RUTHFULLY YOURS

Homeland Security attempted to tackle the immigration crisis by cobbling together a bill, H.R. 399, the Secure Our Borders First Act of 2015 that would purportedly secure the US/Mexican border in increments that would ultimately bring a semblance of security to that dangerous border that at present is little more than a speed bump.

Those increments would be years apart. For example, while this bill requires that a biometric departure system would be a part of the measures to be implemented in conjunction with border security, this component of the bill would not have to be in place for seven years.

Let’s put this lunacy into proper perspective. On December 7, 1941 the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Almost 3,000 Americans lost their lives.

In just 44 months the United States, working with its allies including Russia, an ally of questionable loyalty, we won the war and defeated the Nazis and the Axis Powers. In order to accomplish this incredible achievement, the United States designed and constructed then-revolutionary fleets of a wide array of aircraft and ships. America’s “Greatest Generation” invented and rushed brand new weapons into production, including the world’s first atomic bombs.

America suffered terror attacks twice in 1993 and again on September 11, 2001. The Boston marathon was attacked on April 15, 2013. Those attacks were all carried out by foreign nationals who managed to enter the United States, in one way or another, embed themselves and, in some instances, acquire resident alien status and even United States citizenship by committing fraud.

Border Security and issues about the visa process and the immigration adjudications program were all identified by the 9/11 Commission as being fundamental components of national security.

To date, none of these issues have been dealt with in a meaningful way and H.R. 399 virtually ignores the nexus between failures of the immigration system that were identified by the 9/11 Commission, even though it has been decades since the terror attacks of 1993 and, since 9/11, it has been more than three times as long as it took America to win the Second World War.

Does anyone truly believe that constructing an atomic bomb in 44 months 70 years ago was easier than it would be for the United States, an alleged “super power,” to secure our borders and enforce our fundamental laws today?

There is another disturbing issue: The word “first.”

Abbott and Costello, the famed comedy team is remembered for many funny skits, especially the skit known as “Who’s on first” in which they describe the fielders on a baseball team. The player who is on first has the improbable name of “Who,” while the second baseman is known as “What.” The routine is hilarious.

The issue that the word “first” raises in the ill-conceived Secure Our Border First Act, however, is anything but funny.

If purportedly securing our southern border is “first” the obvious question is: “What is second?”

“Second” in H.R. 399 has nothing to do with enforcement but rather with providing unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status. As I have noted in many of my articles, this is a bad idea for a long list of reasons, but let’s begin with the fact that there is no way to interview these foreign nationals in person. There is no way to conduct a sufficient number of field investigations that fraud would be deterred.

The 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud as the key entry and embedding tactic of terrorists, and not just in the case of the 19 hijackers who so savagely attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, but in the case of other terrorists that the 9/11 report scrutinized.

On November 10, 2014 Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) posted my article, “Lack of Intelligence in Failures to Enforce Immigration Laws,” in which I explained that effective immigration law enforcement could provide our government with opportunities to cultivate informants and cooperating witnesses to help with law enforcement efforts to combat international terror organizations and transnational gangs.

One of the slogans used by the lotteries is, “You’ve got to be in it to win it.” That slogan applies to efforts to identify and dismantle terrorist and criminal organizations where the vital immigration component to these efforts are concerned. Again, the Secure Our Borders First Act does not seek to exploit this important effort.

Additionally, this fatally flawed legislation also does not contain any measures to deal with the fact that the United States does not just have four border states, but 50 border states. As I have noted on numerous occasions, including when I have testified before congressional hearings, any state with an international airport, has access to the tens of thousands of miles of meandering coastline or that lies along the northern and southern borders are all “border states.”

The myriad ways that aliens may enter the United States either in violation of our laws and/or with the intention of violating our laws and the other ways that our immigration system is failing was my focus for my article that FrontPage Magazine posted on July 7, 2014, “Border Security and the Immigration Colander.”

The point I made in that article was that the immigration system is, indeed, a system of many components. Just as it has been said, ”A chain is as strong as its weakest link,” the integrity of the immigration system rests on each and every component of the immigration system.

For example, a terrorist seeking to enter the United States may avail himself/herself of just one of the many opportunities to enter the United States that flaws and vulnerabilities in the immigration and visas systems provides.

A number of years ago I wrote a commentary about the various ways in which aliens, including international terrorists and transnational criminals, may enter our country.

In order to explain the many ways that our nation is vulnerable to the unlawful entry of foreign nationals, I decided to quote the beginning of the famous poem by Henry Wasdsworth Longfellow, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

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.”

Paul Revere had it relatively easy, there were only two possibilities. The British invaders could only come by land or by sea. Three lanterns, at most, would have sufficed to alert the colonists as to how the British were coming.

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, his friends would have required so many lanterns that they would have needed to strip the local hardware store shelves bare of lanterns and would have likely ended up setting the Old North Church on fire.

Let us consider just some of the many ways that illegal aliens and potential criminals and terrorists can gain entry into our country:

1. Running the Mexican border.

2. Running the Canadian border.

3. Stowing away on a ship.

4. Entering the United States through a port of entry under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program. (This enables aliens from 38 countries to enter our country without first applying for and obtaining a nonimmigrant visa.)

5. Procuring a nonimmigrant tourist visa by filing a fraudulent application.

6. Entering the United States with a valid visa and then violating the terms of the visa such as overstaying the period of time allowed. (US VISIT is not currently able to effectively track the departure of aliens who are admitted for a temporary period.)

7. 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 recently while plotting to use explosives to destroy an office building in Dallas, Texas is an example of this method of entry and embedding in our country.

8. 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 or her on the path to United States citizenship and a United States passport.)

9. 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 and a United States passport — potentially in a new name, no less.

10. 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. This was also the tactic used by Ramzi Yousef who participated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and apparently used by the Tsarnaev brothers who attacked the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.)

I have stopped the above list on the tenth item, but there are other ways I have not listed.

If you were attempting to burglar proof you house, I do not think you would be satisfied to simply reinforce your back door and declare your house to be “burglar proof.” You would secure all of your doors, all of your windows, all of your skylights and then have a locksmith install solid locks. You would retain strict control over the keys to those locks and then you would probably install a burglar alarm to automatically summon help if some really persistent burglar managed to break in.

The Secure Our Border First Act would have us believe that all that we need to do is secure the U.S./Mexican border. If they had worked with Paul Revere they would have told him perhaps to only worry about aliens coming by land and forget about the threat of the British coming by sea.

This is beyond myopic and foolish — it is a betrayal of America and Americans.

Time and again the issue of compassion has been raised by the open borders immigration anarchists. They claim that America must be compassionate to millions of illegal aliens who violated our nation’s borders and immigration laws.

These advocates for Comprehensive Immigration Reform claim that many are simply coming to work and send money to their families. Undoubtedly this is true, however, in order to accomplish this goal they often engage in identity theft — thereby wrecking havoc in the lives of those whose identities are stolen. Furthermore, aliens who are engaged in terrorism or who are criminals and fugitives know that they must maintain a low profile. The best way is to take a job that does not call attention to them.

As I have noted in my testimony before congressional hearings, the day before a terrorist engages in an attack he (she) is likely hiding in plain sight by going to work on a job where they have been employed for months or longer.

The problem is that there is no easy way to know who the terrorists are, this was a key point in my January 23, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “Sleeper Cells: The Immigration Component of the Threat.”

The point is that you cannot identify the criminals and terrorists without a score card and, to put it succinctly, “Undocumented Aliens” have no scorecards.

As for the money earned by foreign workers, much of it is sent home. Collectively the remittances (money wired home) last year by foreign workers, both legally working and illegally working in the United States, amounted to more than $125 billion. This is a massive amount of money that was not earned by American workers or by lawful immigrant workers. This is money that was not spent in the United States and money that was not invested in the United States.

Additionally, this is likely only the tip of a huge financial iceberg. Although it is impossible to know the actual totals, a considerable amount of money is sent out of the United States by foreign workers covertly.

The vast majority of these foreign workers displaced American workers and, by flooding the labor pool, also reduced the earnings of American workers who held similar jobs, drove down the wages of those Americans who were fortunate enough to still have jobs.

Aliens who have been granted visas that enable them to work in the United States often manage to game the visa process as do their employers. This is a form of fraud in which foreign workers are hired by companies that claim that they cannot find suitable American or lawful immigrant workers while, in reality, they make certain to intentionally avoid hiring Americans so that they can keep the wages low.

The journalists who pontificate about economic issues on the various television “news” programs often scratch their collective heads in wonderment that middle class wages are actually declining even as costs increase. They announce the latest unemployment statistics that ignore the plight of tens of millions of unemployed and under-employed Americans and then talk about how many new jobs were created during the past month. What they never talk about is the simple fact that more foreign workers enter the United States each month than the number of new jobs that are created.

Politicians promise the folks they hope to persuade to vote for them that they will help create jobs, while ignoring the obvious — enforcement of our immigration laws could liberate jobs. This is a fact that is never discussed by political “conservatives” or “liberals,” for that matter.

Conservatives may frequently make the claim that the government does not create jobs, but they ignored that effective enforcement of our immigration laws could remove illegal aliens from the work force so that American workers could get back to work.

As it now stands, H.R. 399 is an abysmal failure. Go back and rewrite it and get serious.

The Republican Party has gained control of the Senate and increased its control of the House of Representatives. That was months ago. The elections of 2016 are looming large on the horizon with those who would replace Obama lining up and the speculation is beginning as to who will decide to run.

The Democratic Party of Harry Truman and JFK was the party of blue collar, hard working Americans.

It is time to go back to the future.

Here is a novel thought for all who would be President. Take compassion into account and consider the plight of your fellow Americans as you seek to lead our nation. Our immigration laws and our borders exist to protect national security and the lives and livelihoods of American citizens.

Think of the campaign you could craft around that concept.

Imagine what this could do for our nation and our citizens.