http://www.cis.org/krikorian/fortdix

Man-Averted Disaster
By Mark Krikorian, April 29, 2009

The five Muslim immigrants who'd plotted to kill American soldiers at Ft. Dix in New Jersey have been sentenced, four to life and one to 33 years. I wrote a while back on how the many weaknesses in our immigration system contributed to this conspiracy.

Mark Krikorian
NRO Contributor
May 28, 2007

Fort Dix Fix
Immigration policy in wartime.

By Mark Krikorian

Mercifully, today we are not commemorating 100 soldiers killed at Fort Dix this month by a group of immigrant jihadis. Their lives were spared. But we can’t just rely on Circuit City clerks to defend America — Congress needs to help too.

Unfortunately, the Senate’s grotesque immigration bill ignores the lessons about the intersection of immigration and terrorism that we should have learned from the Fort Dix plotters and from dozens and dozens of their predecessors. That lesson is that normal, sustained immigration enforcement, conducted across the board and without apology, is an indispensable tool in preventing and disrupting terrorist plots against our people.

What does the immigration backstory of the Fort Dix plot tell us about homeland security? Let us count the ways.

Border enforcement

The Duka brothers — Dritan, Eljvir, and Shain — the three Albanian illegal aliens among the six plotters, are believed to have snuck across border with their family near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984. Immigration maximalists (in Jonah Goldberg’s useful formulation) have been telling us since 9/11 that none of the hijackers crossed the Mexican border, therefore that part of the immigration problem has no security implications.

But in modern conditions, immigration and security are indivisible — weakness in any aspect of immigration enforcement can and will be exploited. The Duka family didn’t come here planning to be terrorists, intending rather to be ordinary illegal aliens doing the mythical jobs Americans won’t do. But better border enforcement would have short-circuited the chain of events that led to the plot.

But it’s not as though such indirect connections are needed to make the security case for tight border enforcement. Mahmoud Kourani, described in his federal indictment as a “member, fighter, recruiter and fund-raiser for Hezbollah,â€