January 06, 2005

Late last summer, residents of western New York found out that, thanks to flawed U.S. immigration policies the notorious Russian mafia had established a foothold in their region.

Russian immigrant Robert Stein—real name is Mikhail Solovey—was arrested by federal agents at Buffalo Niagara International Airport while trying to flee the country. Solovey lived in America for ten years (his last residence was in East Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo) and holds American citizenship (hopefully, not for much longer). He and another Russian immigrant, Serge Ivanov were indicted in New York and California for defrauding the federal government of almost $1.7 million. Solovey is also accused of threatening a witness in Buffalo.

Solovey and another Russian immigrant opened a computer training school in California. The school had no students and the defendants created fake student accounts and submitted fraudulent student loan applications to the Department of Education.

In addition, the US authorities found out that Solovey was a member of a violent Russian gang, nicknamed the Kurganskaya. According to Russian authorities, Mikhail Solovey is a suspect in a kidnapping and murder committed in the Russian Federation in 1999.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Harvey said that Solovey is a dangerous man and the federal magistrate refused to release him on bail.

The Solovey case demolishes the cheap "perfectly-law-abiding immigrant-entrepreneur" myth that is tirelessly peddled by the open borders lobby. But the case also shows the dangerous incompetence of American immigration authorities and the gross ineffectiveness of screening procedures applied to immigrants.

Most likely, Solovey came to America by posing as a Jewish victim of Soviet anti-Semitism. This explains why he changed his name from the Slavic "Mikhail Solovey" to the Semitic "Robert Stein." As I have outlined elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians used fraudulent documents to pose as Jews in order to get into the U.S and Israel Dozens if not hundreds of them have turned out to be street thugs, outlaws, and even neo-Nazis (in Israel!) .

The simple fact is that the U.S. has enough homegrown American criminals. The last thing it needs is to import foreign ones.

It's about time American authorities and lawmakers removed their politically-correct spectacles and started putting the interests of their own people first.

Eugene Girin [email him] immigrated (legally!) from the Republic of Moldova in 1994 at the age of 10. He is currently studying political science in Rochester, New York.