Just more of the same

Within the past 3-weeks, illegal immigrants have killed 9 people in drunk-driving incidents or plain out murdered Americans:

Driving:

Four year old Christopher “buddy” Rowe in California

Twenty-three year old Matthew Denice in Massachusetts

Four people in Texas in a single traffic incident

Murders:

One each in Oregon, Texas, and Michigan

What are these people doing here?

Now comes word of another Obama relative, Kenyan illegal Onyungu Obama, the President's uncle, arrested for drunk-driving in Framingham, MA. Two years ago, a judge allegedly ordered him deported. Guess he didn’t get the message. He does, however, have a Mass driver's license and social security card. Imagine my surprise.

It’s reported that when offered a free phone call for assistance, he asked for the White House. Why not? After all, Obama’s Kenyan aunt, Zeituni Onyangu had also been slated for deportation, appealed, and won permanent residence. She’d been living in a South Boston project for years, drawing disability and welfare.

Obama has retained prominent counsel in Cleveland immigrant lawyer, Margaret Wong. Meanwhile, the White House has refused to comment.

A few weeks ago, the Obama administration announced it would now prioritize deportation of those with criminal records. Does that include drunk drivers like Uncle Onyangu?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

Backdoor amnesty granted by Obama administration

On Thursday, with the Congress out on vacation and the media and public preoccupied with the dismal economy and an approaching weekend, the White House announced a new immigration policy. It had been rumored to be coming down the pike several months ago by conservative adversaries. Then the shoe dropped, Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, announcing that “non-dangerous” immigrants will be allowed to remain in the U. S., the priority shifting to deporting criminals. Some 300,000 pending cases involving illegals will be reviewed and those absolved allowed to apply for work permits. Certainly this change represents a political plus for an embattled president, who has been losing voter support and could use the shoring up of the Latino vote as he heads towards next year’s elections. For the nation, I believe the policy does an injury with ongoing consequences.

1. Immigration reform should be legislated by the Congress. Yes, the Congress has been reluctant to act and just recently voted down the Dream Act. That doesn’t justify the administration circumventing the Congress to get its way. Had the Congress not acted at the last hour to lift the debt ceiling, it’s conceivable the President might have invoked the 14th Amendment to get around Congress. I think you see where I’m going. Where does it end? Policy shouldn’t be made by fiat.

2. Some argue in favor of this change. Principally, why should young people who have come here early, some serving in our military; others now in college, be sent out of the only country they really know? Truth is, not all illegals came here as youngsters. Anyway, if illegals are inconvenienced, then this is their fault for jumping the queue. We do have an immigration process that allows some 500,000 Mexicans, for example, to enter our country legally each year. It’s unfair, as some of them have said, to let those who’ve jumped the line now stay.

3. And then there’s our unsettling economy, possibly about to go back into recession. Even when legal immigrants come here, a third end up on public support. Many choose to reside in states like California and New York, states riddled with huge public debt. Recently, California governor, Jerry Brown granted in-state tuition rights to illegals, this in the most financially troubled state in the country. The story repeats itself elsewhere amidst the political pandering, the public be damned.

4. Some argue that immigration reform is what the public wants. Thus, this is a good move on the part of the Obama administration. Yes, most of us do want immigration reform, but one not involving massive amnesty for an estimated 11 to 20 million undocumented. Think about the discrepancy in those numbers. We don’t even know how many illegals are in our country. I fault the Republicans as well as Democrats, however, as several years ago there was a bill in Congress to lower the number of immigrants admitted and employ criteria resembling Canada’s point system in exchange for amnesty. Borders would be enforced. Then again, maybe the Republicans were on to something—that administration promises were simply no more than means to an end. Enforce the borders now, and we’ll talk of reform. As is, the promised wall has yet to be completed, employers who hire illegals aren’t scrutinized or are granted minimal fines for violations if caught, and the government has steered away from mandating the very reliable E-Verify procedure to ascertain eligibility for employment.

5. The fundamental flaw in the administration’s new backdoor amnesty approach is that it’s likely to exacerbate the flow of illegals from all over the world into the U.S. After all, unless you get into serious trouble with the law, you’re safe. Hey, bring the family! By the way, when we talk of amnesty, we forget that family members can then come too. 11 million, the lesser figure, suddenly swells to 40 million residents at the very least, and you want to give these people work permits as well when millions of own people can’t find work? Suddenly people who don’t belong here are their competitors. 9.1 percent of our working population is currently out-of-work; more so our Black brothers and sisters at 16 percent. I tell you, we’re playing with social dynamite.

6. By the way, our biggest problem isn’t with Latin Americans wading across the Rio Grande. It’s with those overstaying their visas. The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy will soon be upon us. 18 of its 19 perpetrators had overstayed their visas. Ten years later, we still don’t have a handle on overstayed visas as I reported in an earlier post. But then, who the hell cares? Certainly not the Obama administration.

Can it happen again?

 

We’re now coming up on the 10^th anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11.  Yet in that interval, very little has changed.  We've little control of our borders and we remain lethargic in implementing monitoring of overstays.  Given our recent history of home-grown terrorists, we're likewise negligent in screening applicants for immigration.

For example, just recently we’ve learned that the immigrant hotel maid accusing International Monetary Fund president Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape may be implicated in a web of lies.  She’s now admitted to lying on her application for refugee status, claiming she was ganged raped.  In a recorded conversation with her boyfriend in an Arizona jail two days after her accusations, she commented, “This person is rich and there’s money to be made.”  It’s also reported she's stashed money in several banks, some of it drug dealer money and given false information to the government on her taxes. http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/07/02/new.york.dsk/

Hey, how does someone like this, a rogue liar, not get checked out before being granted asylum?  Strauss-Kahn, however, was compelled to resign as head of the International Monetary Fund and has possibly lost a chance to become France's next President.

Two weeks ago here in KY, the FBI took into custody two Iraqis who had also been granted refugee status.  They had been caught in a sting, trying to provide material support to al Qaeda in Iraq.  One of them bragged that he had employed IEDs against Americans in Iraq.

While we hear much about illegals flooding across the Mexican border, the truth is their numbers are dwarfed by those who simply overstay their visas.  Of the estimated 12 million illegals in the U. S., half of them have done so.  Fact is, it’s now the favored method of sneaking-in.  It sure beats swimming a river, squeezing through a tunnel, or paying a ”coyote,” only to be abandoned in the Arizona desert with the border patrol at your heels.

Unfortunately, the Congress and the Naturalization and Immigration Service have made jumping the queue enticingly easy.  Once foreigners are in our country the INS lacks any mechanism to check on where they are or if they've left.  As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington has put it, “We certainly don’t know who they are or where they are.”   http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0205/p01s03-usju.html

The danger this leads to in staging an attack on the homeland is obvious.  The events of 9/11 were perpetrated by 19 terrorists, all of them granted visas.  Four of them took flight lessons in the U. S., three of them lacking proper visas for doing so.  Two of them had overstayed their visas.

According to the 9/11 Commission, all 19 used driver’s licenses for ID purposes to avoid showing their passports and possibly raising suspicion.  Licenses were procured from VA (7), FL (13), CA (2).  And yet we have advocates of granting driver’s licenses to illegals like 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, arguing we need to ”bring these people out of the shadows.”  Sounds like political pandering to me.

As early as 1996, Congress actually passed a law requiring the INS employ a “rigorous” system to track foreigners entering and leaving the U. S.  Congress, however, delayed its implementation due to protests from border towns, complaining it would interfere with commerce.  Under its provisions, it would call for a swipeable ID card to record entering and leaving the U. S.

Again, the situation isn’t as simple as it sounds.  In any given year, some 30 million visas are issued.  Just recently, the Government  Accounting Office indicated a backlog of 1.6 million overstayed visas, leading Sen. Joe Lieberman, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to comment,  “It is simply unacceptable that we are still systematically unable to identify people who overstay—some of whom may be terrorists . . . .”

The resources, however, needed to capture a relative few are enormously cost prohibitive and unlikely to secure approval in a down economy and a Congress embroiled in a heated budget debate.  At best, the Homeland Security Department has settled to prioritize the more egregious cases.  http://www.globalvisas.com/news/us_struggles_with_backlog_of_overstayers3067.html

If we’re derelict in monitoring overstays, we’re far too lenient in screening would-be immigrants. Consider a few instances supplementing those I mentioned at the outset with regard to the Strauss-Kahn accuser and the two Iraqis picked-up in KY:

Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized citizen, who attempted a car bombing in Times Square in May 2010.

The Lackawanna Six involving six Yemeni-Americans in 2001, who confessed to providing support to al Qaeda interests in Afghanistan.  Some had participated in al Qaeda training camps.

The Fort Dix Plot, involving six foreign born Muslims, four of whom were illegal immigrants.  In 2007 they had plotted to kill soldiers at the army base.

Mohammed Osmud Mohamud, who in November 2010 attempted to ignite a car bomb during a Christmas tree lighting tree ceremony.

I’m aware we have our own American terrorists who represent the extremes of the ideological perspective, Left and Right, but I’m dealing here with lapses in security in the context of immigration and visa monitoring. 

In my view, it’s more productive to pursue intelligence gathering as a preventive to domestic terrorism, whether by foreigners or Americans.  Under the Patriot Act, provision has been made to allow greater surveillance.  Unfortunately, the Patriot Act has been increasingly under attack by liberals who see it as an infringement on civil liberties, or invasion of privacy rights.  The ACLU is adamantly opposed to some of its provisions, recently renewed for the next four years, and they have a point in that one of its provisions allows for the government to seize the personal records of any American without concrete evidence of conspiracy.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-berlin/patriot-act-government-secrecy_b_888185.html

Still, since 2001 no attack on our homeland has occurred, and thus the threat has receded for many, a telling irony to the Patriot Act’s success in preempting another attack on the homeland.

Again, we need to beef up our borders as well, since they provide a funnel into the   U. S. for terrorists.  Proposals such as Amnesty and the Dream Act are misguided, since they serve as incentives when there should be deterrents.

Unless we’re more scrupulous in handling visas, controlling our borders and screening immigrants, we will surely increase the likelihood of another 9/11, though the targets may change:  perhaps a train, a shopping mall, a crowded stadium of unsuspecting fans watching a World Series or Super Bowl.

As Thomas Jefferson, one of my heroes, famously said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”