The Great Reform Scam

Mark Steyn gets it:

Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government's "visa express" system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications – "Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA" – that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

All the above passed through the legal immigration system. Whether they were detained, rejected, approved or posthumously approved, in the end it made no difference. Because U.S. immigration had no real idea who these men were.

But, don't worry, they'll be able to handle another "12 million undocumented Americans" tossed in for express processing.

The real "immigration fraud" is not Mahmoud abu Halima's or John Lee Malvo's or Mohammed Atta's, but that of the politicians who attempted to foist this sham bill on the nation.

The opposition to the "immigration reform" bill is easy to understand, and the almost violent knee-jerk reaction against it isn't necessarily xenophobic. Whether or not you think that the government should deport illegals--as I do--or allow most of them, the ones without criminal records perhaps, to begin the process of becoming citizens, the fact remains that this bill does absolutely nothing to rectify future problems concerning illegal immigrants. It took the government twenty years to again address the issue; at the very least they will have to look at it again twenty years hence, though in all likelihood the crisis point will be reached far sooner as the migrant hordes from the south show no signs of abating and have long ago realized that illegal immigration is as frowned upon as marginal speeding.

A country which does not control its own borders is not a country; it is an abstract idea surrounded by blurry and fluctuating lines. Until America defends her borders, the idea, the definition of what not only America, but an American is, will be ill-defined. In time it will cease to exist at all save as a charming and meaningless term which somehow survived from antiquity.

What Bush and the Congress need to do is to produce a bill which delineates a plan to prevent illegal immigration. If they wish to allow the twelve million illegals to become citizens, fine; I'll be severely disappointed, but blanket amnesty isn't necessarily tragic, though it may be. However, tragedy will set in if the government fails to do anything to ensure that we don't have to run another round of amnesty in as little as a few years. Just how many migrants we can allow without forfeiting the southwest--or our sovereignty; or both--cannot be easily determined. But there is a definite limit to the number of barbarians Rome can handle before she falls.

There is another point in all this. Conservatives, such as myself, who have long ago lost faith in President Bush, have been told by other supposed conservatives that because 9/11 changed everything and now national security is the most important issue, we need to stand by Bush because he understands what is at stake with the War on Terror. Only he doesn't. He has absolutely no idea. I personally reject the claim that the Terrorists are the foremost threat to our freedom. It seems ironic to suggest but it is actually quite the contrary that the actions of our government in response to the Terrorists are the single biggest threat to the fading promises of the Constitution.

If you do follow the neo-conservative line of thinking, however, the best way to keep America free from attacks--it must be admitted that some attacks will still take place--is to prevent those who would make them from coming to this country. But we're not even pretending to do this.

Bush gets credit, from some conservatives, for keeping us safe from attacks post-9/11. But this can be nothing more than dumb luck. How hard can it be to attack a country which has allowed 12 million people to infiltrate itself in just over two decades? It is undeniably clear that those who "hate us" are refraining from another round of terror due to reasons of their own, to which we are not privy.

Those who defend Bush are running out of excuses. Fighting a War on Terror was never conservative, but Bush is no longer even pretending to do that. Through his complicity on border security, Bush has become a useful idiot to those he is supposed to be fighting. In exchange for another blow to western civilization, all we have gotten is a new department, straight out of Orwell, of little utility save as it serves to undermine and destroy liberty. All but the most senseless of conservatives must surely have awoken from their long slumber. The number and influence of those still asleep determines the future of the movement.