|
 imothy
McVeigh was the exception. The rule is that Americans don't try
to commit terrorist acts here; foreigners do.
As long as
foreign terrorists lack long-range missiles, they need to first
cross our borders before they can kill our people. Given that the
primary justification for any U.S. war is to keep Americans safe
from foreign attack, the front line of our current struggle must
be our border. But our government has demonstrated a willful negligence
when it comes to fighting on that front.
Take the story
of Abu Mezer — which begins with his gaining a visa to Canada,
and ends with a police shootout in the Brooklyn apartment he had
turned into a bomb factory. In between, law enforcement had several
opportunities to detain Mezer or send him back to the Middle East.
Mezer's first
two run-ins with the cops had been in Canada — for stealing
a credit card and getting into a fight. On probation in Canada,
he walked through the British Columbia woods to enter the U.S. illegally
through its porous northern border. Park officials found him suffering
of hypothermia and returned him to Canada — just as border
guards would five days later, when he tried to jog across the border.
The next time
U.S. authorities found Mezer, he had already made it past the gates.
He was arrested at bus station. He was released on bail, but before
his trial, someone called the cops on his bomb factory. The shootout
followed, and Mezer was arrested and sentenced to life in prison.
Mezer's story
is not unique. How could it be, given that — according to Northeastern
University — there are 11 million illegals currently in the
United States? Some of them get deported, but, as has been reported
here, some 314,000 "deported" aliens are still in this
country.
INS agents
have admitted that they lock up until deportation only those illegals
who have committed violent felonies. Unfortunately, they don't hold
onto all of the felons. Among the ones that got away is Rafael Resendez-Ramirez.
Resendez was first arrested, at 17, for trespassing in Michigan.
Officials sent him back to Mexico. No one knows how many times he
crossed the border illegally over the next 25 years, but the Justice
Department inspector general reports that Border Patrol agents caught
and released him eight times.
Most Americans
know Resendez as the railroad killer. He has been linked to nine
murders in the U.S. and was sentenced to death in Texas. At the
time of his last release by the INS, he had already been charged
with murder.
It is now widely
known that two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and
Nawaf Alhazmi, were on a CIA watch list of suspected terrorists.
But surely, post-September 11, we know who is coming across
our borders? Sadly, no.
Between late
October and December 1, 2001, according to a congressional source,
7,000 men entered the United States from countries where al Qaeda
is active.
You would think
that terrorists from these countries would be kept out. But
that's not what the law says. Before September 11, the federal law
specifically stated that "mere" membership in a terrorist
organization would not disqualify a visa applicant. That law remains
unchanged today.
Moreover, according
to the official State Department manual on visas, "Only statements
that directly further or abet the commission of a terrorist act
may properly constitute a basis for denying a visa."
In other words,
you can advocate terrorism and still be eligible for a visa. A member
of who Hamas publicly declares, "I think they should knock
down the Sears Tower, too," could still legally enter the U.S.
A particularly
eager federal agent could attempt to build a case that these two
bits of information together should disqualify an applicant —
but that's assuming that the applicants get screened thoroughly.
Every week, 5.8 million foreigners enter the U.S. legally. (That
doesn't include American citizens returning home or illegal immigrants
crawling through our northern woods.) The many different agencies
that handle immigration lack the time and the resources to look
closely enough at applicants to determine who is or is not a terrorist.
Nor do the
2,000 INS field workers have the time to hunt down all the "deported"
aliens still at large. The border patrol is too undermanned to patrol
the border; the INS has to limit inspection time to 13 seconds per
car at legal border crossings. Between midnight and 8 a.m., many
entry points along the northern border are guarded by traffic cones.
And of course, for thousands of miles, there is nothing at the border
at all.
Some people
have called for beefing up the INS. Anyone who's watched Washington,
however, knows that increasing an agency's funding will not increase
its performance. An INS/State Department big enough to handle 11
million illegals, 300,000 deportees and 5.8 million legal immigrants
per week would collapse under its own weight.
We must come
to grips with the fact that the current volume of immigration is
simply unsustainable.
To keep out
those who would kill us, we have to know who's coming into our country.
This requires close screening of everyone who tries to come in legally
— and that close tabs be kept on them after they do. This can
only be accomplished with a drastic reduction in volume.
At the borders,
we will need our best technology and perhaps some military presence
at certain crossing points.
The chances
that these badly needed reforms will be enacted are not very good.
President Bush is dedicated to strengthening ties with Mexico and
increasing his share of the Hispanic vote, and fears that reducing
immigration would upset Mexican president Vicente Fox or Hispanic
political and community leaders.
It may be tempting
to crackdown specifically on non-Western immigrants — a sort
of North American Free Borders agreement. Unfortunately, Latin American
illegals cannot be exonerated from September 11. To see why, try
following the tracks of the Flight 77 hijackers. Their footprints
lead through a 7-Eleven parking lot inhabited by illegal immigrants
from El Salvador, who were looking for day labor fixing fences or
mowing lawns — but who were willing as well, in early August,
to get false I.D.s for a couple of Arab men. And the end of their
journey is still easy to see: a gaping hole in the corner of the
Pentagon.
The illegal-immigrant
community in Northern Virginia provided the hijackers with the infrastructure
they needed to move about the country with ease. In the phrase of
Human Events editor Terence P. Jeffrey, the Salvadoran illegals
in Northern Virginia served as a "human camouflage" for
the September 11 terrorists. The network amounts to being an Underground
Railroad for illegal immigrants — which doesn't discriminate
against terrorists.
As a crater
in New York and 3,000 dead show us, the issue of immigration in
this country is no longer just a battle about the figurative death
of the West — it's about the actual murder of Americans. The
long debate over whether mass immigration has a positive or negative
effect on the U.S. economy or American culture is largely beside
the point. This is no longer about labor or culture. It's about
life and death.
|
