December 17, 2008

Exclusive: Is Obama’s Immigration Stance Change You Can Believe In? Don’t Bet On It

Michael Cutler

I am alarmed by the selection of the "experts" that the Obama transition team is bringing on board to address the immigration crisis confronting our nation.

One of his advisors is T. Alexander Aleinikoff, former executive associate commissioner for programs, was one of the key administrators in a disastrous program known as Citizenship USA that was implemented by the Clinton administration in 1996 – just three years after the terrorist attacks at the CIA headquarters in January 1993 and the bombing at the World Trade Center Complex in February of that year.

The attack at the CIA was carried out by Mir Amal Kansi, a citizen of Pakistan who had been granted political asylum. His rampage on that January morning – during which he fired an AK-47 into the vehicles of CIA employees reporting for work – left two of those officials, Frank Darling and Dr. Lansing Bennett, dead and three others seriously wounded.

It was determined that Kansi had apparently committed fraud in his application for political asylum.

The next month, the attack at the World Trade Center left six people dead and hundreds injured. An estimated one-half billion dollars in damage was inflicted on that complex.

On September 1, 2006 I testified before a field hearing convened by the House Judiciary Committee on the topic, "Is the Reid-Kennedy Bill a Repeat of the Failed Amnesty of 1986?" As a part of my prepared testimony, I discussed how terrorists were able to game the immigration bureaucracy in furtherance of their attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The following is a portion of my testimony at that hearing :

A notable example of such a terrorist can be found in a review of the facts concerning Mahmud Abouhalima, a citizen of Egypt who entered the United States on a tourist visa, overstayed his authorized period of admission and then applied for amnesty under the agricultural worker provisions of IRCA.

He succeeded in obtaining resident alien status through this process. During a 5 year period he drove a cab and had his license suspended numerous times for violations of law and ultimately demonstrated his appreciation for our nation’s generosity by participating in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that left 6 people dead, hundreds of people injured and an estimated one half billion dollars in damage inflicted, on that iconic, ill-fated complex.

America had opened its doors to him so that he might participate in the “American Dream.â€