Are We Allowing Iranian Terrorists to Infiltrate While We Plan for War?

By Michael Cutler

Representatives of Iran have said that while the United States may possess the ability to inflict pain on Iran, Iran has the ability to cause pain to the United States. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the Pentagon has been planning for war with Iran for some time. For quite some time the analysts on television spoke about the potential that Iran could send insurgents into Iraq to attack our soldiers. However, most recently, there has been real speculation that if our nation was to launch a military action against Iran to prevent its nuclear program from succeeding, that Iran would send terrorists to the United States to attack our nation within our own borders.

But our nation has a real problem in learning from history. In the late 1970's, when the United States embassy was seized in Tehran, the former INS was tasked with searching for citizens of Iran who were illegally in the United States. I was a special agent of the former INS back then and was one of the many special agents who was assigned to that project. We quickly found out that we did not possess the capability to carry out this essential mission. Our databases were found lacking and we lacked an adequate number of agents to get the job done. We were only able to identify a small percentage of the total number of Iranian citizens believed to have been in our country back then. It was, perhaps understandable that we had a problem coping with that assignment, then. The former INS had never before been tasked with such an assignment.

Today the situation is far different. We saw our deficiencies that we had in determining who was here and we have already suffered several terrorist attacks.

Our nation has begun implementing a program called US VISIT that is supposed to track all nonimmigrant aliens entering our country but it is still not a completed system and we certainly lack an adequate number of special agents at ICE to get the job done. If you couple this with the deplorable situation along our nation's borders, you realize how our politicians, in pandering to the open borders lobby has left our nation vulnerable to the potential that terrorists could cross our borders as easily as ... dishwashers! In fact, it is entirely possible that such terrorists are already here, within our nation's borders, hiding in plain sight, obtaining menial jobs as dishwashers, cab drivers or other such "under the radar" workers. Immigration is a system and the system lacks the resources to do the most basic job, secure our borders and prevent individuals from gaming the system to obtain immigration benefits that they should not receive. The GAO recently published a report that makes it clear that our national security is at risk because USCIS, the division of DHS that adjudicates applications for immigration benefits, is beset by fraud and corruption.

These issues needed to be addressed yesterday- yet the administration is pushing as hard as ever for a guest worker program that would inundate an already crumbling bureaucracy with more applications than it could possibly manage. Our nation's security is on the line, especially as the situation in Iran continues to deteriorate yet the administration is apparently unwilling to address the component of national security that would make the most commonsense and has the most direct bearing on our security and, indeed, survival; the securing of our borders and the restoration of integrity to the immigration system.

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