Caliphate

Chapter XV

Whatever his sanity, or lack thereof, no one could accuse President Buckman of not thinking ahead, of not planning for the future. Even while the social order was being altered, his administration and its allies in Congress were busy making the country approximately energy self-sufficient.

This program was unprecedentedly huge. Not only did nuclear plants begin to spring up like mushrooms, every major city was scheduled for a thermal depolymerization plant, solar chimneys began to rise in the deserts of the southwest, all barriers to drilling for oil in northern Alaska were swept away, Colorado and adjoining states were gifted, if that's quite the word, with further plants to begin to convert the huge shale deposits of the Green River Basin, holding enough recoverable oil to meet the needs of the United States for several centuries.

With this level of government sponsored planning and employment, to which must be added the rough quadrupling of the size of the Army, from five hundred thousand to just over two million, the United States experienced a more or less severe labor shortage. This was partially made up by a guest worker program that allowed in millions of Indians and other East Asians. Many of these later achieved citizenship, enough so that "Dinesh" and "Aishwarya" began to compete with "John" and "Jennifer" among most popular baby names.

It should perhaps be noted that Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and even Christian-Animists have never once, as of this writing, set off a bomb or engaged in any other act of terrorism on mainland American soil.

Mexicans and other Latins were generally not allowed in, as much of that newly huge Army was deployed along the Mexican border with orders to shoot crossers without warning. Much of the Army not deployed on the borders was devoted to massive roundups of illegal immigrants, generally. Most of these were, of course, Latin.

The Supreme Court decided that that was not a violation of Posse Comitatus as the illegal immigration had arisen to the level of an invasion and invasion was a military rather than a legal matter.

The resultant loss of revenue experienced by Mexico, in particular, as millions of Mexican citizens were unceremoniously dumped back across the border was to create a massive and rising level of instability within that country. Nor was the loss of revenue the sole factor in the later outbreak of civil war within Mexico, for those same illegal immigrants to the United States-even though cut off from the mainstream of American society-had also seen a society that worked far, far better than Mexico ever had. These returnees saw no insuperable reason why Mexico could not work as well…