With 150,000 American troops headed for the showdown on the Euphrates, the FBI has suddenly discovered that the real danger to the United States lies right here in River City. It's not pool but as many as 3,000 or more Iraqi nationals already in this country whom the FBI cannot find.
The Washington Post reported this week:
The FBI has launched a concerted search for several thousand illegal Iraqi immigrants who have gone missing while visiting the United States and are among those being sought for voluntary interviews in advance of a possible war with Iraq, officials said.
Although the majority of Iraqi immigrants are viewed as being opposed to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and sympathetic to the United States, federal authorities are concerned that others who have disappeared from the government's view are more likely to be agents of the Iraqi regime or to be allied with terrorist groups, officials said.
["Missing Iraqis Sought, FBI Hunts for Thousands Here Illegally," By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, January 27, 2003]
The larger danger, of course, is the open borders immigration policy and its treasonous architects and lobbyists who have brought us to this situation.
Had the borders been closed permanently after 9/11, had a sane immigration policy been followed for the last 30 years, and had the federal government taken seriously the repeated warnings over those three decades that the border is out of control, we would not now be squatting in terror whether Saddam Hussein's sleeper agents will deploy smallpox in the water supply, nuclear weapons in American sports stadiums or chemical and biological agents in American shopping malls.
"Imagine," President Bush said in his State of the Union address, "those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." [SOTU address text video audio]
Just so—assuming Saddam's intentions are as hostile toward this country as Mr. Bush's are against his.
Iraq may or may not be a serious threat to this country now, but after the war the administration seems hell-bent on waging is launched, you can bet your warheads Iraq will be our enemy.
Even if Saddam doesn't have sleepers already here, it's predictable that Iraqis slavering for vengeance on the Great Satan that attacked their fatherland will take up where Osama bin Laden's suicide squad left off.
Yet the 3,000 missing Iraqis are merely a blip on the government screen. There are also some "50,000 Iraqi nationals who have entered the United States as visitors or refugees within the last decade or so" for whom the FBI is looking as well, and then there are as many as some 300,000 "absconders" of various nationalities, as immigrants who fail to meet deportation orders are called. After Sept. 11, the Post tells us, the government launched a program to locate and deport the 300,000 absconders. To date, "the program has succeeded in removing only about 1,100 people, officials said."
Obviously, foreigners who sneak into the country illegally or stay after their visas have expired cannot be counted against our immigration policy in general. But the larger point is that for the last 30 years neither the federal government nor the Congress nor most of the opinion-forming media have taken immigration problems seriously.
Possessed by the mythology of "a nation of immigrants" and hectored constantly by the sneers and accusations of cheap labor open borders propagandists, the politicians, administrators and journalists have generally failed to perceive much of a problem in chronic lax border security and the permanent presence of millions of illegal aliens.
The security threats we now face are all of a piece with our generally flaccid attitude and policies toward the issue of who can come and who can stay that we have followed for nearly two generations.
It may be that what Mr. Bush calls a "day of horror" will not happen, that none of the missing illegals is a terrorist. But what is frightening is that no one knows—including the FBI and the people in our government who are supposed to know.
"We don't really know how big the problem is or how big the threat might be, but the possibility is real," a "senior counter-terrorism official" told the Post.
If Sept. 11 proved anything, it is that who you let into your country is important—not simply a good way to hire cheap nannies or make you feel toasty about how open-minded you are.
Most Americans knew that already, and most who didn't have learned it since 9/11.
It's too much to expect that the Treason Lobby that never gives up working for open borders and limitless immigration will ever learn it.
But it's not too much to ask that those who make and enforce our immigration laws absorb it as soon as possible.
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