After moving last year to the city whose Statue of Liberty beckons the world's downtrodden, he set up a non-profit group, Projectusa, and began a controversial advertising campaign in May that associated traffic congestion with immigration.

`Tired of sitting in traffic?' his bright red billboards asked motorists, `Every day, another 6,000 immigrants arrive.'

The signs, one in Brooklyn and two in Queens, were recently removed but others will come, Nelsen said. Projectusa for now consists of a web site to raise money for more signs.

`The unprecedented level of foreigners arriving in the US every day the web site says.

Nelsen, called a hate monger by critics, says the contract on one sign expired as scheduled but the other two were cut short after local political leaders unhappy aboutthe message applied `backdoor pressure' on the companies that sold the advertising space. He said he has met with lawyers to discuss suing the politicians who he says have infringed on his free speech rights.

`I feel strongly that we don't need any more people in this country,' he said, insisting that his crusade is based not on enmity but on statistical concerns related to overpopulation.

`We can't pretend like there's no problem here,' he told Reuters. `We're doing something that is incredibly horrible to our country. It's a disaster.'

Nelsen said Washington politicians ignore the issue for fear of being labeled racists but he is prepared to force the debate, come what may. `I'm willing to take the blows, and people are responding extremely well to that.'

Of course, not everyone has responded well to Nelsen's message. On August 11, a group of New York politicians including city council speaker Peter Vallone held a news conference at city hall to denounce the billboards.

The borough presidents ofQueens, Brooklyn and Manhattan have also publicly criticised Nelsen and he said others have called him everything from a Nazi to a racist.

Pat Young, chairman of the board at the New York immigration coalition, said Nelsen's billboards were bigoted because they attacked 25 per cent of the state's inhabitants. `Maybe these messages play well in Idaho but I don't think they play well in New York,' he said.

Young said immigrants contribute to US prosperity and enrich New York culturally. `I think that Projectusa is out of touch with the American tradition of welcoming immigrants,' he said, calling Nelsen `essentially a crank' who runs an extremist group.

Current levels of immigration to the United States, which the immigration and naturalisation service says reached about 935,000 last year, are appropriate, Young said. Conceding that only about 660,000 of those came legally, according to the INS, he said the US economy and society can absorb the flow. `The US economy is at its most prosperous in historywith current levels of immigration,' Young said. `They (immigrants) help to provide services that wouldn't be done otherwise.'

But Dan Stein, executive director of Washington-based Fair, a group working to reduce immigration, said Nelsen's message is part of a meaningful political dialogue.