Posted on 09/16/2002 3:45:31 AM PDT by Clinton Is Scum
New Malkin Blockbuster Exposes Immigration Chaos
We Must Clean House at the INS
By U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo
This is a truly alarming book, a book Americans of all political persuasions need to read and ponder. If even half of what author Michelle Malkin says is true, the United States is far more vulnerable to terrorist infiltration than our leaders have disclosed.
Paul Revere may have been called an "alarmist," but the British really were coming! And so are the terrorists. They are coming in part because we have allowed them into our country with antiquated immigration laws, ineffectual border controls, laughable enforcement practices, and bureaucratic incompetence that rivals anything in a Peter Sellers movie.
Malkin, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, is a former Los Angeles Daily News and Seattle Times editorial writer whose column appears in Human Events and other papers around the country. She has performed a national service in writing Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores (Regnery), a very compelling account of our failed immigration controls.
We are often told, "American is a nation of immigrants." That is half true: We are a nation of sons and daughters and grandchildren of former immigrants. The difference is important, as no nation of any kind could be forged from a collection of people speaking different languages and possessing divided loyalties.
America was founded by a people of predominantly English heritage, all speaking the same language, most of whom were second, third, or fourth generation Americans.
Jefferson and Adams and Washington were not immigrants, and neither were most of the soldiers who nearly froze to death at Valley Forge.
But it is accurate to say that America has always welcomed immigrants, and we continue to do so today. And we should. The problem is that immigration is no longer a stream that enriches our culture and our economy. It has become a flood. And tragically for both America and the legal immigrants whom we welcome, the flood carries with it a lot of unwanted and even dangerous garbage.
Invasion documents that flood and the flow of terrorists and criminals that come with it.
Lax immigration policies and incompetent enforcement makes it all too easy to get into the United States and to stay here. The picture painted by the author is both alarming and shameful.
From Malkin’s research we learn how the September 11 terrorists used our immigration laws to enter the country and remain here to do their dirty business. We learn how lax border controls continue to plague us, and why the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) continue to follow inept and inadequate procedures.
Malkin documents numerous cases of the total breakdown in enforcement, many of them outrageous. We all read about the two terrorists from the Florida flight school who received their INS visa approval notices in the mail six months after their murderous acts of September 11.
But the real scandal is that such bureaucratic stupidity is routine with the INS. Author Malkin shows why and how this happens, and why it will continue. These outrageous snafus will continue because the INS is the most mismanaged—or unmanaged—agency in the federal government!
Can America afford to have its already weak and overly complex immigration laws enforced by bureaucrats whose antics would remind us of the Keystone Cops if the stakes weren’t so high?
Should we tolerate an agency where federal employees actively conspire in the smuggling of more than 1,000 pounds of cocaine through inspection lanes at the border?
Can America afford an INS that routinely starves the interior enforcement division so that conscientious enforcement agents must routinely allow arrested felons to escape deportation?
Should Americans accept an INS whose employees will take bribes to stamp entry visas illegally?
Can we tolerate a policy and an agency management that do not punish fraud in the petitions for political asylum? Malkin uncovers a report that shows a 90% rate of fraud in the petitions. Yet the petitions are frequently approved despite the known fraud.
Should we tolerate an INS that even after September 11 continued to check passports of foreign tourists traveling on the visa waiver program?
Invasion chronicles dozens of such cases and traces the practices to senior management malfeasance. These "mix-ups" are not just occasional human errors. Unfortunately, they follow a pattern that the General Accounting Office and the INS inspector general trace to a widespread attitude in top management that encourages lax enforcement and fails to follow up on identified problems.
Is the answer to give the INS more money? Give it new technology? Author Malkin shows that money and technology are not the answers. New fingerprint data transmission devices sit unused in dozens of field offices because there was no training and no supervision for their proper use. This kind of waste and mismanagement is common at the INS.
The author makes many recommendations for reform, from tighter visa requirements, realistic border controls, an expanded role for the military, narrower asylum rules. Her foremost recommendation is to "clean house at the INS."
After reading Invasion, you will wonder why it wasn’t done yesterday.
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© Human Events, 2002
He could close the borders if he wanted to--but he won't. He's not even interested in appointing a commissioner who will try to do even a half-@$$ job.
Real border control would mean going against the globalists, the mobs, the triads, the Mexicans, and every other Tom, Dick and Harry who believe that America should be open for rape and the pillaging. If we want real border and immigration control, we're going to have to fight 98% of the politicians.
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