Border Crackdown
No time to be neighborly.
By Timothy P. Carney, a reporter for the Evans-Novak Political Report.
January 24, 2002 9:30 a.m.
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.