Immigration Reform Now
By Isaiah Z. Sterrett (12/02/04)
IN THE QUAINT little city of Alexandria, Virginia there lives a woman whom I humbly classify as my new friend. Her name is Alicia, and she works on King Street, the gateway to the village’s glittering Old Town district. A hard worker and indeed a very good worker, she is an immigrant; for almost a decade she has happily made her home in the United States.
After leaving the Philippines, Alicia went where many new immigrants go: San Francisco. Today just a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital, she tours Washington like every other American, in awe of its grandeur and history.
Alicia is what immigration is supposed to be about. The best and the brightest from all over the globe are supposed to congregate in America. Instead, immigration in this country has been hijacked. Rather than being embraced by Americans, immigration scares us; we understand, as sad as it may be, that every person who enters the U.S. illegally—-from anywhere—-increases the likelihood of another 9/11.
If that sounds like crazy alarmism, just examine the evidence. Mexican citizens come to the United States illegally everyday, and everyone knows it. I know it, you know it, Vicente Fox knows it, George W. Bush knows it, and Osama “Paper Tiger” bin Laden knows it. So in lieu of politely waiting for Osama to take advantage of the problem, Bush must fix the problem. This will require not only a harder stance against Mexican leadership, but a concerted effort by the White House to work with the governments of border-states. A private, no-cameras-allowed heart-to-heart between President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is needed.
All nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers could have come from Mexico. They didn’t, but they could have. That means that other would-be hijackers, with similar intentions as their fallen compatriots, could come from Mexico. And why not? San Diego is a nice town, and, as far as I know, it has an airport.
Conservatives who relentlessly rail against Bush on the Mexican immigration issue are partly wrong. The Administration’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) helps monitor foreigners’ activities within our borders, and has led to the arrest of dozens of illegal aliens. If it was truly successful, it would be responsible for thousands of arrests, but what we have is better than nothing.
As of July of this year, over 77,000 foreign students and visitors were registered with SEVIS, as were 100,000 of their dependents. This is good. But, pardon me, if I was planning to escape into southern California from Mexico, hijack a commercial aircraft, and crash it into a Los Angeles skyscraper, I probably wouldn’t register with the Department of Homeland Security.
In addition to SEVIS, Congress just appropriated over $300 million to increase the availability of inkless fingerprinting kits, digital cameras, and other equipment to be used to fight illegal immigration. But we’ve done this before—-and the problem still exists.
Immigration is no longer a fun socioeconomic issue. Now it’s a war issue. If we mistakenly forget to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, the republic will likely survive through the night. But if terrorists convene en masse in California, New Mexico, Arizona, or Texas, plotting my murder, President Bush will have done very little to thwart them.
The U.S.-Canadian border, despite the little attention it’s given, is also a problem. A Canadian news agency recently reported that crossing the northern border “has just become more difficult for anyone who is not a Canadian or American citizen.” But the same source points out that “the United States will not be singling out people because of their birthplaces.”
That kind of brazen naiveté can only be answered with a pop quiz:
For ten points, which of the following is more likely to carry out a terrorist act on U.S. soil?
(a) a young man from France
(b) a young man from Britain
(c) a young man from Australia
(d) a young man from Saudi Arabia
On the basis of this news report, the American government is earning a big, bloody F on this test. We must button up the borders today, before L.A. is a pile of rubble.
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