Thread: Politicizing the Border Weakens Our Security

July 15, 2008
Exclusive: Politicizing the Border Weakens Our Security

Michael Cutler

This Washington Times article about Sen. Obama's Sunday speech to the Hispanic rights group La Raza should be of great concern to all Americans. It deals with the politicization of one of the most important issues confronting the United States today: border security and the immigration system.

Those of you who are familiar with my commentaries and my testimony before various Congressional hearings and other venues know that I am adamantly opposed to providing any sort of wide-scale programs to provide amnesty for illegal aliens.I oppose any pathway to citizenship or guest worker programs for millions of aliens who have entered our country illegally or in one way or another violated the terms of their lawful admission into our country after entry, or committed visa fraud in order to enter our country in the first place.

This is not because I am cold-hearted or because I am a "nativist" (a derogatory term I have heard used by the advocates of open bordersto describe anyone who thinks our nation, especially in this perilous age, should have a secure border [not sealed border] and an immigration system that has integrity.) I am not a xenophobe. I believe that the United States is strengthened and the lives of our citizens are greatly enriched by the fact that our nation has so many people from so many parts of the globe who have been attracted to this great nation and decided to legally immigrate here, adding their threads to this magnificent tapestry we call the United States of America.

My own mother was a lawful immigrant who entered the United States several years before the Holocaust swept through Europe and claimed so many casualties, among them most of my mom's family, including my grandmother (for whom I was named).My dad was born in Brooklyn, New York, but his parents and most of his siblings came to America shortly after the turn of the last century.

Tragically, my parents both died of cancer while I was attending college but I know so much about their backgrounds and the backgrounds of their families and I am proud of my immigrant roots.

I am not opposed to lawful immigration, provided that our government can run an effective and efficient program that properly screens those who would come to America to begin their lives anew and share the American dream and contribute to our country's future while building their own futures in this land of opportunity.

The problem is that the massive influx of illegal aliens is not in the best interests of our nation or our citizens.In addition to creating a national security nightmare, it also enables criminals (including violent gang members) to enter our country and hide in plain sight in communities overflowing with illegal aliens from the many parts of the world. Therefore it acts in a twofold manner: enabling entrance to criminals and providing potential victims for these criminals, who often ply their "trades" among the communities populated by those who have either immigrated here legally or entered our country illegally but are of the same ethnicity as are the criminals.This pattern, in my experience, is universal and impacts every community in the United States.

By not knowing their true identities, including their respective nationalities, our governmentwill find it all but impossible to determine with certainty if they have criminal histories in other countries or if their names appear on various terrorist or criminal watch lists because of potential affiliation with criminal or terrorist organizations.The "undocumented" nature of these aliens means that the government does not have a shred of official documentation toattest to any of these very serious questions.

Because we have no reliable way of knowing when or how illegal aliens entered the United States, there will be no real way of even deciding which illegal aliens would be eligible to apply to participate in a citizenship program such as both candidates claim they want to create. The only way that many of these critically important questions might be answered is to have an adequate number of agents who would be able to go out into the streets of cities and towns across our nation and conduct an actual field investigation, showing photos of such alien applicants to neighbors and those who they claim they have worked with. This is the process by which security clearances are granted. As an INS senior special agent, I held a Top Secret clearance that had to be renewed every five years. The field investigation took several weeks of actual field work and was costly, as well as time-consuming.

The reality?There is absolutely no way for our government to conduct comparable investigations of millions of aliens who have no documentation to begin with.We have heard the politicians and the advocates of such amnesty programs, speak about doing security checks.A security check is absolutely nothing like a background investigation.To compare the two is like comparing a patient getting a thorough exam from a battery of doctors, including blood tests, cardiac stress tests, etc., and the person who has his temperature and blood pressure taken at the local pharmacy.

The agency that would be responsible foradministering the guest worker program is USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).They would be required to process tens ofthousands of applications per daythat would befiled bythose millions of illegal aliens.All that they would be able to do is to run the name and fingerprints of the applicants.If the alien had never been arrested in the United States, an especially likely possibility if the alien had come here recently, and if the alien provides a false or especially a fictitious name, a tactic used universally by criminals and terrorists, the name would come up as being a "no hit."The adjudicators at USCIS would then issue that alien an official identity document in whatever name the applicant claimed was his (hers). In essence, the criminal alien or terrorist would be able to put himself into his own version of a "witness protection program" that we should probably call the"bad guy protection program." It was for these reasons that I came to refer to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act that had been rammed through the United States Senate last year as truly being the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007." That fatally flawed legislation would have required USCIS to process a minimum of 100,000 applications each and every day.

Illegal immigration also impacts the labor market, driving down wages and often eroding various hard-won benefits for those workers who are legally entitled to live and work in the United States.

The massive influx of illegal aliens also hammers schools and hospitals and creates damage to our nation's environment.

Therefore I find it more than a bit ironic that Sen. Obama would link the "American Dream" to an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.This is not the sort of dream I like to have - it sound more like the American Nightmare.

In reinforcing thestereotype that all aliens are Latinos must make those newly arrived lawful immigrants wonder what country they have arrived in.A couple of days ago, Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought that all American school children should learn a new language - Spanish.

I certainly believe that our kids should learn additional languages. I took French in junior high school and high school.My parents spoke in Yiddish when I was a young boy when they didn't want me to know what they were talking about and, given that incentive, I quickly began to learn Yiddish!I also had to learn Spanish when I was hired by the INS because it is believed that some 75% to 80%of the illegal alien population of the United States is Spanish-speaking.(That training is not routinely offered to the special agents of ICE today, meaning that it is easier for illegal aliens who speak Spanish to get away with making false claims to United States citizenship and hobbling efforts by ICE special agentsat conducting field investigations.

But why does Mr. Obama believe that Spanish language in particular is important for our kids?

With all of the talk about the United States being a "welcoming nation,"what about having those who come to our country, learning the language of the country that they voluntarily came to?

Then we come to Mr. Obama's outrageous statement last Sunday as reported in the Washington Times article linked above:

In Sunday's speech, Mr. Obama said that by embracing the "enforcement-first" approach, Mr. McCain has not in effect "abandoned his courageous stance" he took to support last year's bill.

What? Mr. Obamaactually criticized Sen. McCain for saying that wants tosecure the borders of the United States first, before moving on to implementing a program to put illegal aliens on a pathway to United States citizenship!

You have to conclude that if Mr. Obama gets his way, our borders would remain porous while he would simply provide the promise of United States citizenship to millions of illegal aliens already present in our country with God knows how many more arriving each and every day (and night).

If Mr. Obama was really being honest about his view on this issue, I suspect he would call for declaring anyone who was born on the planet earth to be a United States citizen.Then he could tell the special agents of ICE thatthey should limit their activities to going after aliens who arrive in flying saucers!Of course then there would be those who would accuse those agents of species profiling...

Having hammered away at Mr. Obama, I want to be fair and tell you about Mr. McCain, the co-author of the McCain-Kennedy ImmigrationBill.

Mr. McCain said he would go to the governors of the four border states and then, when they certify that their states' borders are secured, he would move on to attempting to enact his immigration reform bill! Here are a couple of important questions:

Why go to the governors of the border states to find out about the security of their borders?I have certainlyhad credibility issues with the DHS that I won't repeat here, but my regular readers are familiar withmy concerns about the lack of adequate numbers of Border Patrol agents and virtual fences that would probably stop virtually no one!But at least that is where the information should be made available.Furthermore, we know how most of those governors feel about immigration.

Additionally, what about the fact that an estimated 30 to 40% of the illegal aliens in our country did not run our nation's borders but rather entered through ports of entry and then violated the terms of their admission? What about those illegal aliens who may have run the border that is supposed to separate Canada from the United States?What about the issue of rampant fraud and incompetence in the immigration benefits program?

The point is that it is clear that neither candidate for the office of the President of the United States wants to secure ournation's borders or create an immigration system that has even a modicum of integrity and protects our nation and our citizens.

Our nation is clearly in the midst of the most profound challenges it has faced since itsfounding.The mortgage crisis would be tough enough to deal with by itself.The energy crisis would be tough enough to deal with by itself.The threat of additional terrorist attacks and the entry of tens of thousands of violent gang members are a daunting challenge to our nation.The synergy of all of these problems coupled with the disloyalty of corporations that are fixated on profits and for whom the bottom line is purely the bottom line, threaten the future of this nation in ways that I believe are unparalleled in the history of the United States.

A couple of days ago I discussed these issues with an old friend, a former colleague at the INS and I said to him that if the United States was still a
"Super-Power" I would love to know where the Kryptonite was buried.

My friend neatly summed up what is wrong with our nation today:"Washington, D.C."

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Cutler is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a recognized authority who addresses the implications of immigration on national security and criminal justice. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.

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