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December 30, 2008
Exclusive: Five-Year Terror Report Exposes Holes in Border Security
The five-year terror threat report that appeared in the news on December 25th should not be mistaken for a Christmas present. The report provides ample evidence that our government has been making decisions and taking actions that, as I have noted for many years now, represent lunacy by those whose sworn duty is protect our nation, our citizens and our way of life.
Our nation's security is jeopardized by the Visa Waiver Program, and I have provided congressional testimony about the tremendous risks posed by immigration benefit fraud. Now consider the passages from the December 25th news article that details vulnerabilities identified by the government-issued report concerning the threat of terrorist attacks being conducted against the United States in the next five years:
"The threat of terrorism and the threat of extremist ideologies has not abated," Chertoff said in his year-end address on Dec. 18. "This threat has not evaporated, and we can't turn the page on it."
Terrorists will continue to try to evade U.S. border security measures and place operatives inside the mainland to carry out attacks, the 38-page assessment said. It also said that they may pose as refugees or asylum seekers or try to exploit foreign travel channels such as the visa waiver program, which allows citizens of 34 countries to enter the U.S. without visas.
Yet incredibly, within the past several weeks, the Visa Waiver program has been expanded from 27 nations to include citizens of 34 nations!
If you wonder why our government is doing this, you are not alone.
The hospitality and travel industries have concocted a program that they call "Discover America” and have hired Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of Homeland Security who told us that we could protect ourselves against chemical attack by buying duct tape. They have spent many millions of dollars to push their agenda of making it easy for aliens to come to the United States.
I certainly favor trade and profit, but not when the price for that profit may the lives of our citizens. These people are fools for pushing a program that increases our nation's vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Purely from a financial standpoint, a terrorist attack would hammer their industry into the ground. This is as dumb and wrong-headed as the subprime mortgages that caused banks to fall like dominoes.
I have written extensively about the Visa Waiver Program and don't want to be repetitive, but I believe it is worthwhile for me to once again list the benefits that the visa requirement provides to national security:
1. By requiring visas of aliens who seek to enter the United States, this process helps to screen potential passengers on airliners that are destined to the United States. Richard Reid, the so-called "Shoe Bomber," was able to board an airliner to come to the United States although he had no intentions of entering the United States – his apparent goal was to blow up the airliner and its many passengers somewhere over the depths of the Atlantic Ocean by detonating explosives he had concealed in his shoes. Because he is a subject of Great Britain, a country that participates in the Visa Waiver Program, Reid did not obtain a visa before he boarded that airliner.
2. The CBP inspectors are supposed to make a decision in one minute or less as to the admissibility of an alien seeking to enter the United States. The visa requirement helps them to do a more effective job.
3. The application for a nonimmigrant visa contains roughly 40 questions that could provide invaluable information to law enforcement officials should that alien become the target of a criminal or terrorist investigation. The information could provide intelligence as well as investigative leads.
4. If an alien applicant lies on the application for a visa that lie is called "visa fraud." The maximum penalty for visa fraud starts out at 10 years in jail for those who commit this crime simply in order to come to the United States, ostensibly to seek unlawful employment or other such purpose. The penalty increases to 15 years in jail for those aliens who obtain a visa to commit a felony. For aliens who engage in visa fraud to traffic in narcotics or commit another narcotics-related crime, the maximum jail sentence that can be imposes rises to 20 years. inally, when an alien can be proven to have engaged in visa fraud in furtherance of terrorism, the maximum penalty climbs to 25 years in prison. It is important to note that while it may be difficult to prove that an individual is a terrorist, it is usually relatively simple to prove that the alien has committed visa fraud when there is fraud involved in the visa application. Indeed, terror suspects are often charged with visa fraud.
5. The charge of visa fraud can also be extremely helpful to law enforcement authorities who want to take a bad guy off the street without tipping their hand to the other members of a criminal or terrorism conspiracy with which the individual arrested was involved.
6. Even when an alien applies for a visa and his application is denied, the application he filed remains available for law enforcement and intelligence personnel to review to glean intelligence from that application.
Under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program, none of the significant benefits to law enforcement or national security apply.
Time and again, the level of incompetence demonstrated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been nothing short of staggering. I often refer to DHS as being the Department of Homeland Surrender. Time and again, the information provided to the citizens of our nation and our "leaders" has made it clear that our government has flat out refused to fix what is wrong with the immigration bureaucracy.
While it’s true that the majority of people who legally immigrate to the United States simply want to become a part of this wonderful nation, there are others whose intentions are not benign but are, in fact, motivated by a desire to do harm to our nation, such as Nada Nadim Prouty, a young woman whom I have profiled before. There have been many others who similarly engaged in immigration fraud in order to acquire United States citizenship in support of espionage and terrorism. Yet scant attention is being paid to creating an immigration system that has even a semblance of integrity.
Even as you read this commentary and even as our nation's leaders are reading the report discussed in the Washington Times article linked at the top of this page, there are many politicians among them who are determined to ram Comprehensive Immigration Reform, a/k/a CIR, through the legislative process.
This legislation would represent a huge threat to our nation's security.
Don't take my word for it: take the findings of the government's own watchdog agencies and consider what they are warning our leaders.
The safety of our nation begins at its borders but it does not end there. It is therefore essential that not only must our borders be secured, but that our immigration bureaucracy honor those who abide by the laws and seeks to weed out those who would commit fraud and those who would assist them.
An amnesty program, which is what Comprehensive Immigration Reform amounts to, is one of the most dangerous programs our country could possibly implement. In my judgment, it could easily become a suicide pact given the reality of the way that such a program would be administered.
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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