JW Marriott argued in Saturday’s WPost that it’s important to water down visa standards to admit more Chinese tourists. Now, that’s no surprise coming from a hotel magnate, but it’s a good example of the frivolity with which we approach the most important defensive tool we have for future security threats. This kind of special pleading for exceptions has become standard and has corrupted the whole process of making immigration policy, just like in the tax law, but with more deleterious consequences. The Visa Waiver Program is a real magnet for this sort of thing, with South Korea recently hiring a lobbying firm to get Congress to include it in the program, while Poland’s president visited Washington two years ago mainly to lobby for the same thing, arguing in effect that we should knowingly allow large-scale illegal immigration from Poland because it had sent some troops to Iraq. And what really ticked me off was a column in a recent issue of the English-language Armenian paper I take that bemoaned the swiss-cheese border with Mexico but argued that the U.S. should loosen standards for visa applicants from Armenia: “Even if the entire remaining Armenian population in Armenia decided to somehow sneak into the U.S., the flow would not even be a ripple compared to the problems that now exist along the southern border.” Somehow, I don’t find that comforting.