Unable to shut up about the glories of uncontrolled mass immigration, the Open Borders lobby ever since Sept. 11 has periodically tried to tell us that the 19 foreign terrorists who entered the United States legally weren't really immigrants. Therefore, you see, mass immigration is OK. Like everything else the Open Borders crackpots claim, this is wrong.
But that still doesn't mean they'll shut up. In a recent letter to National Review, Open Borders zealot Daniel Griswold [VDARE.COM note: click here for Craig Nelsen's account of debating Griswold] of the Cato Institute, the Taj Mahal of the Open Borders cult, insisted that none of the 19 terrorists of Sept. 11 was an immigrant.
"They were all here on temporary 'non-immigrant' tourist or student visas. They never applied to the INS for green cards or any other permanent status."
I guess we're supposed to feel a lot better.
He's correct in only the most technical and legalistic sense. In the first place, a good number (as many as 40 percent, the INS has estimated) of all the illegal immigrants currently here entered the country legally—and just never went home after their visas expired. Since neither most of them nor the 19 killers of Sept. 11 ever intended to go back to the old sod, it requires just a wee bit of snake oil to claim with a straight face that they're not really immigrants—foreigners who come here with the intent to stay.
In the second place, the Open Borders lie has now been put to what should be its final rest by a comprehensive report issued last week by the Center for Immigration Studies. Based in Washington, the Center and its authoritative reports on various aspects of immigration are far more patient than I am with the fools, frauds and outright traitors of the Open Borders mafia, but its patience pays off with facts and statistics that raise some hard questions about our immigration policies.
"The Open Door: How Militant Islamic Terrorists Entered and Remained in the United States, 1993-2001" by the CIS's research director, Steven Camarota, shows how the 48 foreign-born radical Muslims who have been implicated in terrorism in this country since 1993
"have manipulated almost every possible means of admission to the United States: Some have indeed come as students, tourists, and business travelers; others, however, have been Lawful Permanent Residents and naturalized U.S. citizens; while yet others have snuck across the border, arrived as stowaways on ships, used false passports, been granted amnesty, or been applicants for asylum."
At the time they committed their acts of terrorism, the report found, 16 of the 48 terrorists were here on temporary visas (mainly as tourists), 12 were illegal aliens and 17 were Lawful Permanent Residents or had actually been naturalized as U.S. citizens. Even if you don't count the Sept. 11 19 as "immigrants," there are plenty who are immigrants in every sense of the word who have perpetrated terrorism. The point is that mass immigration makes it easier for terrorists to get into the country and carry out their attacks.
That ought to be obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense, but it quite sails over the heads of the Open Borders nuts.
Not only does anyone with any common sense grasp that mass immigration and the lax border security it encourages allow terrorists to enter the country easily, but so does a gentleman not usually accused of having much common sense: Osama bin Laden. The CIS report cites a story from the San Francisco Chronicle (Nov. 21, 2001) about the confession of yet another terrorist immigrant, naturalized citizen Khalid Abu al Dahab, who helped bomb U.S. embassies in Africa.
As the CIS report quotes the Chronicle story,
"Dahab said [Osama] bin Laden was eager to recruit American citizens of Middle Eastern descent,"
and in meetings with him and a co-conspirator in the 1990s
"emphasized the necessity of recruiting as many Muslims with American citizenship as possible into the organization."
Probably Bin Laden, like many foreigners, doesn't quite grasp how easy it is for aliens to sneak into this country illegally.
But no matter how easy it is, it's even better if the terrorists are already here, and better still if they're legal U.S. citizens.
With the help of the Open Borders lobby over the last 30 years, that's exactly what's occurred.
When Vice President Cheney tells us "The prospects of a future attack on the United States are almost certain. Not a matter of if, but when"; when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says almost the same thing, and FBI Director Robert Mueller says suicide bombings in the United States are "inevitable," the terrorists they're talking about are probably the very kind of people that Osama bin Laden was so eager to recruit in the last decade—the very same kind of people that the Open Borders lobby for decades has told us will make such great Americans.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
May 30, 2002
