Immigration System Must Finally Put Americans First

Chain migration exemplifies wrong approach to immigration system.

The failed terror attack on December 11, 2017 has called attention to “chain migration.”

We will consider chain migration momentarily, but first we need to consider the entire immigration system as a chain.

It has been said that a chain is as strong as its weakest link.  Today the immigration system is comprised of extremely weak links and all must be addressed because failures of each and every element of the immigration system leave America and Americans vulnerable to the threat of terrorism and crime.

I addressed these concerns in an article awhile back, Immigration and the Terrorist Threat.

America’s immigration laws have nothing to do with race, religion or ethnicity but about national security, public health and public safety as well as the livelihoods of American workers.

Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182 – Inadmissible aliens is a section of law that is contained within the Immigration and Nationality Act and enumerates the grounds for excluding aliens from the United States.  The categories includes aliens infected with dangerous communicable diseases, suffer from extreme mental illness and are prone to violence, aliens who are criminals, human rights violators, war criminals, spies or terrorists. Finally that list also includes aliens who would likely become public charges or displace American workers. There is nothing in that list that relates to the race, religion or ethnicity of these aliens.

Every time there is a terror attack the focus turns to the specific visa under which the terror suspect may have entered the United States.  This piecemeal approach is ineffective in understanding the true nature of the threats we face.

All categories of visas are problematic.  Effective vetting is often not as effective as we would want it to be.

Young people may not have created a track record that could be uncovered during the course of the visa issuance process.

Our officials are forced to rely on watch-lists and databases that may not be complete or where translating names from one language to another further complicates the process as does our reliance of information furnished by foreign governments.

Sanctuary Cities attract aliens who seek to evade detection for a multitude of reasons- none of them in America’s best interests.

On July 13, 2011 the Washington Times published a truly disturbing article, “Visas reviewed to find those who overstayed / Aim is to find any would-be terrorists.”

On September 2, 2014 ABC News reported, “Lost in America: Visa Program Struggles to “Track Missing Foreign Students.”

The likelihood is that any aliens who are evading immigration law enforcement are hiding in Sanctuary Cities.

Today the issue gaining the attention involves “Chain migration” and the underlying principle of “Family Reunification” are emblematic of what is utterly wrong with America’s immigration system, yet those two pillars of the immigration system have been in place for more than a half-century.

In point of fact, President Trump is the first president in decades who understands this very important principle as does Attorney General Jeff Sessions who, prior to becoming the Attorney General, chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest.

Consequently, Chain Migration was already in the crosshairs of the Trump administration as he and Attorney General Jeff Sessions work to change the immigration system to address national security, public safety and the livelihoods of American workers and their struggling families.

On December 11, 2017 the issue of Chain Migration was thrust onto the front page of newspapers across the United States and the “A Block” of news programs when a 27 year old lawful immigrant from Bangladesh attempted to create mass carnage under the streets of Times Square in a terror attack inspired by ISIS and an abject hatred for America and Americans.

The following day the Justice Department issued a press release that announced, “Akayed Ullah Charged With Terrorism and Explosives Charges in Connection With the Detonation of a Bomb in New York City.”

Ullah, reportedly a citizen of Bangladesh had been admitted into the United States in 2011 as a lawful immigrant because of “chain migration.”

While it is reasonable and certainly makes sense for lawful immigrants to bring members of their nuclear families to the United States, there is no reasonable justification for bringing their extended families to the United States as lawful immigrants in their own right.

Nevertheless, under current immigration laws, an alien who becomes a United States citizen may petition the government to grant immigrant visas to all of his/her adult brothers and sisters and their respective spouses and children.

Large families are common in Third World countries and it is not unusual for a family to have a more than a half-dozen children.  It is not uncommon for the children of those large families to have as many children as well.  One new citizen can literally bring in dozens of new immigrants.

These immigrants need not possess any specific skills or education and often wind up competing with American and lawful immigrants for scarce jobs.

Similar attention was focused on another flawed element of the immigration system, the Diversity Visa Lottery when a terrorist a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, used a truck as a weapon of mass destruction to attack pedestrians and bike riders on October 31, 2017 on the west side of Manhattan, leaving eight people dead and a dozen injured.

Shortly after that deadly terror attack I wrote about the vulnerabilities of this visa category referring to it as A Game of Russian Roulette.

The December 2, 2015 deadly terror attack in San Bernardino, California focused attention on the K-1 (fiancee) visa program.

In following up on that attack, on April 28, 2016 ICE issued a press release, “3 people tied to shooter in San Bernardino terrorist attack arrested on federal conspiracy, marriage fraud and false statement charges.”

The deadly terror attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, by the Tsarnaev brothers, called attention to failures of the system by which applications for political asylum are adjudicated.

With a new budget crisis looming just weeks from now the Democrats are pushing for a permanent “solution” to the approximately 800,000 illegal aliens who had been given a temporary reprieve from deportation under DACA by the Obama administration.

These hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients were not interviewed.  No field investigations were conducted to verify the information contained in their applications.  To qualify they only had to claim that they had entered the United States before they turned 16.

At the time that DACA was implemented by Obama those aliens could be as old as 31 years of age.  Some may now therefore be as old as 36.

DACA could represent the tip of a huge immigration iceberg.  If these aliens are provided with lawful status, they could become naturalized United States citizens who, under current law, have the absolute right to petition the federal government to provide immigrant visas to each and every one of their siblings and their siblings’ family members.

Meanwhile the United States continues to admit approximately one million new immigrants each and every year.  By law these aliens may seek to naturalize after they are present in the United States for five years (three years if they are married to a United States citizen spouse).

The system is operating at a level that makes effective screening problematic, to say the least.

Each year USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) the division of the DHS that adjudicates applications for various immigration benefits such as conferring lawful immigrant status and United States citizenship upon aliens, processes upwards of 6 million applications.

What is not generally known is that it only takes minutes to approve an application but may take days or weeks to deny an application.  Beleaguered adjudications officers are overwhelmed by applications and the only way to keep up with the work flow is to approve as many applications as possible.

Immigration fraud was identified by the 9/11 Commission as the key embedding tactic of terrorists.  That was the principle behind my article Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.

Effective enforcement of our immigration laws are America’s first line of defense and last line of defense in this particularly perilous era.

At the conclusion of my prepared testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 20, 2013 on the topic, “Building an Immigration System Worthy of American Values” I noted that one of the key problems with the U.S. government’s approach to the immigration crisis was that our government has prioritized the needs and demands of aliens over the citizens of the United States.

To quote from that final paragraph of my testimony:

Back when I was an INS special agent, I recall that Doris Meissner, who was at the time the Commissioner of the INS, said that the agency needed to be ‘‘customer oriented.’’ Unfortunately, while I agree about the need to be customer oriented, what Ms. Meissner and apparently too many politicians today seem to have forgotten is that the ‘‘customers’’ of the INS and of our Government in general are the citizens of the United States of America.

The misplaced loyalty of all too many of our political leaders to aliens over citizens, and to globalist special interest groups who see in America’s border impediments to their wealth, undermines America’s sovereignty and with it national security and public safety.

Putting the best interests of Americans first is in America’s best interest.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

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