Just so there is no misunderstanding. I am not against immigration. How could I be? Members of my family and my wife's family all came from the old country. But I am militantly against immigrants who don't want to become Americans, who refuse to integrate into our society.

Thus far immigration has not been an issue for the major parties in any of our recent presidential elections. Pat Buchanan tried to raise the issue as the Reform party candidate in 2000 but he was hardly heard in the countryside, once he and Ralph Nader were locked out of the televised presidential debates.

However, John Gizzi in the conservative weekly Human Events, reports that immigration is emerging as a key issue in the upcoming German elections. And the issue has propelled the Minister President of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, ahead of incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. If Stoiber is able to upset the heavily favored Schroeder it will impact on politics in this country as well.

The reason is that the immigration issue in Germany revolves around those who refuse to integrate into German society. Unemployment there is running at post-World War II highs. It really irritates many German voters that there are immigrants from Turkey and other nations who refuse to speak the German language and who openly scorn the nation that has provided them with jobs at a time when many native Germans are unemployed.

Underlying at least some of the tension gripping the German electorate is the fact that many of those who refuse to become Germans are Moslems who openly scorn the German government, which is still officially Christian, both Roman Catholic and Lutheran.

It is true that there are other issues on the table as well. Stoiber is a tax cutter and, in Bavaria, unemployment is about half the national average. Stoiber is also pro-family and opposes the radical lifestyle issues being pushed by the Green Party, which is the coalition partner of Schroeder's Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The fact that Stoiber now is running ahead of Schroeder 40% to 36% doesn't mean that much right now because Germany is a multi-party state.

Only once since then-West Germany began to hold elections after the Second World War has any party won an outright majority in parliament and that was in l957 when Konrad Adenauer and his Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (Bavaria) party had that distinction. Thereafter, the CDU/CSU had to govern with the aid of the FDP or Free Democratic Party, who back then were classical free market liberals. The FDP switched sides in l969 and formed the coalition, which brought Willy Brandt and the SPD to power, and then switched again bringing the CDU/CSU back into power soon after Ronald Reagan was elected in this country.

The Social Democrats won again by forming a coalition with the Green Party (the so-called Red/Green government) after pledging not to do so.

So even though Stoiber and the CDU/CSU may end up having the largest fraction in the Bundestag (the lower House of parliament which elects the Chancellor) he will need to find a coalition partner willing to sign on with him to produce an outright majority with which to govern.

Right now there are enough undecided voters to make the outcome of the upcoming elections very uncertain. German pollsters suspect that immigration is an even larger issue than current national surveys show. Just like in this country, many German voters don't want to admit how they feel about the issue.

Even so, a Stoiber victory will surely be attributed to the immigration issue. If it can enable a Bavarian to become Chancellor of the Federal Republic (no Southern German has been able to do so in the past 53 years), American politicians will begin to take a good, hard look at that issue and exactly how it played.

No major party candidate is likely to run on a ticket of closing the US borders or building a wall across the country. But a Stoiber victory might cause a major party candidate for President to directly address the question of whether immigrants are properly integrating themselves into American society. Were that to happen, the Germans would have done this country a profound service, perhaps repaying us a little for what we did to rescue them after we defeated them in l945.

Paul Weyrich is president of the Free Congress Foundation.

© This column is the property of the Free Congress Foundation and may not be reproduced without their permission. For comments and inquiries, contact Angie Wheeler at awheeler@freecongress.org. Visit our website at www.FreeCongress.org