Posted on 09/26/2001 6:20:26 AM PDT by The Energizer
SECURITY FROM TERRORISM BEGINS WITH SECURING OUR BORDERS
Georgie Anne Geyer
WASHINGTON -- It has now been revealed that one major reason four of the hijackers were able to move around this country with such apparent ease in the weeks before the Pentagon crash was the fact that they had valid Virginia driver's licenses. How very curious.
As it turns out, they were not American citizens. They didn't even live in Virginia. But our generally sloppy bureaucrats and avid pro-immigration multiculturalists have been busy-busy making this a country "open" to everyone. They had put through a law in Virginia that allows people to get driver's licenses without providing passports or leases to verify their identity and residence.
And Virginia's "strict." In such states as California, you don't have to speak English, and driving tests are given in multiple languages, although the traffic signs ae not. Virginia state officials say they will change these rules. It's a little late, of course. They weren't about to change them in August, when an Arlington notary public was convicted of immigration fraud for helping thousands of out-of-state illegal immigrants obtain those same Virginia driver's licenses that facilitated the terrorists.
Remember the case of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian "holy man" who was behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993? In the years preceding that "warning," his pictures were on newspapers' front pages all over the Arab world. But when he went to the U.S. consulate in Sudan, they just stamped his visa. "Your name's Beelzebub? Go right ahead." I'm surprised they didn't award him a ticket to New York and a few nights at the Marriott.
Suddenly, many people are belatedly aware that our immigration authorities, under the sway of self-interested, pro-immigration legal groups and multilingual academic groups, have bared the nation to its enemies. Headlines in The Washington Post read, "Tougher Enforcement by INS Urged" and, in The New York Times, "Identify Yourself: Who's American?" A Washington Times' headline this week: "U.S. open borders to Canada, Mexico a thing of the past."
And Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the capable diplomat who was head of the American anti-terrorism commission that warned against such attacks as the one on Sept. 11, lists immigration reform as one of three areas of concern, after airline safety and intelligence failures.
"My view is we have to review the entire border process," he told a group at the U.S. Institute of Peace last week. "One of the terrorists was here on a student visa. He never even showed up at the institute that petitioned the U.S. government for his visa -- and the institution never reported to the Immigration and Naturalization Service about him."
The increased emphasis on security from terrorism tends to focus on complex technology and on infiltrating movements overseas. But what was lacking in the years leading up to Sept. 11 was the moxie to know that we soon won't have a "nation" if anybody in the world can simply wander into it, as well as the street sense to realize that "cultural differences" have meaning -- and consequences.
Intricate satellite intelligence and infiltrators weren't necessary for predicting these attacks. All we required were a few people capable of reading human nature and analyzing the trajectory of events that had already happened. The first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993, the 1996 Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the aborted "millennium plot" to bomb the Los Angeles Airport in 1999, and the brazen attack last year on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen: All proclaimed that the radical Islamic groups behind them were leading up to something even bigger.
To restore security and to rekindle this common sense, then, start with such plebeian protections as driver's licenses, passports, student visas, border security, serious citizenship training and, most probably, a national identity card of the sort that every European country has (without losing their civil liberties).
But we also need officials to control our wantonly open borders. We need to increase the wholly inadequate Border Patrol, to establish the long-discussed computerized system to track entries and exits, and to recognize the State Department overseas as "America's other border patrol." Above all, we need a temporary reduction in legal immigration and in the admission of temporary workers and students, if only to allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service time to organize to face the disasters its carelessness has helped impose upon us. Let's not forget the multiculturalists in universities and in bureacracies who have worked so assiduously to break America down into separated, conflicting ethnic groups (for example, the Census, where one must identify oneself by race and ethnicity instead of citizenship). But plenty of blame should also go to the corporations.
At the Miami Herald Conference on Latin America recently, Laura Reiff, a lawyer with the powerful law firm of Greenberg Traurig and also co-chairman of the Essential Workers Immigration Coalition, verbally assaulted opponents of what is, in truth, cheap labor for her companies, saying they reflected "the ugly racism issue and the hatred that is so endemic in our society."
This kind of thinking represents the real "coalition" behind the abysmal conditions of our immigration law: lawyers profiting from companies exploiting cheap labor -- and then calling Americans who desire reasonable immigration laws "racists" and "endemic haters." Of course, they have a stake in the nation's security, too, since they also had employees and clients in the World Trade Center.
After Sept. 11, it is apparent that the time to end all these vulgar charades is now!
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