Immigration Reform Is About Stopping Terror, Remember?
As President Barack Obama hauls out what is essentially George W. Bush’s defeated 2007 immigration reform bill, expect a redo of a nationwide fist fight over the wrong problem.
As was the debate then, the coming 2009-2010 contest will be framed as what to do about millions of illegal Mexicans already living in the U.S. It was all about Mexico-U.S. bilateralism, American agribusiness, and questions about anti-Latino xenophobia. But lost in all the indignation about where and when to wave Mexican flags was any consideration of the original catalyst that justifiably set the whole thing in motion: a desire by the president and Congress to stop border infiltrators who speak not Spanish but Arabic. To prevent, as best possible, the next terrorist attack by Muslim extremists coming over an unguarded American border.
Will the coming fight over immigration reform miss this again?
The Bush-Kennedy-Kyl-McCain comprehensive immigration reform bill died a violent political death just a little over two years ago. Senate Bill 1639′s failure was largely due to the most controversial idea in it, which was that it would have granted a sort of temporary legalization — a so-called “Z visa” — to most everyone who’d already sneaked into the country.
Section 601 (h) would have granted a probationary legal status on all of these unauthorized people, mostly some 12 million Mexicans. It would have put them on a path to residency and eventual citizenship once they were fingerprinted and underwent a cursory computerized FBI background check. All hell broke loose over the idea of bestowing such rich rewards on so many Mexicans for doing wrong. There was a lot of back and forth over 601′s likely effect on future immigration patterns between the two countries, the needs of American businesses, the likely administrative burdens, and so forth, as there should have been.
But most of the bill’s architects and debaters in 2007 somehow entirely missed what one might have expected to be regarded an issue of equal footing, given that 9/11 was the instigator of that bill and a slew of other historic border security legislation since the attacks. It is that Islamic terrorists could very well be among those who stole over the border alongside Mexican laborers. As I have reported extensively, thousands of unauthorized immigrants hail from more than 40 Islamic nations. The traffic continues yet, from designated state sponsors of terrorism like Iran and Syria, as well as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Not until June of 2007, when the bill was gasping its last breath, did Arizona Senator John Kyl finally wake up to the fact that Z visas would have granted legal status not only to Mexican laborers but also to anyone who’d made it from one of these countries where Islamic terrorist groups live and train to exploit any system weakness to attack again. Yet remarkably, no one until Kyl at that late hour in 2007 had even entertained the possibility that some of them might try.
The Department of Homeland Security lists more than 40 such “countries of interest,” and when a migrant from one of them gets caught at the border, they do undergo a higher level of investigative scrutiny that goes with the label “special interest aliens.” But statisticians and federal agencies that track illegal immigration say that for every person caught crossing the border, three to six get through to live amongst us. Following that logic and extrapolating from homeland security capture statistics, I postulate that up to 60,000 border jumpers from terrorist-harboring states in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa are probably living somewhere in America.
Kyl told me in a telephone interview at the time that my reporting documenting this traffic inspired him to draft an amendment that would have very pointedly separated out such people from the vast sea of Latino laborers. Kyl told me his amendment would have required much more investigative concentration on people from “countries of interest” before Z visas impart to them legitimacy and freedom of movement:
“It’s frightening. It’s frustrating, because we’re not stopping a lot of this activity today,” Kyl told me. “And I am greatly concerned about the potential for future terrorist activity inside the U.S. I can not imagine why anybody would oppose it, and in fact in some respects it could be deemed as a predicate for doing more.”
What stupid congressional representatives we have.
Kyl’s a good guy, yet he’s unable to think like a normal citizen since being brainwashed in D.C.
Here’s another common citizen’s thought that Kyl et al won’g begin to grasp.
::: Anyone in the middle east able to come up with $20,000 to take the illegal path must be SPONSORED. Arabs aren’t Chinese where the families and the tongs stretch film-thin to get an anchor in place. Their ‘sponsors’, whether they know it, must come from nefarious sources, altruism to an indidual worker bee not existing in the Arab world.
You’ve done a good job, Todd. Please replace the boob on the Hill.
Terrorist is one reason. How about the billions of dollars wasted on illegals for food, medical, education and police. Illegals come over, work at min. pay, start families, use the system for everything they cannot pay for and tax the system for their illegal behavior. They started with nothing and slowly move upward. I come from from a middle class family who tries to get ahead but is beaten down by the system that comforts the illegal. Congress leadership blows.
Not all immigrants become successful Americans, and many have returned to their home countries when it didn’t work out to their expectations. Some immigrants have turned to illegitimate activities rather than return home, and Muslims with imperial Islamic motives have a ready rationale for such activity; all immigrants are not equal. Then again, the current focus in on creating a multicultural nirvana rather than an American monoculture.
Can we just eliminate all government funding for illegal aliens, punish people who hire them or do business with them, seal up the boder and deport them already? Enough is enough. There’s a thousand reasons why we should do all that and zero reasons not to.
One of my best friends was murdered by racist illegal aliens from Mexico 2 years ago only because he was white and his girlfriend was hispanic. Get these low lifes the hell out of here. They drag down our society and are universally hated by Americans.
Blackwater:
“Can we just eliminate all government funding for illegal aliens, punish people who hire them or do business with them, seal up the boder and deport them already? Enough is enough. There’s a thousand reasons why we should do all that and zero reasons not to.
One of my best friends was murdered by racist illegal aliens from Mexico 2 years ago only because he was white and his girlfriend was hispanic. Get these low lifes the hell out of here. They drag down our society and are universally hated by Americans.”
As a legal immigrant, I totally agree with you!
you’d be hardpressed to find legal immigrants that would support amnesty for illegal aliens.
enforced the law, get illegals out and implement the all immigration rules.
While our attention is focused on OBAMACARE, Keep your eyes on the CHESS BOARD. Moving from the Left is a chess piece for Immigration Reform.
Obama’s DHS is quietly moving towards amnesty for illegal immigrants. Amnesty, free health care, and voting rights for 20Million illegals, NEW AMERICANS.
An estimated 8Million of those NEW AMERICANS will be folded into big labor as DNC union member thugs, paid members to VOTE DEMOCRAT in up coming elections. They have a plan for CHECKMATE.
And you wondered why immigration laws have never been enforced! Sign up at …numbersusa.com and stay informed.
KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE CHESS BOARD. DO NOT ALLOW DEMOCRAT FASCIST, SOCIALIST A CHECKMATE USING IMMIGRATION REFORM.
Rampant population growth threatens our economy and quality of life. Immigration, both legal and illegal, are fueling this growth. I’m not talking about environmental degradation or resource depletion. I’m talking about the effect upon rising unemployment and poverty in America.
I should introduce myself. I am the author of a book titled “Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America.” To make a long story short, my theory is that, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.
This theory has huge implications for U.S. policy toward population management, especially immigration policy. Our policies of encouraging high rates of immigration are rooted in the belief of economists that population growth is a good thing, fueling economic growth. Through most of human history, the interests of the common good and business (corporations) were both well-served by continuing population growth. For the common good, we needed more workers to man our factories, producing the goods needed for a high standard of living. This population growth translated into sales volume growth for corporations. Both were happy.
But, once an optimum population density is breached, their interests diverge. It is in the best interest of the common good to stabilize the population, avoiding an erosion of our quality of life through high unemployment and poverty. However, it is still in the interest of corporations to fuel population growth because, even though per capita consumption goes into decline, total consumption still increases. We now find ourselves in the position of having corporations and economists influencing public policy in a direction that is not in the best interest of the common good.
The U.N. ranks the U.S. with eight third world countries – India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia and China – as accounting for fully half of the world’s population growth by 2050. It’s absolutely imperative that our population be stabilized, and that’s impossible without dramatically reining in immigration, both legal and illegal.
If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com where you can read the preface, join in my blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like. (It’s also available at Amazon.com.)
Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph. I just don’t know how else to inject this new perspective into the immigration debate without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.
Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”