THE CANADIAN BORDER: A WEAK LINK IN AMERICAN SECURITY BY MICHAEL CUTLER
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8607/pub_detail.asp
A news report that appeared in the Washington Times on February 1, 2011 states that the top two senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee have discovered that the federal government has control of only 32 miles of the 4,000 mile border that is supposed to separate the United States from Canada.
Here is the direct quote from this disturbing news report:
Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent and committee chairman, said that the lack of a strong defense along the northern border is “absolutely alarming” and that it leaves the American public “grossly underprotected” from terrorist attacks, drug smugglers and other illegal activity.
“The Department of Homeland Security has concluded that the risk of terrorist activity across our northern border is actually higher than across our southern border,” Mr. Lieberman told reporters, after releasing a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that said DHS could do a better job of border defense. “The report also finds that less than 1 percent of the border is under operational control – less than 1 percent of our northern border.”
The point is that Senators Lieberman and Collins are justified in being concerned about the abject lack of security where our northern border is concerned. Canada represents a different set of challenges to the United States than does Mexico. I can tell you from personal experience having worked in close cooperation with members of the national police of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), that unlike Mexico, the Canadian law enforcement authorities possess a high level of integrity and professionalism. I found the members of the “Mounties” to be every bit as capable and trustworthy as our best law enforcement officers in the United States. However, there are a number of terrorist organizations that have established themselves in Canada and additionally, there are other concerns that our government must have where international borders are concerned.
While I am gratified that at least two of our nation’s one hundred senators have “discovered” the Canadian border, there are ever so many other vulnerabilities that are being ignored by our government on all levels. Some time ago I wrote a commentary about the famous poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” in which I explained that with just three candles, Paul Revere’s compatriots could signal how the British were coming.
I have decided to provide you with a segment of that commentary that illustrates the many ways that we are vulnerable- ways that must be effectively addressed to protect our nation and our citizens.
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower, as a signal light, —
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower, as a signal light, —
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.
Paul Revere had it relatively easy, there were only two possibilities. The British invaders could only come by land or by sea. Today, were Mr. Revere alive and decided to continue his now “low tech” method to communicate how illegal aliens and criminals and terrorists among them were entering the United States, he would need to have his friend place so many lanterns in the North Church tower that the tower would have probably burned to the ground!
Let us consider some of the many ways that illegal aliens and potentially criminals and terrorists, can gain entry into our country and embed themselves once they are here:
Running the Mexican border Running the Canadian border Stowing away on a ship Entering the United States through a port of entry under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program (This enables aliens from 35 countries to enter our country without first applying for and obtaining a nonimmigrant visa.) Procuring a nonimmigrant tourist visa by filing a fraudulent application. Entering the United States with a valid visa and then violating the terms of the visa such as overstaying the period of time for which he was admitted. (US VISIT is not currently able to track the departure of aliens who are admitted for a temporary period.) Procuring a nonimmigrant student visa and then not attending the school for which the visa was issued- (Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, the 19 year old terror suspect who was arrested while plotting to use explosives to destroy an office building in Dallas, Texas is an example of this method of entry and ebedding in our country as was Nada Nadim Prouty, a woman from Lebanon who entered the United States on a student visa roughly 20 years ago who went on to commit immigration fraud and ultimately feloniously acquired United States citizenship. She parlayed her naturalization certificate into a security clearance and a job at the FBI and CIA where she used her clearance to access sensitive databases involving Hezbollah!) Applying for and receiving an immigrant visa based on a fraud marriage. (If successful, this ploy provides the alien with a “green card” and puts him (her) on the path to United States citizenship.) Applying for and receiving an immigrant visa based on a fraud job offer, as is the case with the marriage fraud, the alien would receive a “green card” and would place the alien on the path to United States citizenship. Applying for political asylum by making a false claim of “credible fear.” (Mir Aimal Kansi used this ploy. In January 1993, roughly one month before the first attack on the World Trade Center, he stood outside the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia and opened fire on CIA employees who were arriving for what they had thought would be a routine day at work. Two CIA officials died and three were wounded. Additionally, more recently a 23 year old native and citizen of Eritrea by the name of Samuel Abrahaley Fessahazion, aka “Sami,” aka “Alex” and aka “Alex Williams” was able to easily game the bureaucracy at USCIS and was awarded political asylum on November 13, 2008, just under six weeks after applying for political asylum and falsely claiming that he had been fleeing persecution in Eritrea. In reality- at the time he claimed to have been fleeing persecution in Eritrea he was smuggling illegal aliens from East Africa into the United States through South and Central America and across our nation’s “border” with Mexico!)
The issue is that with the “revelation” addressed in yesterday’s Washington Times, all that Senators Lieberman and Collins are taking note of is our all but nonexistent northern border while ignoring the multitude of other weaknesses in what should be a coherent immigration system.
If, as the saying goes, a chain is as strong as its weakest link, where the immigration system is concerned, all that we have are extremely weak links and missing links!
The goal of illegal aliens who run our nation’s borders is to make their way from the borders of the United States to the cities of our country from coast to coast and border to border. Under the current “leadership” at DHS, an agency I have come to refer to as the Department of Homeland Surrender, once an alien evades the Border Patrol, something that is apparently easier to do on the northern border than on our highly porous southern border, there is little done by our government to seek to apprehend these illegal aliens.
There have been a number of press releases that ICE has issued where the focus on the press release was to boast about how a visa fraud ring or an alien smuggling ring was dismantled by special agents of ICE. Certainly any efforts to accomplish these goals is worthwhile- but then what becomes crystal clear in reading the press releases is that absolutely no effort was reported on how ICE attempted to locate and apprehend the illegal aliens who availed themselves of the services of these criminal enterprises to surreptitiously enter the United States or acquire lawful status in our country by conspiring to commit fraud.
In fact, all too often, we are told that aliens who pay smugglers to enable them to evade the Border Patrol are considered to be “victims” of human trafficking! I can tell you that anyone who pays another person in order to enter into a criminal conspiracy to evade the law is not a “victim” but is, in fact, a “co-conspirator!”
Because of the tactics of Richard Reid, the so-called “Shoe Bomber,” a British national who managed to hide explosives in his shoes and attempted to detonate those explosives while he sat on an airliner flying to the United States, we all have to remove our shoes before we are permitted to board airliners throughout the United States.
We are greatly restricted in terms of the quantity of fluids we can bring onboard airliners. This is because a cell of radical Islamists who were also British citizens, were planning to create binary explosives which entailed a number of the terrorists bringing seemingly harmless liquids onboard the airliner they intended to destroy in midair, and then mixing those liquids once the airplane was airborne- creating a deadly explosive.
However, the fact that neither Reid nor the terrorists who were planning to employ binary explosives did not require visas issued by the United States Department of State in order to board that airliner or seek admission into the United States is not only being utterly ignored, but in the years since those near catastrophes, both the Bush Administration and the current administration have actually expanded the number of countries that participate in this extremely wrong-headed program. Today the citizens of 36 countries are eligible to participate in the Visa Waiver Program!
Senators Collins and Lieberman have finally discovered that the United States has a northern border and that the border exists only on maps! I am completely underwhelmed!
Eighteen years ago, in 1993 two terrorist attacks were carried out in our country by Radical Islamist terrorists that involved the killing of two CIA officers and the wounding of three others in January 1993 by a Pakistani national who was granted political asylum by defrauding the immigration benefits program. One month later the first attack against the World Trade Center left 6 innocent victims dead, hundreds injured and an estimated one half billion dollars in damages inflicted on the World Trade Center Complex that nearly toppled one of the towers that stretched nearly a quarter of a mile into the skies over the City of New York.
More than nine years ago the World Trade Center was reduced to a rubble pile, an airliner was brought down in a field in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon was struck by yet another airliner that was turned into a weapon. Approximately 3,000 innocent people were slaughtered on that day in September, 2001. Thousands of additional people, primarily first responders, were sickened by the toxic substances they inhaled or were otherwise exposed to. Some of these people have also since died while other suffer terribly until this very day.
Yet it is considered a revelation that the two senators who lead the Homeland Security Committee in Washington have finally given a bit of thought to the northern border of the United States?
How many more decades will it take for our alleged “leaders” to consider the other vulnerabilities that our nation has faced for decades? The 9/11 Commission, to which I provided testimony, made it clear that our visa process left us open to vulnerabilities. The 9/11 Commission made it clear that visa fraud and immigration benefit fraud enabled the terrorists to enter our country and embed themselves in our country. That commission also made it clear that the issuance of identity documents such as driver’s licenses that were issued to the terrorists using false names added to their ability to conceal themselves in the United States and hide in plain sight among their intended victims.
Yet these issues have not been addressed in any meaningful fashion.
Finally, I want you to consider that failures to secure our borders and create an immigration system that has real integrity does not just leave us vulnerable to terrorists- a matter of extreme importance and obvious urgency- but those failures have a hugely deleterious impact on nearly every other challenge that confronts our nation today.
These failures not only permit terrorists to gain entry into our country but permit transnational criminals to enter our country and may permit weapons and other contraband including huge quantities of narcotics to enter our country. (It is remarkable that Ms Napolitano is fixated on guns that may be smuggled from the United States to Mexico but is seemingly unconcerned about the potential for guns or other weapons entering the United States from outside our nation’s borders!)
When foreign workers enter the United States they displace American workers who are finding it increasingly impossible to support themselves and their families. It has been estimated that one in five American families now lives at or below the poverty level!
While the United States certainly needs to do much more to secure our borders, it is imperative that the immigration laws of the United States be enforced effectively from within the interior of the United States. Many states are copying the Arizona immigration law that I helped the law firm retained by Governor Jan Brewer to defend. The citizens of our nation are clearly “getting it!”
The time has long since come for the federal government to live up to its absolute obligation of securing its borders against unlawful entry, and honoring those countless millions of lawful immigrants who came to this country from the four corners of our planet to begin their lives anew and thereby create what has come to be known as the “American Dream” by instilling in the immigration system real integrity.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a recognized authority who addresses the implications of immigration on national security and criminal justice. His website can be read here. Each Friday evening from 7 till 9 pm EDT, he co-hosts a radio show called “Bordering on Insanity” on RePatriot Radio. The audience call-in numbers are: 940-825-1041 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 940-825-1041 end_of_the_skype_highlighting and 940-825-1042 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 940-825-1042 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
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