox guffawed when the name of anti-immigration crusader Tom Tancredo emerged in a question, and told white western Iowans that many of the Hispanics living and working here simply want to cash in on higher wages in the United States and return to Mexico or Latin America. The latter opinion runs in direct contrast to a just-released study from the Pew Hispanic Center.

Friday evening, Fox, who served as president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006 and broke the stranglehold of 71 years of single-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was scheduled to speak two more times on the campus of this northwest Iowa private college. Fox is another in a long-time of distinguished speakers to visit the campus of part of the William W. Siebens lecture series. He held a news conference earlier Friday and fielded questions from Iowa Independent and other reporters, most in English but one in Spanish from the western Iowa newspaper, La Prensa.

Earlier in his remarks to the Buena Vista University crowd Fox allowed that most men who have served in political office anywhere in the world fail to deliver on all their promises.

“Maybe the lady that is campaigning here will deliver,” Fox said. “We hope so.”

When pressed on that (by a BVU student), Fox — who also made the veiled endorsement in earlier remarks — didn’t invoke Clinton’s name but he said women have a “different character” and “vision” that may be the prescription for what troubles many nations.

“Maybe it’s because having kids is something very, very special,” Fox said.

He added, “They will do whatever is necessary to ensure the future of their kids.”

Later, when asked directly what he thought of the presidential campaign of GOP Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo Fox asked a student panelist to repeat the name of the candidate. When he recognized Tancredo, Fox said a long, “ahhhhh” and waved a hand dismissively.

“He shouldn’t have a Spanish name, Tancredo,” Fox joked. “It’s an offense to all of us in Mexico.”

In the bigger picture, Fox advocated an economic system for the Americas that he envisions as operating something akin to the European Union. He said the United States clearly has a labor shortage and that a younger Mexico with a “mature” United States, in the demographics of age, have complementary economies. What’s more, Fox said, many of the Hispanics working in this nation and hailing from foreign places just want to make enough to live more comfortably in their homelands and aren’t viewing America as anything more than a wage-earning weigh station.

“They don’t want to stay here forever,” Fox said.

Fox was also scheduled to be in Storm Lake Saturday morning for a community meeting on the campus of this heavily Hispanic community.  There were rumblings in the press room about protests during the community event set for Saturday — some anti-immigration and perhaps some from Latinos who may feel Fox didn’t fight hard enough in his dealing with President Bush on behalf of Hispanics of Mexican descent. Campus officials said they did not expect any issues but would nevertheless be “ready” for them.