Our Borders Are Just a "Speed Bump" for Al Qaeda

By Michael Cutler

I watched the ABC News report on the possible infiltration of an al Qaeda cell into the U.S. The report is more than a little disquieting, not only because of the fact that our officials apparently believe that our nation may be attacked within a short time frame, but because our government has done virtually nothing to prevent this from happening! How will our officials prevent these terrorists from entering our country? If they are here, how will be identify them and seek to arrest and neutralize them before they attack us?

Let me make this as clear as I can. Our nation's borders barely represent a speed bump to millions of illegal aliens who simply want to work in violation of law in the United States. How much of a deterrent would those borders be to terrorists who are determined to enter our country to attack us? Additionally, our immigration bureaucracy is so inept and incompetent that, according to the GAO, last year the USCIS claims to have lost more than 111,000 immigration files relating to aliens seeking a wide variety of immigration benefits, including some 30,000 who applied for United States citizenship. Incredibly, USCIS adjudicated those critical applications without the related files! Senators Grassley of Iowa and Collins of Maine requested that the GAO conduct and investigation into this madness. You can read Senator Grassley's press release concerning the report here, and you can read the actual GAO report here.

The consistent failures to secure our borders, create an immigration system that has meaningful integrity and effective efforts to enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States all contribute to our vulnerabilities. It is also important to understand that while everyone who understands law enforcement agree that the cultivation of informants is an important component of counterterrorism, the most effective way of cultivating informants within alien communities is to enforce the immigration laws and then provide opportunities to those aliens who violate the laws to become informants and seek their assistance in identifying terrorists as well as other relevant intelligence.

Rather than focusing on methodology for keeping the terrorists out (if they are not already here), it would appear that our officials such as Michael Chertoff accept the fact that terrorists can easily cross our borders and simply move on to the next issue - how to minimize the damage they do within our country!

The administration and members of the Senate had been pushing for a Guest Worker Amnesty Program in the guise of a bill that would have granted official identity documents to millions of illegal and undocumented aliens whose nationalities as well as their names are unknown and unverifiable. Fortunately this bill is dead, for now, but I am concerned that Capitol Hill may well try to resurrect this bill yet again. I came to refer to the last version of this bill as the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007."

There are so many ways that terrorists can easily circumvent our nearly nonexistent efforts at securing our border that I understand why Secretary Chertoff seems to believe that we cannot stop the bad guys from entering our country, but this is not the way it can or should be! Our borders needed to be secured after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The Visa Waiver Program needed to be terminated after the attacks of 9/11; instead, President Bush, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, and the other current and former members of the administration have been clamoring for an expansion of the disastrous Visa Waiver Program! Our nation currently permits corporations to make national security decisions for the United States! As a consequence of this lunacy, "We the People" may pay for this with our lives!

Our government is supposed to be "Of the people and for the people." Apparently this is not the case!

We the People need to make our concerns heard in Washington. It is time to remind the members of Congress that they work for us! If only 14% of the American people approve of the way that Congress does its job, then it is time that the 86% who do not approve call their senators and members of the House of Representatives tomorrow morning!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

TrackBack