The New York Sun is running a story (no link available) this weekend about a mosque director arrested on charges that “he helped more than 200 aliens sneak into or stay illegally in America.”

The alleged offenses apparently revolve around the INS’ Religious Worker Program. According to the Sun, the “program allows aliens with religious training and experience to obtain work visas and green cards if religious organizations sponsor them”. It would be interesting to know more about this program, which is justified, presumably, by the assumption that the presence of additional “religious workers” in this country must automatically be a force for the good. That may or may not have been true in the past, but in an age when the US is threatened by an ideology with, to put it mildly, a strong religious component, it is clearly no longer the case.

It’s time for a closer look at this program.