You Haven't Read the Best Book Ever Written on American Immigration

In fact, you probably haven't even heard of it.

In decades of studying the subject, the best book I have ever read about immigration, fiction or nonfiction, was written by a semi-obscure poet who shunned attention and died, scarcely noticed by the political world, in 2022.

No, it’s not Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail’s prophetic but controversial take on the future of third-world immigration to the West, which foretold the future in some ways but was also sometimes painted with overly broad brushstrokes.

It’s a novel that, while compared favorably by several contemporary reviewers to Orwell’s Animal Farm, was ignored by the literary mainstream and disappeared largely without a trace.

I can’t remember how I first came upon Paul Lake’s short novel Cry Wolf: A Political Fable, but my experience with it reminded me of the great southern writer Walker Percy’s first encounter with The Pulitzer-Prizew…