“A Republic, if you can keep it”

— Benjamin Franklin, in response to a question on what form of American government had been created by the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

“My dream is that we will not have a border”

— former Mexican President Vicente Fox at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University promoting the agenda of expanding NAFTA to include the free flow of people, May 12.

Although it went unreported by The Associated Press, along with Robert Pastor, author of a 2001 book entitled “Toward a North American Community,” former Mexican President Vicente Fox unabashedly advanced his “new vision for North American Prosperity” at a recent KSU event.

Readers who have not yet heard that they should adopt a “North American identity” may be quite surprised to learn of the former El Presidente’s proposals that we officially eliminate American borders and wave the white flag of surrender over the nation we were entrusted to pass on.

Oh, and the U.S. must repeat the 1986 legalization program for the millions of currently illegal aliens who didn’t wait for the officially borderless continent, insists the man who was president as millions of his countrymen fled the corruption and grinding poverty of Mexico for “El Norte.”

More than 10 percent of Mexican- born people now live in the USA.

A little background:

As he has countless times, in a 2000 interview on ABC’s “This Week,” then Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox hopefully predicted that by 2010 people would move freely across the border between Mexico and the United States.

El Presidente’s cure for illegal immigration from Mexico? Eliminate our immigration laws.

End that old-fashioned American sovereignty and eventually “integrate” the nations of the Americas. Defined: Defended borders are selfish and Americans live far too well.

“Is the dream of prosperity just for Americans or can it be shared with the rest of us?” Fox asks while he relentlessly pushes for the expansion of the 1994 NAFTA agreement to include people.

At the sparsely attended KSU event this month, Fox promised, that without borders, “the dreams of our founding fathers will be fulfilled with freedom and better distribution of the wealth.”

This longtime American is not the first to note that Leon Trotsky and Karl Marx were not our founding fathers.

In his autobiographical 2007 book: “Revolution of Hope,” Fox boasts that “I proposed a NAFTA Plus plan to President Bush and Canada’s Prime Minister Jean Chretien to move us toward a single continental economic union, modeled on the European example.”

For Americans who take Franklin’s challenge to heart, it would be alarming enough if Fox were a singular voice in the privileged and oh-so enlightened “Post American” ruling class.

He isn’t.

After Fox and George W. Bush were sworn in, the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper ran an editorial accurately noting that “though neither Fox nor President Bush expects to dissolve the 2,000-mile border overnight, the Mexican leader clearly prefers sooner rather than later.”

Joining other American editorial pages — including the Wall Street Journal’s — the AJC went on to accurately announce that “Mexican President Vicente Fox envisions a North American economic alliance that will make the border between the United States and Mexico as unrestricted as the one between Tennessee and Georgia.” And then endorsed the concept by recommending that “the ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union.”

Fox is “El Presidente” no more and George W. Bush failed in his repeated attempts to legalize the illegal aliens who escaped American Border Patrol Agents.

The open borders amnesty agenda however, lives on. Under enormous pressure from Mexico and a coalition of big business and the radical ethnic lobby — and against huge resistance from the American people — President Obama is reportedly ready to push his own legalization legislation soon.

Not to mention discarding the rule of law on open borders and legalization, we should all be asking how large a population we want in what is now the United States, and remember that under the current interpretation of our Constitution, most people born on our soil are awarded the title, rights and benefits of an “American citizen.”

Open borders and amnesty threaten to make the term — American — and the founder’s struggle — meaningless.

D.A. King of Marietta is president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, which is opposed to open borders. On the Web: (http://www.TheDustinInmanSociety.org)