Still not closing the borders

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 18, 2002]

The Center for Immigration Studies reported that of the 48 foreign-born, radical Muslims who have been charged, convicted or admitted involvement in terrorism in the United States since 1993, one-third were on temporary visas, one-third were lawful permanent residents or naturalized U.S. citizens, one-fourth were illegal aliens, and three had applied for asylum.

Reporter Joel Mowbray arranged for six experts to analyze the visa applications of 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 (the other 4 were not available). These experts concluded that all should have been denied visas under then-existing law. For example, the visas impudently listed such non-specific addresses as "California," "New York," or "Hotel."

Why haven't the U.S. bureaucrats who admitted these terrorists been punished or fired, and why haven't we plugged the loopholes in our borders and visa-granting system that allowed these fatal mistakes? Instead of taking immediate and vigorous steps to exclude, locate and deport the undesirables, the government is moving forward with surveillance of all Americans, pretending that all law-abiding U.S. citizens are suspect.

Instead of closing our borders to aliens until we have a system to require visa applications to comply with the law, track the travels of aliens and deport them when their visas expire, we hear increased pressure to force all Americans to carry an I.D. card and/or to federalize state driver's licenses. Forcing us all to carry machine-readable identification would give government (and anyone else with a card reader) access to enormous personal information about health, lifestyle, travels, and finances.

Families are being disrupted all over the country as National Guardsmen are called up and shipped out to fight terrorism thousands of miles away. Meanwhile, thousands of miles of our northern and southern borders are left frighteningly unmanned.

What steps has our government taken to keep out the exotic diseases and new strains of old diseases brought in by aliens? Outbreaks of malaria, West Nile disease, and tuberculosis have popped up all over the country and the New England Journal of Medicine reported that some patients with West Nile virus exhibit polio-like symptoms.

Instead of stopping Third World diseases at our borders, the response has been to try to push through 50 state legislatures a bill proposed in the guise of fighting anthrax or smallpox bioterrorism, but whose powers can be invoked in the absence of terrorism. Versions of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act passed by some states give unelected officials the power to forcibly medicate individuals under threat of quarantine or criminal charge, and to confiscate private property including guns.

Congress is pressured hard to do nothing by ethnicity lobbyists, big corporations, the travel industry, the universities, and open-borders activists, all of whom want to keep the flow of alien visitors coming into our country regardless of the national security danger. Our government regularly allows foreign students and visitors to overstay their visas. Our government has failed to implement an effective tracking system to monitor their whereabouts and order them to leave when their visas expire.

When is our government going to lock our borders against aliens who should not be allowed into the United States and should be deported when they are caught? It is absolutely essential to reduce the numbers of immigrants and visitor-visas until our government develops an effective system of keeping the bad guys out and deporting the illegals. If we don't do this, the civil liberties of U.S. citizens will be severely restricted.

-- From The Phyllis Schlafly Report, November 2002.

Copyright © 2008 Issues & Views