Posted on 09/22/2007 4:20:53 AM PDT by Man50D
WASHINGTON -- Nearly 10,000 people from countries designated as sponsors of terrorism have entered the United States under an immigration diversity program with relatively few restrictions, a report released on Friday said.
The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the State Department's inspector general warned in 2003 that the Diversity Visa Program posed a significant risk to national security and recommended it be closed to people from countries on the U.S. list of state terrorism sponsors.
But four years later, the program remains open to people from those nations and little is known about what becomes of them once they enter the United States, the GAO said.
From 2000 to 2006, the program allowed 3,703 people from Sudan, 3,164 from Iran, 2,763 from Cuba and 162 from Syria to enter the United States and apply for permanent legal resident status, the report said. That totals 9,792 new immigrants.
"We found no documented evidence of ... immigrants from state sponsors of terrorism committing any terrorist acts," said the GAO, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress.
"However ... the Department of Homeland Security, terrorism experts and federal law enforcement officials familiar with immigration fraud believe that some individuals including terrorists and criminals could use fraudulent means to enter or remain in the United States."
The report quoted a U.S. security officer in Turkey as saying it would be possible for Iranian intelligence officers to pose as applicants and not be detected if their identities were not already known to U.S. intelligence.
The GAO said the State Department expressed disappointment with the report's findings and rejected recommendations that the department compile more comprehensive data on fraud activity and formulate a new strategy for combating it.
The Department of Homeland Security did not comment on the report, the GAO said.
The Diversity Visa Program was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 and provides up to 55,000 immigrant visas each year to people from countries with relatively low rates of immigration to the United States. People from 179 countries are eligible to participate this year.
The program has enabled more than half a million immigrants -- mainly from Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia -- to gain permanent legal status in the United States.
But unlike most U.S. visa programs, the diversity program does not require applicants to have family members or employers in the United States to petition on their behalf.
Applicants from countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism normally are granted non-immigrant visas under limited circumstances. But the GAO report said no parallel restrictions exist for diversity visas.
And I thought the govt turning a blind eye at the open borders was bad, now this.
Either idiots, traitors, or both.
It takes a while for them to ripen. Blind devotion to the false ideal of diversity at its finest.
The state department needs a giant flush, and has for decades.
And I thought the govt turning a blind eye at the open borders was bad, now this.....and this is Bush’s fault!!!!!
From corporate America to government to your neighborhood school: Mandatory Diversity = Cultural Suicide.
This is another in a series of attempts to murder America. It’s beyond treason; it’s a betrayal of Western Civilization.
I’ve been thinking that Bush should go to New York and kick that Persian into the hole at Ground Zero like Leonidas did in “The 300.” But somehow, shouting “This is NAFTA!” wouldn’t be quite the same.
Bed bugs.
Shh, you'll upset the Bush 100 percenters who don't like having facts thrown in their emotional based servitude.
We really don’t know much about these people from this article. It’s entirely plausible that most, perhaps an overwhelming majority, of them are just ordinary subjects of these terrorist governments trying to escape terror, fear, and persecution. Most ordinary people in these countries aren’t among the terrorist goon squads who rule through fear.
On the other hand...
But TSA is still strip searching little old ladies at the airport, so everything will be okay.
Lady Margaret Thatcher
Culture, et cetera
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, June 22, 1999
Soviet America
“Britain and America are two of the most tolerant societies in history, having demonstrated that tolerance by welcoming refugees and immigrants from all parts of the world and then turning them into British and American citizens by inducting them into the national community. These immigrants learned our language and adopted our history as their own. Such cultural inclusion is, in fact, the only way to achieve a successful multi-ethnic society. . .
“The concept of multiculturalism threatens to unravel all that good work. Here is a genuinely utopian enterprise, more utopian indeed than the Tower of Babel. . . . The U.S. is moving toward a system in which the government presides over a number of different social groups, some of which have their own language and type of education. This approach undermines social unity and allows construction of a multicultural society, which is the very opposite of America’s previous practice. The government aims to supervise these different groups and keep the peace by redistributing income from one to another.
“Thus the utopia of multiculturalism involves a bureaucratic class presiding over a nation divided into a variety of ethnic nationalities. That, of course, looks awfully like the old Soviet Union. Such a system cannot work, and its failure is likely to inflict great damage on the people, their traditions, and their liberties.”
— Lady Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister, writing on “Resisting the Utopian Impulse” in the spring issue of American Outlook
“immigration diversity program “
All I need to hear........
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