Immigration Reform Is About Stopping Terror, Remember?
But alas, Kyl’s amendment — and the ideas about immigration reform actually addressing terrorism — was overcome in the cacophony of the national screaming match about Mexican laborers and American agribusiness. And in any event, the whole bill died a short time later. Kyl’s amendment was never proposed. With it went the only token ode to the lessons of 9/11.
As the Obama administration moves forward with the next incarnation of the Z visa, the stories of Wshyar Mohammed-Salih, Majeed Aziz-Beirut, and Awat Mahmood-Qadir are worth considering. The three Muslim Kurds stole over the Texas border on March 12 after a very long — and illegal — journey from their hometowns of Irbil and Kirkuk. The Iraqis got caught almost immediately, still dripping wet from the float across. I recently interviewed all three Iraqis in an Immigration Customs Enforcement lockup in Pearsall, Texas.
I’m the only reporter who asked.
They told me they paid a Turkish smuggler $20,000 each for an all-inclusive package that included Mexican tourist visas, airfare through Dubai and France to Mexico City, lodging, and finally a Mexican coyote smuggler who got them to the Rio Grande near the Los Ebanos ferry crossing. The route they took was well worn, their smuggler clearly in business for years tapping into high demand among Iraqi war refugees and anyone else from the region who had money to pay for the same visas and trip to the Texas border.
They told me they decided to come to America the illegal way because of various troubles in their hometowns and a backlog of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis seeking resettlement visas that American authorities only recently started grudgingly granting a few thousand at a time, for security reasons. Understandably, American authorities have worried about granting visas to Iraqis en masse because some among them might be insurgents and terrorists hoping for targets softer than well-armed U.S. Marines trained to shoot back.
“I know America has brought a lot of of Iraqis here to live,” Majeed told me during our interview. “I want to be one of them.”
Fair enough. And no surprise, at least to me. I found nothing to indicate that Majeed or his two traveling companions were insurgents or terrorists. In fact, FBI sources told me they were investigated and deemed benevolent economic migrants. Most are. The three are applying for political asylum.
But those about to draft and debate the next generation of a Z visa ought to consider that terrorists with $20,000 can swim the Rio Grande just as well.
With no press attention about their crossing, it’s as if the three Iraqis had never done so at all. Ghosts not worthy of serious inquiry. Clearly, eight years of uneventful peace, with no terror attack on the homeland, has muscled out of public discourse the terrorist threat posed by this traffic.
In the coming year, we’ll be hearing a lot about our Latino neighbors and Mexicans who sneaked over and put down roots. People will trot out the term “border security” and let it hang out there like it has something to do with Latino-related border crime, or drug warring, or gun trafficking and the like.
But Kyl’s stillborn amendment from 2007 should have its day in the sun.
Because a handful of terrorists, as we now all know, portend an impact on our national budget, military, foreign policy, and inner national psyche that at least equals, if not far exceeds, the collective impact posed by millions of Mexicans living here.
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”