Fake Security is More Dangerous than No Security

How the “Improved Visa Waiver Program” creates the perilous illusion of security.

Once again terrorists have attacked and wounded and killed innocent civilians in London, England.

On June 3rd a terrorist attack at London Bridge and Borough Market was carried out by three apparent Jihadists who used a rented van to mow down pedestrians, whereupon the three emerged from that van and attacked still more victims with their knives.

The terrorists have applied to their attacks the principle behind Occam’s razor, that postulates that in attempting to understand how something is accomplished, the simplest solution is most likely the correct solution.

In the case of terrorists, using a simple strategy and crude weapons such as motor vehicles and knives that are readily available, decreases the likelihood that such plots can be discovered and prevented before they are carried out.

While the TSA, was created in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11 and its FY 2017 Budget of $7.6 billion and more than 42,000 employees exist to safeguard transportation, with particular emphasis on airliners, most terror attacks do not involve airliners.

Continuing with the concept of Occam’s razor, the United States needs to do whatever is possible and reasonable to prevent international terrorists from entering the United States in the first place.

All vulnerabilities must, therefore be effectively addressed.

If an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure, preventing the entry of such terrorists represents a ton of cure.

As I have noted in a recent article, Border Security Is National Security.

There is no shortage of ways for terrorists to enter the United States.  Recently attention has turned to the way that aliens who enter the United States through the legal inspections process at ports of entry are able to easily disappear within the United States and embed themselves in the towns and cities where they live and quietly go about their deadly preparations.

That issue and others were raised in the report issued on May 23, 2017 by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Visa Overstays: A Gap in the Nation’s Border.  That report served as the predication for my recent article.

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission noted that most terrorists enter the United States through international airports.

Given these facts it is becoming clear that President Trump’s goal of subjecting aliens seeking entry into the United States to “extreme vetting” is a matter of national security.

In fact, the 9/11 Commission found flaws in the way that visas were issued and noted that the visa adjudications process needed to be tightened up.

The Visa Waiver Program runs contrary to that important mission yet, the number of the countries whose citizens may enter the United States without first applying for visas and receiving visas continues to increase under pressure from such special interest/lobbying groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in spite of the fact that the nexus between visa overstays and terrorism has been well known for many years.  In fact, on May 11, 2006 I testified before a hearing conducted by the House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the topic, Visa Overstays: Can We Bar The Terrorist Door?

Shortly after the attacks of 9/11 the virtual mantra of our leaders was, “To be successful, the terrorists need only get it ‘right’ while our security depends on our government getting it ‘right’ 100% of the time.”

As concerns about terrorists who are citizens of countries who participate in the Visa Waiver Program increased as more terror attacks were carried out in Europe and elsewhere, the Obama administration and the Congress cooperated to modify the Visa Waiver Program through the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015.

The “improvements” to the Visa Waiver Program are illusory and designed to quell the fears and concerns of Americans while making certain that this dangerous program continues to satisfy the demands of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other such lobbying organizations who, as I have previously noted, are far more concerned with head counts on airliners than body counts in the morgue.

By creating this dangerous illusion, the stage has been set for what may be further attempts to expand this wrong-headed program rather than do what is necessary and terminate it altogether.

Here is how the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) has been modified, as noted in the official CBP website:

Under the Act, travelers in the following categories are no longer eligible to travel or be admitted to the United States under the VWP:

•  Nationals of VWP countries who have been present in Iraq, Syria, or countries listed under specified designation lists (currently including Iran and Sudan) at any time on or after March 1, 2011 (with limited government/military exceptions).

•  Nationals of VWP countries who have been present in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, at any time on or after March 1, 2011 (with limited government/military exceptions).

These restrictions do not apply to VWP travelers whose presence in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, or Yemen was to perform military service in the armed forces of a program country, or in order to carry out official duties as a full-time employee of the government of a program country. We recommend those who have traveled to the seven countries listed above for military/official purposes bring with them appropriate documentation when traveling through a U.S. port of entry.

The vast majority of VWP-eligible travelers will not be affected by the new Act. New countries may be added to this list at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security.

On the face of it, rendering citizens of VWP countries ineligible to enter the United States, if they had recently traveled to countries affiliated with terrorism, is a prudent measure.

However, what is the likelihood that our consular officials or our CBP inspectors at ports of entry will know if such aliens had traveled to Syria, Iraq or other such countries?

Is there truly an expectation that such aliens will show up at U.S. embassies and consulates seeking visas after freely admitting that they have made such trips to those countries?

Are we to expect, perhaps, that such individuals might show up with their transcripts in hand, attesting to their acquired prowess in the construction bombs when they attended terror training camps in the Middle East?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its corporate friends in the hotel, travel, hospitality and manufacturing industries formed an unholy alliance, the Discover America Partnership that, nevertheless, continues to lobby for an expansion of the dangerous Visa Waiver Program, ignoring that ISIS, al-Qaeda and transnational criminals have already “discovered” America.

That partnership opposes any efforts to more effectively scrutinize foreign visitors, pushing for the admission of ever more foreign tourists, foreign students and, of course, huge increases in exploitable foreign workers to displace Americans.

My article, “Visa Waiver Program Endangers Our Safety And Security” included a list of six ways an effectively administered visa program helps combat terrorism and protect America and Americans and even enhances airliner safety.

All of those important benefits are utterly lost when aliens enter the U.S. under Visa Waiver Program.  Under this program aliens do not apply for or receive visas.

To cite a few examples as to how the visa requirement enhance national security and public safety:

Visa applications contain information and biometrics that can be essential to conducting investigations into terrorists and criminals.  Aliens who commit fraud in completing that application face up to 25 years in prison, if the purpose for applying for the visa was to further a terror goal.

Aliens who are required to have visas before traveling to the United States are not permitted to board airliners if they have no visas.  Aliens who are denied visas are subsequently barred from boarding airliners.  Richard Reid, the infamous “Shoe Bomber” was, as a British citizen, able to board the airliner destined to the United States without first receiving a visa.

Yet the Visa Waiver program persists as do the risks that this program creates for national security and public safety.

The final blow to our safety and security is provided by Lethal Sanctuary Cities that are eager to harbor and shield illegal aliens, no matter how they entered the United States, from detection by immigration law enforcement officers.

Simply stated, Sanctuary Cities Endanger – National Security and Public Safety.

National security and public safety must be the absolute priority for our government.  Illusions of security are less then worthless- they are dangerous.

The Visa Waiver Program and Sanctuary Cities must, for once and for all, be terminated.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

Study: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes

Rowan Scarborough from The Washington Times reports:

A research group in New Jersey has taken a fresh look at postelection polling data and concluded that the number of noncitizens voting illegally in U.S. elections is likely far greater than previous estimates.

As many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election, which put Barack Obama in the White House.

The research organization Just Facts, a widely cited, independent think tank led by self-described conservatives and libertarians, revealed its number-crunching in a report on national immigration.

Just Facts President James D. Agresti and his team looked at data from an extensive Harvard/YouGov study that every two years questions a sample size of tens of thousands of voters. Some acknowledge they are noncitizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

Read more.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in November 2016 stated, “[N]oncitizens and illegal aliens are counted when apportioning congressional districts and when allocating state electors under the Electoral College. This means noncitizens play a role in determining how many congressional representatives a state has and exert an indirect influence on presidential elections.”

FAIR reports:

Mass immigration has had a significant effect on American electoral politics. Despite the fact that it is a crime for aliens to vote in federal elections, noncitizens and illegal aliens are counted when apportioning congressional districts. This means that areas with large numbers of illegal alien residents gain additional representatives in Congress.

In addition, there is evidence that both foreign nationals who are lawfully present in the United States and illegal aliens have voted in recent elections. During this election cycle, noncitizens have been discovered on voter registration rolls in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. And the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York recently announced that it charged a Canadian woman with making a false claim to citizenship after she registered and voted in more than 20 elections.

Several past elections – for the presidency and other offices – have been extremely close. Accordingly, ballots cast by noncitizen voters have the potential to improperly alter the outcome of elections. Consider how close the 2000 presidential election was. Could the outcome have been affected by noncitizen voting? The answer is yes.

Download the PDF of this Backgrounder.

President Trump signed an executive order setting up a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to try to find on-the-ground truth in illegal voting. The Advisory Commission is headed by Vice President Mike Pence.  The Commission’s mission:

The Commission shall, consistent with applicable law, study the registration and voting processes used in Federal elections.  The Commission shall be solely advisory and shall submit a report to the President that identifies the following:

(a)  those laws, rules, policies, activities, strategies, and practices that enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes used in Federal elections;

(b)  those laws, rules, policies, activities, strategies, and practices that undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes used in Federal elections; and

(c)  those vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.

It would seem that Democrats and Republicans alike can rally around this effort.

RELATED ARTICLES:

1.4 million illegals working under stolen Social Security numbers

Study supports Trump: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes

Think tank backs Trump, says large number of non-citizens vote illegally

Did Votes By Noncitizens Cost Trump The 2016 Popular Vote? Sure Looks That Way

The Loophole in Background Check Thinking: Criminals Obey the Law

Gun control groups expend an awful lot of ink, time and money advocating for “common-sense public safety laws” like “universal” background checks because such restrictions, they claim, will keep guns out of the hands of criminals and other dangerous people.

It’s peculiar, then, that many of these entities don’t do a better job of background-checking their own adherents and associates. Not too long ago, then-California state senator Leland Yee (D), whose staunch support of gun control measures earned him a spot on the Brady Campaign’s “Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll,” was accused of committing various felonies, including illegal firearms trafficking and money laundering offenses. Following a plea agreement in which he acknowledged his participation in a firearms trafficking conspiracy, among other offenses, Yee was sentenced to five years in jail.

Members of the Michael Bloomberg-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), now reconfigured as Everytown for Gun Safety, popped up in the news with such embarrassing regularity due to arrests and convictions for crimes, including gun crimes, that the New York Post ran an editorial in 2013 titled “Illegal mayors against guns.”

And last month, a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Illinois alleges that a certain Francisco Sanchez violated a federal gun law that prohibits possession of a firearm by a felon. The snag is that at the time, Mr. Sanchez (a.k.a. “Smokey”) was apparently working as a supervisor at CeaseFire Illinois, as highlighted in a February feature by the Everytown-funded website, The Trace.   

The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint states that Mr. Sanchez was convicted of murder and aggravated battery in 1986, and adds the more disturbing allegation that he is the “national leader of the Gangster Two-Six Nation,” a street gang “prevalent throughout Chicago” and in other states. Mr. Sanchez’s arrest occurred as part of a larger federal investigation of gang-related gun and drug trafficking in which other suspected gang members or associates were apprehended and over 100 firearms were seized.

Of course, the complaint contains only allegations, not evidence, and Mr. Sanchez and his fellow defendants remain innocent until proven guilty. However, the arrests – which took place shortly before the Memorial Day weekend – coincided with a drop in gun homicides as compared to last year’s holiday weekend.

We’ve written before about how criminals get guns, including this study at Chicago’s Cook County Jail that concluded criminals bypass legal sources in favor of guns obtained from “family, gang members, or other social connections.”

Expanded background check laws won’t stop criminals because criminals ignore the law. Nonetheless, Everytown and others of its ilk will continue to call for ever-increasing restrictions and laws affecting law-abiding gun owners in the name of prohibiting felons, violent criminals, and gang members from obtaining guns. Honest gun owners will continue to do what they’ve always done: obey the law.

NJ Court: State Can’t Criminalize Possession of ‘Pencils’ and Other Lawful Objects for Home Self-defense

It is refreshing to finally see some common sense coming out of a court in NJ, as the state is notoriously known for its illogical and Draconian gun laws that do little more than make felons out of law-abiding gun owners.

Last week, the Supreme Court of New Jersey upheld the right to lawfully possess and hold a weapon for self-defense in the home, rejecting arguments advanced by the State that would treat a citizen like a criminal for simply answering an angry knock at his own door while holding an object that was legal to possess.

The case, Montalvo v. State, arose out of a commonplace neighborhood dispute. Daleckis, downstairs of Montalvo, banged on the ceiling to let Montalvo know he was upset about the noise from upstairs. Montalvo then knocked on the Daleckis front door, and, getting no response, threw a table off their shared porch, which he acknowledged was a “stupid” thing to do. Shortly after, Daleckis went to the Montalvo apartment to confront him over the broken table. Montalvo and his wife claimed Daleckis was not just knocking but angrily kicking and slamming on their door. Uncertain of what to expect, Montalvo took the precaution of picking up a machete – used in his work as a roofer and kept with other tools – before opening the door. In the exchange that followed, Daleckis said Montalvo pointed the machete at him, while Montalvo testified he held the machete down the entire time. Both agreed, though, that Montalvo never stepped outside of his own apartment.

By the time the police arrived, the quarrel had fizzled out (Daleckis ultimately refused to provide a statement to police). Montalvo was arrested on charges that included two weapon possession offenses. The first count, possession with a purpose to use the weapon unlawfully, requires an intent to use the weapon against another’s person or property. The second was a violation of N.J. Stat. Ann. § 2C:39-5(d) (knowingly possessing the machete “under circumstances not manifestly appropriate for such lawful uses as it may have”), which prohibits possession of a weapon other than a firearm where the defendant has not yet formed an intent to use the object as a weapon, but possesses it under circumstances in which it is likely to be so used. This second count became the focus of the litigation.

Because New Jersey law defines a “weapon” as “anything readily capable of lethal use or inflicting serious bodily injury,” Section 2C:39-5(d) criminalizes possession of ordinarily lawful objects (scissors, razors, kitchen knives) in circumstances where the possession is not “manifestly appropriate” for lawful use, regardless of the actual intent of the possessor. This offense is a fourth degree crime, punishable by between three and five years’ incarceration on conviction.

At Montalvo’s trial, the model instructions to the jury directed that only three elements were necessary for a Section 2C:39-5(d) conviction: a weapon, possessed “knowingly,” in circumstances where a reasonable person would agree the object was likely to be used as a weapon. In response to the jury’s questions about self-defense, the judge advised that self-defense could not justify possession unless the defendant had armed himself as a “spontaneous” response to repel an immediate and compelling danger – anticipatory self-defense did not qualify. So instructed, the jury found Montalvo guilty of the Section 2C:39-5(d) offense but acquitted him on the first charge, and he was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

In his appeal, Montalvo argued the jury had been misdirected on self-defense, and that his conviction criminalized the possession of an otherwise legal weapon in his home in violation of the Second Amendment. After an appellate court affirmed his conviction and sentence, Montalvo launched a further appeal to the state’s highest court, the Supreme Court of New Jersey. 

The Attorney General of New Jersey took the unusual step of filing a “friend of the court” brief in the appeal, arguing that, while citizens are entitled to possess lawful weapons in the home for self-defense, the State is concurrently authorized to regulate the manner in which these weapons are possessed. “Everyday objects, which are entirely lawful to possess in their own right, even a pencil, can be used as weapons. The Legislature did not issue a wholesale prohibition on such lawful objects, but rather sought to regulate only the circumstances under which such objects may be possessed.” (Emphasis added.) This brief, consistent with the submissions by the prosecution, claimed the Second Amendment could not apply because Montalvo’s “disproportionate” response, arming himself where there was no “actual threat,” exceeded the boundaries of the right of self-defense in the home. In furtherance of this extremely narrow interpretation, the Attorney General’s brief asked that the court modify the model jury instructions for use in future cases to clarify that weapons for active self-defense in the home could be used only if the person armed himself spontaneously to repel an immediate danger.

A unanimous Supreme Court of New Jersey rejected this outlandish approach as both unworkable and unsupported by U.S. Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago (extending to “all instruments that constitute bearable arms”).

Justice Fernandez-Vina, writing for the court, noted at the onset that the case did not demand “an extensive Second Amendment analysis. We need only observe that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to possess weapons, including machetes, in the home for self-defense purposes.” Montalvo’s possession of the machete was lawful and it made no difference “whether his possession was for roofing or for self-defense because either would qualify as a lawful purpose.”

The interpretation of the law promoted by the State and the Attorney General was inconsistent with the very core of this fundamental right. The right to possess a weapon in the home for self-defense would be almost useless “if one were required to keep the weapon out-of-hand, picking it up only ‘spontaneously’” when and if the circumstances made clear an immediate danger existed. Calibrating the right so exactly to the presence of an immediate danger made it impossible to hold a weapon in anticipation of such potential, but not yet imminent, threats. This did not mean Montalvo could threaten the use of a machete merely for the purpose of inciting fear in another, but it did mean he could answer his door simply holding a weapon.

The court reversed the judgment below confirming the conviction and remanded the case; at the same time, the court directed a review and revision of the jury charge for Section 2C:39-5(d) offenses. The revision language, as suggested by the court, would clarify that possession of a lawful weapon in one’s home could not form the basis of a conviction under Section 2C:39-5(d); that a person may possess, in the home, objects that serve multiple lawful purposes, including the purpose of anticipatory self-defense; and that a person who responds to the door of his home with a concealed weapon that threatens no one acts within the bounds of the law.

Although we welcome this common sense ruling by the Supreme Court of New Jersey, this case affords yet another illustration of the importance of the courts and how dependent, in practice, the exercise of Second Amendment rights is on what any particular court considers to be the boundaries of the law. Since the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald, there have been all too many judges that have concluded the right to keep and bear arms is some kind of second-class constitutional right.

Florida’s Medical Use of Marijuana Law

SB 8-A — Medical Use of Marijuana implements the provisions of Art. X, s. 29, of the State Constitution. The bill builds on the existing compassionate use of low-THC and medical cannabis program with additional provisions to implement the Constitutional Amendment passed by Florida voters in the 2016 General Election.

Provisions in the bill relating to patients:

  • Exempt marijuana and marijuana delivery devices from sales and use tax that would otherwise be imposed under ch. 212, F.S.
  • Establish procedures for physicians to issue physician certifications to patients who have qualifying medical conditions. The bill includes all debilitating medical conditions listed in the State Constitution as a qualifying medical condition: cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, PTSD, ALS, Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or other debilitating medical condition of the same kind or class as or comparable to those enumerated. The bill also includes as a qualifying medical condition:
    • Chronic nonmalignant pain, which is defined as pain that is caused by or that originates from a qualifying medical condition and persists beyond the usual course of the qualifying medical condition.
    • A terminal condition.
  • Eliminate the 90-day waiting period before the qualified physician may register a patient as qualified to receive low-THC cannabis or medical marijuana.
  • Ensure that qualified patients can receive low-THC cannabis as well as full-THC marijuana.
  • Allow marijuana edibles and vaping, but prohibit the smoking of marijuana.
  • Establish residency requirements for patients to be issued a Medical Marijuana Use Registry Identification Card (ID card). The bill specifies documentation that must be provided to document residency, including documentation required for a seasonal resident.
  • Grandfather in existing patients from the low-THC and “right to try” programs registered in the compassionate use registry so that they may continue receiving their medication ordered through those programs.

Provisions in the bill relating to caregivers:

  • Establish qualifications to become a caregiver, which include:
    • Being at least 21 years of age and a resident of this state.
    • Agreeing in writing to assist the qualified patient and serve as the patient’s caregiver.
    • Passing a 2-hour caregiver course that is administered by the Department of Health (DOH).
    • Passing a background screening unless the patient is a close relative of the caregiver.
  • Limit the number of caregivers each patient may have and the number of patients each caregiver may assist.
  • Require a caregiver to be registered on the medical marijuana use registry and possess a caregiver identification card. The caregiver must be in immediate possession of his or her medical marijuana use registry ID card when in possession of marijuana or a marijuana delivery device and present the ID card upon the request of a law enforcement officer.
  • Require a caregiver to purchase or administer marijuana for medical use by a qualified patient who is younger than 18 years of age.
  • Prohibit a caregiver from receiving compensation, other than the actual expenses incurred, for any services provided to the qualified patient.

Provisions in the bill relating to qualified physicians and physician certifications:

  • Require a physician to complete a 2-hour course and examination relating to the requirements of this law for approval as a qualified physician. A qualified physician must also comply with a 2-hour continuing education requirement for licensure renewal.
  • Prohibit a qualified physician from being employed by, or having a direct or indirect economic interest in, a medical marijuana treatment center or marijuana testing laboratory.
  • Establish standards for a qualified physician to issue a physician certification to include:
    • Conducting a physical examination while physically present in the same room as the patient and a full assessment of the patient’s medical history.
    • Diagnosing the patient with at least one qualifying medical condition.
    • Determining, and documenting in the patient’s medical record, that the medical use of marijuana would likely outweigh the potential health risks for the patient. If a patient is younger than 18, a second physician must concur with this determination and this determination must be documented in the patient’s medical record.
    • Determining, and documenting in the patient’s medical record, whether the patient is pregnant. A physician may issue a physician certification for low-THC cannabis only, to a patient who is pregnant.
    • Reviewing the patient’s controlled drug prescription history in the prescription drug monitoring program database.
    • Reviewing the medical marijuana use registry to confirm that the patient does not have an active physician certification from another qualified physician.
    • Registering as the issuer of the physician certification for the named qualified patient on the medical marijuana use registry.
    • Updating the registry with specified relevant information concerning the physician’s certification for the patient’s medical use of marijuana.
  • Limit certifications to no more than three 70-day supply limits of marijuana.
  • Require a qualified physician to evaluate an existing qualified patient at least once every 30 weeks before issuing a new physician certification for that patient.

Provisions in the bill relating to Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers (MMTCs):

  • Require the DOH to license the seven existing dispensing organizations as MMTCs. These MMTCs may begin dispensing marijuana pursuant to this law on July 3, 2017.
  • Require the DOH to license as MMTCs 10 applicants by October 3, 2017.
    • The first group of licensees, which are to be licensed as MMTCs by August 1, 2017, include applicants that submitted an application under the compassionate use law in 2014, which was reviewed, evaluated, and scored by the DOH; which had an administrative or judicial challenge pending as of January 1, 2017, or had a final ranking within one point of the highest final ranking in its region; which meets the requirements of this law; and can document that it has the ability to begin cultivating marijuana within 30 days after registration as an MMTC.
    • The next group of licenses must be licensed by October 3, 2017. These applicants must submit an application to be reviewed, evaluated, and scored for selection to be licensed as an MMTC. Within this group, one license must be awarded to an applicant that is a recognized class member of specified litigation and a member of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association-Florida Chapter. All applicants must meet the requirements of this law. In the scoring of applications, the DOH is directed to give preference for up to two of these new licenses to applicants that demonstrate in their applications that they own and will use or convert a facility or facilities that are, or were, used for the processing of citrus fruit or citrus molasses for the processing of marijuana.
  • Require the DOH to license four additional MMTCs within 6 months after the medical marijuana use registry contains 100,000 active qualified patients, and upon each additional 100,000 active qualified patient registrations.
  • Limit MMTCs to 25 dispensing facilities statewide until the medical marijuana use registry contains 100,000 active qualified patients. When that occurs, an additional five dispensing facilities are authorized for each licensed MMTC.
    • Upon each additional 100,000 active qualified patient registrations, an additional five dispensing facilities are authorized for each licensed MMTC.
    • The bill also requires each MMTC to locate its authorized dispensing facilities within five regions statewide according to county population estimates for the counties within each region.
    • An MMTC that chooses not to establish a dispensing facility within a region as authorized, may sell that regional slot to another MMTC.
    • These limitations on dispensing facilities expire on April 1, 2020.
  • Detail requirements for MMTC applicants and standards that each MMTC must meet to obtain and maintain licensure; including a diversity plan that promotes and ensures the involvement of minority persons, minority business enterprises, or veteran business enterprises.
  • Authorize alternate forms of assets to satisfy the performance bond requirements.
  • Require an MMTC to perform all functions of cultivating, processing, transporting, and dispensing marijuana for medical use; including ensuring that low-THC is available for the medical use of qualified patients.
  • Require MMTC processing facilities to pass a Food Safety Good Manufacturing Practices inspection by a nationally recognized certifying body.
  • Require laboratory testing of MMTC products and create a certification program for medical marijuana testing laboratories.
  • Establish standards for advertising and requirements for a professional appearance and operation of dispensing facilities.
  • Require background screening of MMTC owners, officers, board members, managers, and employees, and of medical marijuana testing laboratory owners and managers.
  • Authorize a change of ownership for an MMTC under specified parameters and prohibit ownership in multiple MMTCs or certain profit-sharing arrangements.
  • Preempt the regulation of cultivation and processing of marijuana to the state.
  • Authorize local governments to ban MMTC dispensing facilities within their borders. However, if a local government does not ban dispensing facilities, it may not place any restrictions on the number of dispensing facilities allowed within its jurisdiction. Also, it may not adopt any regulations or fees for dispensing facilities that are more restrictive than its ordinances regulating pharmacies.

Additional provisions in the bill:

  • Establish administrative, disciplinary, or criminal penalties for prohibited acts by physicians, patients, caregivers, MMTCs, medical marijuana testing laboratories, and other persons. These prohibited acts include, but are not limited to:
    • A qualified patient or caregiver cultivating marijuana or acquiring marijuana from anyone other than an MMTC.
    • A qualified patient or caregiver in possession of marijuana or a marijuana delivery device who fails or refuses to present his or her marijuana use registry identification card upon the request of a law enforcement officer. However the bill includes certain mitigating actions that may enable a patient or caregiver to avoid prosecution.
    • An MMTC providing kickbacks to a qualified physician.
    • Unlicensed activity.
    • Counterfeiting marijuana or a marijuana delivery device purporting it to be from a licensed MMTC.
    • Possessing or making a counterfeit or otherwise unlawfully issued medical marijuana use registry identification card.
  • Authorize the DOH to pursue certain enforcement action for violations of this law.
  • Specify that this act does not limit an employer’s ability regarding a drug-free workplace program or policy, does not require an employer to accommodate the medical use of marijuana in the workplace or an employee working while under the influence of marijuana, does not create a cause of action against an employer for wrongful discharge or discrimination, and that marijuana is not reimbursable under ch. 440, F.S., relating to workers’ compensation.
  • Require the DOH and the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to establish public educational campaigns related to the medical use of marijuana.
  • Require the Department of Law Enforcement to develop initial training and continuing education for law enforcement agencies relating to activities governed by this law and criminal laws governing marijuana.
  • Create the Coalition for Medicinal Cannabis Research and Education (Coalition) to conduct rigorous scientific research, provide education, disseminate research, and to guide policy development for the adoption of a statewide policy on ordering and dosing practices for the medicinal use of cannabis.
  • Include rulemaking and other provisions to aid the DOH in adopting rules and implementing the provisions of Amendment 2 within the time frame specified in the amendment.
  • Require each district school board to adopt a policy and procedure for allowing a student who is a qualified patient to use marijuana obtained pursuant to this law.
  • Rename the Office of Compassionate Use in the DOH, the Office of Medical Marijuana Use.
  • Rename the compassionate use registry, the medical marijuana use registry.
  • Provide a severability clause so that if any provision of the act or its application is held invalid, the invalidity does not affect other provisions or applications which can still be given effect.
  • Include appropriations for the state 2017-2018 fiscal year for the DOH, the education programs, and the Coalition.

Amid Efforts to Impeach, Trump is Winning for America

Vice President Mike Pence said nothing touches and encourages himself and president Trump more than hearing Americans say they are praying for them. Folks, given president Trump’s superhuman focus on winning for America while enduring unprecedented vitriolic attacks from all sides, I’d say our prayers are working.

After months on the road working to elect conservatives in special elections, I’m back home. I ran into my favorite bank teller, a middle-aged Hispanic woman. “Oh Mr Marcus, it is so good to see you.” Folks, I was taken aback as she began expressing her extremely heartfelt thanks for my working to elect Trump and the work I do around the country. Frankly, I was stunned by how much Trump winning meant to her. Fake news media will never understand the phenomenal connection Trump has with a majority of the American people. They (We the People) get it. They know Obama was destroying our country. They know Trump is committed to bringing us back from the edge of destruction and they are extremely excited and grateful. None of fake news media’s 24/7 attempts to politically assassinate Trump is working — quite the opposite.

Who could have imagined that Trump’s Washington DC inexperience would be one of his greatest strengths. Trump governs free of pro-politician political correctness. A gifted businessman, Trump is instinctively using his talent; making deals good for America while getting us out of deals bad for America. Case in point, Trump pulled us out of the disastrous Paris climate deal. 

Meanwhile, Washington DC establishment elites are outraged, “That’s not how we do things in this town. Trump can’t say that! Trump can’t do that! How dare Trump speak directly to the American people via tweets!”

I’ve heard talking heads supposedly on our side say they wish Trump would conform more to traditional presidential behavior. I say Trump is doing just fine being 100% Trump. He has made remarkable positive changes in 100 days that would have taken other Republicans 10 years. Whenever Republicans win elections they are advised to move slowly and be careful not to anger Leftists too much to avoid fake news media backlash.

America’s number one radio personality, Rush Limbaugh said, “If what you do relies on talent, you will never be your best doing it someone else’s way.” Based on his proven talent, I trust Trump to govern his way as long as he functions according to our Constitution. I could not care less that Washington insiders view him as a bull in their Washington DC china store. Break more stuff Mr President. Please break more stuff.

Leftists worldwide are so obsessed with removing Trump from office and blocking his agenda, they appear to have suspended interest in all else.

The Left was brutally tough on Sarah Palin; everything out of her mouth was spun to brand her an idiot. Compared to how the Left is relentlessly going after Trump, Palin was treated with kid gloves.

Though under reported we are winning in unprecedented ways under president Trump.

Trump appointing Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education was huge for America, a serious blow to Leftists’ government indoctrination of our kids. Though high-tech bludgeoned by Leftists, DeVos strongly advocates restoring parent’s rights. 

Along with the confirmation of conservative Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, Trump just nominated 11 new conservative federal judges. These are awesome selections with long term positive effects.

Trump has rolled back a ton of Obama’s overreaching stupid job-killing and economy-dragging regulations.

Keeping his campaign promises and rolling back Obama’s mess, Trump has signed a remarkable list of executive orders.

During his Infrastructure speech at the Department of Transportation, Trump expressed his desire to cut absurd regulations. Trump said,

“It is time at last to put America first. No longer can we allow these rules and regulations to tie down our economy, chain up our prosperity and sap our great American spirit.”

Wow, now that’s what I am talkin’ about folks — ignore fake news media’s lies. We are winning under Trump. We are winning.

Displaying arrogant wickedness, Democrats are boldly lying to the American people, falsely accusing Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors. They have taken their first legislative steps to remove Trump from office by drafting articles of impeachment. 

Leftist law professor Marjorie Cohn absurdly said Trump pulling us out of the Paris climate deal is an impeachable offense. These people on the left are deranged. Still, they must be taken seriously and blocked. If allowed, Democrats and fake news media will impeach our president based totally on lies. 

I am confident we who love America will remain firmly entrenched in our support for our president.

Thanks to God and Trump’s talent, we are winning.

The Politically Hopeless, Completely Incoherent, and Totally Lame Economic Agenda of the Democratic Party by John Tamny

n a column from December of 2015, the Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady unveiled an inconvenient fact that poverty warriors on the American left and right would perhaps prefer remain hidden: from 1980 to 2000, when the U.S. economy boomed, the number of Mexican arrivals into the U.S. grew from 2.2 million in 1980 to 9.4 million in 2000. The previous number is a clear market signal that the U.S. is where poverty has always been cured, as opposed to a condition that requires specific U.S. policy fixes.

O’Grady’s statistics came to mind while reading a recent New York Times column by Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He writes that a “highly progressive agenda [from Democratic scholars and politicians] has been coming together in recent months, one with the potential to unite both the Hillary and Bernie wings of the party, to go beyond both Clintonomics and Obamanomics.”The problem is that the agenda that’s got Bernstein so giddy has nothing to do with the very economic growth that is always the source of rising economic opportunity for the poor, middle and rich.

More Welfare

Up front, Bernstein expresses excitement about a $190 billion (annually) program that he describes as a “universal child allowance.” The allowance would amount to annual federal checks sent to low-income families of $3,000/child. It all sounds so compassionate on its face to those who think it kind for Congress to spend the money of others, but given a second look even the mildly sentient will understand that economic opportunity never springs from a forcible shift of money from one pocket to another. If it were, theft would be both legal and encouraged.

The very economic growth in the U.S. that has long proven a magnet for the world’s poorest springs not from wealth redistribution, but instead from precious capital being matched with entrepreneurs eager to transform ideas into reality. Just as the U.S. economy wouldn’t advance if Americans with odd-numbered addresses stealthily ‘lifted’ $3,000 each from those with even-numbered addresses, neither will it grow if the federal government is the one taking from some, only to give to others.

Economic progress always and everywhere springs from investment, yet Bernstein is arguing with a straight face that the U.S.’s poorest will be better off if the feds extract $190 billion of precious capital from the investment pool. As readers can probably imagine, he doesn’t stop there.

Government Jobs

Interesting is that Bernstein’s next naïve suggestion involves “direct job creation policies, meaning either jobs created by the government or publicly subsidized private employment.” Ok, but all jobs are a function of private wealth creation as Bernstein unwittingly acknowledges given his call for resource extraction from the private sector in order to create them.

This begs the obvious question why economic opportunity would be enhanced if the entrepreneurial and business sectors had less in the way of funds to innovate with. But that’s exactly what Bernstein is seeking through his $190 billion “universal child allowance,” not to mention his call for more “jobs created by the government.”Stating what’s obvious even to Bernstein, government can’t create any work absent private sector wealth, so why not leave precious resources in the hands of the true wealth creators? Precisely because they’re wealth focused, funds kept in their control will be invested in ways that foster much greater opportunity than can politicians consuming wealth created by others.

Contradictions Abound

Still, Bernstein plainly can’t see just how contradictory his proposals are; proposals that explicitly acknowledge where all opportunity emerges from. Instead, he calls for more government programs. Specifically, he’s proposing a $1 trillion expansion of the “earned-income tax credit” meant to pay Americans to go to work.

As he suggests, the $1 trillion of funds extracted from the productive parts of the economy would lead to family of four tax credits of $6,000 in place of the “current benefit of about $2,000.” Ok, but what goes unexplained here is why we need to pay those residing in the U.S. to work in the first place.

What gives life to the above question is the previously mentioned influx of Mexican strivers into the U.S. during the U.S. boom of the 80s and 90s. What the latter indicated clearly is that economic growth itself is the greatest enemy poverty has ever known. It also indicated that work is available to those who seek it, and even better, the work available is quite a bit more remunerative than one could find anywhere else in the world.

Rest assured that the U.S. hasn’t historically experienced beautiful floods of immigration because opportunity stateside was limited. People come here because the U.S. is once again the country in which the impoverished can gradually erase their poverty thanks to abundant work opportunities. If Mexicans who frequently don’t speak English can improve their economic situations in the U.S., why on earth would the political class pay natives who do speak the language to pursue the very work that is the envy of much of the rest of the world?Put rather simply, those who require payment above and beyond their wage to get up and go in the morning have problems that have nothing to do with a lack of work, and everything to do with a lack of initiative. Importantly, handouts from Washington logically won’t fix what is a problem of limp ambition. At best, they’ll exacerbate what Bernstein claims to want to fix.

Inequality Hurts No One

Most comical is Bernstein’s assertion that the tax credits will allegedly mitigate “the damage done to low- and moderate-wage earners by the forces of inequality that have steered growth away from them” in modern times. What could he possibly mean? The U.S. has long been very unequal economically, yet the world’s poorest have consistently risked their lives to get here precisely because wealth gaps most correlate with opportunity.

Translated, investment abundantly flows to societies where individuals are free to pursue what most elevates their talents (yes, pursuit of what makes them unequal), and with investment comes work options for everyone. Doubters need only travel to Seattle and Silicon Valley, where the world’s five most valuable companies are headquartered, to see up close why the latter is true.

Similarly glossed over by this confused economist is that rising inequality is the surest sign of a shrinking lifestyle inequality between the rich and poor. We work in order to get, and thanks to rich entrepreneurs more and more Americans have instant access at incessantly falling prices to the computers, mobile phones, televisions, clothing and food that were once solely the preserve of the rich.Just once it would be nice if Bernstein and the other class warriors he runs with would explain how individual achievement that leads to wealth harms those who aren’t rich. What he would find were he to replace emotion with rationality is that in capitalist societies, people generally get rich by virtue of producing abundance for everyone. In short, we need more inequality, not less, if the goal is to improve the living standards of those who presently earn less.

Remarkably, Bernstein describes the ideas presented as “bold” and “progressive,” but in truth, they’re the same lame-brained policies of redistribution that the left have been promoting for decades. And as they’re anti-capital formation by Bernstein’s very own admission, they’re also inimical to the very prosperity that has long made the U.S. the country where poverty is cured. To be clear, if this is the best the Democrats have, they’ll long remain in the minority.

John Tamny

John Tamny

John Tamny is a Forbes contributor, editor of RealClearMarkets, a senior fellow in economics at Reason, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research & Trading. He’s the author of the 2016 book Who Needs the Fed? (Encounter), along with Popular Economics (Regnery Publishing, 2015).

My Visit to Cuba — An American in Havana

I had the opportunity to visit Cuba. I flew via Southwest Airlines from Tampa International Airport to the José Martí International Airport in Havana, Cuba on June 4th and returned on June 9th, 2017.

After my short visit to Cuba I now fully understand why I spent my entire 23 years in the U.S. Army fighting against Communism.

Cuba is the poster child for Communism (i.e. socialism). It is a country with full control of its people by their government. Arriving was like an episode of the Twilight Zone where I was transported back to the 1950s. The 26th of July Movement began in July 1953 and ended when rebels finally ousted Cuban President Fulgencio Batista on 1 January 1959. Not much has improved for the Cuban people since then.

The graffiti, in the featured image above, reads, “Cuba, socialism or death!” I saw this graffiti along with pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara throughout the country. On highway billboards, on the walls of buildings, in government museums and in the public square. It is a constant reminder to the Cuban people of where their loyalty lies – to defend Communism at all cost, and the cost is high, very high.

The greatest threat to the survival of the Cuban people is “socialismo.”

ITS THE ECONOMY STUPID!

As former Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy stupid!” For the Cuban people it truly is the economy, stupid.

Perhaps a few of my first hand experiences in Cuba will help those who favor big government understand where “socialismo” leads.

One of the things some people, many of whom have never visited Cuba, tout is their “excellent” healthcare system. Let me explain about the Cuban single payer government healthcare system. First, every visitor to Cuba must purchase health insurance from the Cuban government. For example, the cost of my health insurance was automatically included in the price of my plane ticket. So how much does the Cuban government pay its doctors to provide universal healthcare? The salary of a doctor is $30 a month.

In 2013 Brazil hired 4,000 doctors from Cuba to “work in areas where medical services and physicians are scarce.” These Cuban doctors were to be paid approximately $30,000 a year to provide medical services to remote areas of Brazil. According to U.S. News & World Report, “Analysts say the export of medical services adds about $6 billion a year to Cuba’s economy.”

How does this work? Brazil paid the Cuban government the $30,000 annual salaries of the Cuban doctors and the Cuban government then paid the doctors $30 a month or $360 a year. This equates to an 83% profit for the Cuban government. Not surprisingly many of these Cuban doctors sought asylum in Brazil to be paid what they actually earned, $30,000.

In socialist governments the “minimum wage” inextricably becomes the prevailing wage.

It’s the economy stupid.

WORKING IN THE CUBAN TOURISM INDUSTRY

In 1991, after the fall of the former Soviet Union, the Cuban economy collapsed because economic aid provided by the Russians ended. More recently Cuba’s main international commercial partners—Venezuela, Brazil, China—have lost their appetites for subsidizing the anemic Cuban economy, lending a new urgency to grow perennially lethargic exports, and forcing the Cuban authorities to look for new sources of foreign exchange – tourism.

As U.S. News & World Report noted, “[T]ourism, the official No. 1 source of incoming cash, brought in $2.5 billion in 2011, according to the most recent statistics available.”

With the opening of tourism to U.S. citizens this incoming cash has increased. According to the Brookings Institute, “In the wake of the December 2014 rapprochement, the United States significantly relaxed restrictions on U.S. travel to the island, and prospective tourists in other nations saw Cuba in a new light. As a result, tourist arrivals jumped by over 16 percent in 2015 to 3.5 million. U.S. travelers, including those from the Cuban diaspora, now amount to roughly 14 percent of new arrivals, and are expected to nearly double in 2016.”

Our party was nine individuals, all U.S. citizens. We stayed in a large villa, owned by a Spanish citizen, located near embassy row in Havana. The villa could accommodate up to 14 people and came with a staff of five. The cost, including breakfast, for the villa was $10,000. We also hired two drivers with vans to take our party to various sites within Cuba. The cost to hire the two drivers amounted to an additional $2,000.

The manager of the villa was paid $15 a month, with individual staff members paid less. The manager went to Havana University and became a statistician. The manager for a number of years was a professor but decided to work in the tourism industry because the pay was better.

During our stay I went on a one-hour carriage ride through the heart of Havana. I paid the driver of the carriage $30 for two people to ride in his horse drawn carriage. The driver made $30 in one hour. This one carriage driver made as much in one hour as does a doctor working in a Havana hospital who earns $30 a month.

Given the price our party paid to rent the villa and the clear disparity between the wages of those in the tourism industry and the prevailing wage, in Communist Cuba it truly is the economy, stupid.

WORKING IN THE FARMING INDUSTRY

Tobacco rancho in the Vinales valley. Note the picture of Che Guevara on the water tank. Photo: Author.

To meet the Cuban people we decided to travel outside of Havana. Our group visited a tobacco rancho (farm) about 200 kilometers west of Havana located in the Vinales Valley, the heart of tobacco growing in Cuba. It is in Vinales Valley that Cuban farmers grow what is considered the finest cigar tobacco in the world.

The farm we visited has been owned by a Cuban family for generations. We went into a tobacco curing barn and we received a talk about how the tobacco seeds were planted, how the plants were cultivated and how the tobacco was grown, harvested and then cured for a full year or more. We then went to another gazebo type structure to see how cigars are rolled.

The tobacco farmer told us that every year he must send 90% of his tobacco crop to the government where it is processed and made into Cuban cigars for sale and export.

So how does the farmer survive with just 10% of his crop as his reward for all of his and his families hard work?

He produces his own cigars and sells them to tourists. This is a limited form of capitalism in a repressive socialist society. The farmer partnered with a local tour guide to bring foreign visitors to his farm to see his work, try and buy his cigars. His cigars do not have a label like the government brand Cohiba. The government forbids him from branding his cigars and putting them into boxes. This farmer sells his cigars in packets made from palm leaves holding 14 or 20 cigars.

A Cohiba cigar sold in Cuban government stores costs from $20 to $30 per cigar. This farmer sells his cigars for $3 each. His cigars are no different than those made in government factories, except his are better. His cigars are cured longer, he removes the stem of the tobacco leaf, which contains all of the nicotine, and wraps them in paper for five days to further age them.

This one farmer selling one pack of 20 cigars makes $60 or twice the monthly salary of a doctor. While there our party alone bought 6 packs of 20 cigars or $360 worth of cigars. There were a dozen other tourists at the farm when we arrived. Many of them also bought his cigars. Capitalism works, even in a socialist society.

It’s the economy stupid.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Cuban people I spoke with were friendly toward us Americans. Those who provided us with personal services whether in local restaurants, while on tours, our drivers and those who took care of us where we stayed were professional, hard working and kind.

But Cuba’s desire to be a tourist attraction is waning. MarketWatch’s Kari Paul reports:

A flash of excitement about travel to Cuba after the country opened its borders to the U.S. in 2016 for the first time in decades may have lost some of its shine.

Americans are less interested in travel to Cuba this year than they were in 2016, a survey from insurance provider Allianz Global Assistance found. Some 76% of the 1,514 respondents said they were not likely to plan a trip to Cuba in 2017 compared to 70% in 2016. Only 2% of those surveyed planned to visit Cuba in the next six months or by the end of 2017, the same as 2016 despite a projected increase in travelers from the country’s ministry of tourism. It also found that 60% of Americans said “would not like to travel to Cuba” compared to just 58% in 2016.

[ … ]

Indeed, the initial excitement about the formerly closed off country gave way to moral dilemmas over food shortages and other problems caused by tourism, as well as disappointment over limited working internet, lower hotel standards, and lack of running water there. The Allianz study found lack of travel infrastructure was a major cause of anxiety about traveling to Cuba for 13% of Americans.

The slide in demand has led a number of airlines to reduce or completely eliminate flights to the country, including Silver Airways, a Florida-headquartered domestic airline that dropped all nine of its planned routes to Cuba. Frontier is dropping its Miami-Havana route by June 4, after costs in Havana “significantly exceeded our initial assumptions,” a spokesman told MarketWatch. Spirit Airlines will drop its last flight to Cuba by June 1: “The costs of serving Havana continue to outweigh the demand for service,” Spirit Airlines  president and chief executive officer of Bob Fornaro said in April.

Sumers suggested confusion over the approved reasons to go to Cuba is keeping the average American visitor away still. As of May 2017, visitors to the country have to select one of 12 categories for their visit, which include religious activities, humanitarian projects, “support for the Cuban people,” and journalistic activities. “You can’t go to Cuba to sit on the beach and have fun and that’s what Americans like to do on vacation,” he said. “Cuba is a bit of an outlier still — it is not easy to visit and for a lot of people it’s still a pain. You have to really want to go there.”

What I observed is that the Cuban people have great potential if they are unleashed and allowed to earn what they are truly worth. Socialismo is slowly but surely killing their lives and doing them great harm. I noticed on the ride West of Havana through the rural areas of Cuba hundreds of people waiting along the road trying to get a ride. Some were nurses in their white uniforms thumbing rides to the hospital where they are needed. I saw horse drawn carriages along the major highway carrying people because the public transportation system cannot keep up with the demand. The horses and cattle we saw were emaciated. The roads were in poor shape including the national highway system.

As one Cuban man put it, “the people have no love for their work.” They have no love for their work because Cuba needs a change in direction. Raul Castro has announced that he will step down as President of Cuba in February 2018. This is a chance for Cuba to change direction. To move to a capitalistic society where the individual benefits from what he or she produces, not the government. However, the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research reports:

The Cuban media has been emphasizing that Raul Castro is leaving power. He announced in 2016 that he would be stepping down as President in 2018. Yet, he was reelected for five years as Secretary General of Cuba’s Communist Party and will remain as head of Cuba’s Armed Forces. The position of President, which will become mostly ceremonial, will be held by Miguel Diaz Canel, a low-level Communist Party bureaucrat with little military or public support.

In Cuba, power resides in the military and the Politburo of the Communist Party, both of which will continue to be controlled by Raul and his military comrades.

We shall see what happens in February 2018. The great fear among those to whom I spoke with is the new leadership will keep the ways of the old regime.

Socialismo o Muerte (socialism or death) must be replaced with Liberar al pueblo cubano (free the Cuban people).

RELATED ARTICLES: 

United Nations Honors Che Guevara—Yet Again 

Castro’s Killing Fields: A Pattern of Disregard for Human Life Lasting Six Decades (February)

Trump Tightens Cuba Embargo, Restricting Access to Hotels and Businesses

The Twelve Reasons Why Cuba Is A Terrorist Nation And Is A Security Treat To The USA

Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ – New York Times

American Diplomats Were Attacked in Cuba by Sonic Wave Weapons

Cuba Has “Occupying Army” in Venezuela, OAS Secretary General Claims – VIDEO

Trump’s New Foreign Policy of “Principled Realism”

Trump’s ‘Active Leadership’ Reverses Course on Obama’s Cuba Policy

Report: Trump Poised to Reverse Obama’s Cuba Policies – Townhall

Myths About Cuba

This is why American tourists don’t want to travel to Cuba

F Stands for Fail: Washington Post Flip-Flops on Suppressors

The Washington Post — in one of its rare reversions to journalism – recently issued a fact check that handed Americans for Responsible Solutions and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) three Pinocchios for overstating the noise-canceling properties of firearm suppressors. “There is little that’s quiet about a firearm with a silencer, unless one also thinks a jackhammer is quiet,” the report concluded. 

The context was the debate over the Hearing Protection Act (HPA). This bill would treat suppressors as if they were ordinary firearms for federal regulatory purposes, rather than the current practice of treating their sales as if they were machine guns, which are subject to much more cumbersome rules designed to discourage ownership. 

Suppressors’ popularity has increased exponentially in recent years, as firearm owners have embraced the health-promoting and experience-enhancing benefits of their use.

And while they do decrease the report of firearms, they do not, as the Post fact check accurately reported, render them anywhere near “silent.”

Who could possibly argue with technology that can reduce hearing loss associated with firearm use? Certainly not the Washington Post, which in its March 20 fact check stated, “We obviously take no position on whether this proposed law would be good or bad …. “

Obviously. 

Only that wasn’t so obvious to Washington Post’s editorial board (which at least formally is still separate from the paper’s reporting bureaus, although practically speaking editorializing and reporting have become nearly one in the same at the paper). 

Nine days after the fact check was published – shooting down, as it were, the main argument against the HPA (that gunshots would become undetectable) – the Washington Post did a 180 degree turn and editorialized against the bill. The HPA, it claimed, would repeal “one of the oldest and most effective firearms controls on the books.”

Effective how, exactly? Well, according to the Post, “Silencers are almost never used in murders and other crimes under the current restrictive law, but certainly they would be used in more crimes if there were more of them in circulation.” 

But in fact suppressor use in crime hasn’t perceptibly increased at all, even as the number of suppressors legally owned in America has nearly doubled in the last three years (the Post itself put the current number at “about 900,000,” while CNN reported it was 571,750 in March 2014). Figure in the mountain of unprocessed applications, as ATF struggles with a months-long backlog, and the actual number legally in circulation would already be considerably higher. 

And if the HPA were to become law, retail sales of suppressors would still have to be processed by federally licensed dealers, with the buyer undergoing a background check and filling out the associated paperwork that would allow for tracing of the device if it were recovered at the scene of a crime.

The Post insists that “Congress should tell the NRA to go away and not come back unless and until it has waged a serious campaign to get recreational shooters to take precautions ….” 

Really, Washington Post? We invited you, along with other news outlets, to come out to our headquarters – maybe a 30 minute drive from your own – to see exactly how suppressors work and exactly what sort of safety precautions we teach people who use firearms. 

You can find these safety precautions posted to our website. They include the admonition:

Wear eye and ear protection as appropriate.
Guns are loud and the noise can cause hearing damage.

Rules like this have been part of NRA training programs for over a 100 years.

And if you need hearing protection, you can easily buy it at the NRA Store. We’ll even throw in additional foam ear plugs at the range for free, if you want them, as we do for all of our visitors. 

But you didn’t know that, because you refused our invitation (unlike your peers), and you didn’t conduct the minimal research a competent third grade teacher would demand of any student before writing your silly, hypocritical, flip-flopping editorial. 

In this case you were right before you were wrong. But while half-credit may be good enough for your brand of journalism, it still earns an F from us. And that stands for FAIL. 

8 Big-Government Policies that Hurt the Poor by Patrick Tyrrell

It’s clear that many big government policies are creating winners and losers in America.

The story has been the same for decades. Government makes friends with a company or an industry, blocks out the competition with regulation, and in some cases gives the company subsidies.

Such cronyism is bad for innovators and for consumers. But fewer people realize that it’s also bad for the poor. A recent report from The Heritage Foundation detailed 23 of these big government policies that hurt the poor, and provided concrete ways to address them.

Winners and losers from big government policies are not always clear. And yet for some crony policies, the winners and losers are very clear. The winners are a small group of identifiable government cronies, while the losers include people of little or no influence with the government.

Here is a look at eight big government policies from the report that benefit government cronies at the expense of other groups of people, including the poor.

1. Renewable Fuel Standard

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated that renewable fuels be mixed into America’s gasoline supply, primarily by using corn-based ethanol. Then, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Acts significantly increased the amount that must be mixed in.

This mandate is known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. It forces the use of higher levels of biofuels than the market would otherwise bear. The result has been higher food and fuel prices.

Who Wins: Corn farmers, soybean farmers, and biofuel companies.

Who Loses: Consumers of gasoline, consumers of food, and farmers that rely on feedstock and restaurants.

2. Federal Sugar Program

The federal government tries to limit the supply of sugar that is sold in the United States.

This federal sugar program uses a combination of price supports, marketing allotments that limit how much sugar processors can sell each year, and import restrictions that reduce the amount of imports.

As a result, the price of American sugar is consistently higher than world prices.

Who WinsSugar growers and sugar harvesters.

Who Loses: Workers in sugar-using industries, and consumers of food (including bread) that contains sugar.

3. Catfish Inspection Program

As a result of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s catfish inspection program, the USDA inspects catfish while the Food and Drug Administration inspects all other seafood.

This creates duplication because seafood processing facilities that produce both catfish and any other seafood will have to deal with two different types of seafood regulatory schemes instead of just one.

This program also creates a non-tariff trade barrier that will make it extremely difficult for foreign catfish exporters to export to the U.S., likely reducing competition for the domestic catfish industry.

Who WinsDomestic catfish producers.

Who Loses: Domestic catfish consumers.

4. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (the Jones Act)

The Merchant Marine Act – nicknamed after Sen. Wesley Jones, R-Wash. – requires the use of domestically built ships when transporting goods between U.S. ports. The ships must also be U.S.-owned, and mostly U.S.-crewed.

Who WinsThe U.S. domestic shipping industry.

Who Loses: The U.S. military, automobile drivers, users of propane and heating oil, and anyone benefitting from the trade and transportation of goods between U.S. ports.

5. Occupational Licensure

Licensure laws create government requirements for being allowed to practice a profession. These requirements exist even though the market would produce certification options if consumers desired such information.

Who WinsWorkers who have already obtained licenses.

Who Loses: People wanting to work who can’t because they don’t have a license, and consumers who have to pay higher prices for services.

6. Economic Development Takings

On June 23, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Kelo v. City of New London that the government can seize private property and transfer it to another private party for economic development.

This type of taking was deemed to be for “public use” and ruled a proper use of the government’s eminent domain power under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Who Wins: People who successfully lobby the government to seize other people’s property for financial gain.

Who LosesProperty owners who have their property seized.

7. Home-Sharing Regulations

Local governments sometimes ban or excessively regulate home-sharing – that is, renting out one’s home to accommodate travelers, such as through Airbnb.

When this happens, consumers have less choices of where to stay when traveling, hotels can charge higher prices, and homeowners and renters can’t make full use of their legally possessed homes to earn income for themselves.

Who WinsHotel employee union lobbies, and the hotel industry.

Who Loses: Homeowners and renters.

8. Ride-Sharing Regulations

In some state and local jurisdictions (such as outside Portland, Oregon; Alaska; and Austin, Texas), the government bans or heavily regulates ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft.

These companies are popping up all over because they meet consumers’ needs, but they are being held down in certain cities where the government backs the establishment industry.

Who WinsTraditional taxicab companies.

Who Loses: Uber, Lyft, and drivers looking for low barriers to entry; taxicab customers; customers who want to go in or out of certain neighborhoods that traditional taxi drivers avoid; and users of public transportation seeking to complete the “last mile” of their trips.

When industries or groups win special favors from politicians at the expense of ordinary Americans and the poor, it is an affront to freedom – especially to the economic freedom of the poor.

Policies that drive up prices – especially of commodities – are harder to absorb if you are poor.

The policies listed above can block off the only escape route that poor people have from poverty, preventing them from doing what they are good at for a living, for example, or from renting out their home or other property.

All Americans should have the same opportunities open to them. But when government cronyism rears its ugly head, they don’t.

Those who fall on the losing side of cronyism are more likely to agree with President Ronald Reagan when he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Reprinted from Daily Signal.

Patrick Tyrrell

Patrick Tyrrell is a research coordinator in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis.

EDITORS NOTE: Get trained for success by leading entrepreneurs.  Learn more at FEEcon.org

President Trump Does a 180 on Obama’s Offshore Energy Policy

Here’s what a real “All-of-the-above” energy strategy looks like, and all it took was a stroke of a pen.

Unlike his predecessor, President Donald Trump is embracing American energy abundance. His latest action is an executive order reviewing President Barack Obama’s lock-down on offshore energy:

“Today we’re unleashing American energy and clearing the way for thousands and thousands of high paying American energy jobs,” said Trump, flanked by Republican lawmakers from energy-producing states during a White House signing ceremony.

“Our country is blessed with incredible natural resources including abundant offshore oil and natural gas resources, but the federal government has kept 94% of these offshore areas closed for exploration and production,” he said. “This deprives our country of potentially thousands and thousands of jobs and billions in wealth.”

The directive, known as the America First Offshore Energy Strategy, directs Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review the current five-year development plan on the Outer Continental Shelf for offshore oil and gas exploration as well as review the regulations and permitting process for development and seismic research.

The E.O. reviews every offshore area and could lead to future opportunities in the Mid-Atlantic, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and off Alaska’s coast. In other words, there will be a comprehensive, strategic look at how we can safely develop all our offshore energy resources–oil, natural, gas, and wind.

Map of U.S. offshore oil and natural gas resources

Source: American Petroleum Institute.

Specifically about the Arctic, the E.O. reverses President Obama’s attempt to permanently block future energy development in the Arctic Ocean. This could open the door to accessing the 34 billion barrels of oil and the 60 billion barrels (equivalent) of natural gas below the Arctic coast of the U.S.

National Petroleum Council chart on Arctic energy resources.

Source: National Petroleum Council.

What’s more, not only does the E.O. re-evaluate what areas would be open to offshore energy development, but it also reviews nearly a dozen Interior Department rules issued by the Obama administration.

All in all it’s a benefit for energy security. “President Trump has made it clear that developing and producing more American energy is a win for the economy and for American families,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy. “We whole heartedly agree.”

MORE ARTICLES ON:ENERGY

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This Senate Bill Will Make Federal Regulations Smarter and More Effective

Americans complain about over regulation. As rule after rule has piled up over the decades, they have good reason to complain.

But here’s an interesting observation: Regulations written by the Obama administration operated under something like a power law. The biggest regulatory costs came from a few regulations, as this American Action Forum chart shows.

American Action Forum chart: Regulatory costs for Top 3 rules versus all others, by year, 2009-2016.
Source: American Action Forum.

Another way of looking at this is a chart from an important report, Taming the Administration State, by the U.S. Chamber’s Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs Division.

4x

“The regulatory world is top-heavy, where a majority of costs and benefits are concentrated in three or four measures,” explained AAF’s Sam Bakins.

Regulations with massive burdens include the FCC’s Open Internet Order that converted the internet into a publicly utility, the (stayed) Waters of the United States rule that would give EPA authority over how land is used over large portions of the country, and the (also stayed) Clean Power Plan that would wipe out affordable coal-fueled power plants.

Businesses—especially small businesses— have had to cope with these costly rules and know full well they hold back investment, job creation, and economic growth.

If we focus on the costliest rules, regulators can limit their detrimental effects, make them more effective at achieving their intended goals, or even reevaluate their intended purpose.

To the rescue is the Regulatory Accountability Act (RAA). Sens.  Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) introduced the bipartisan bill in the Senate that would make the first major changes to the federal regulatory process in seven decades.

The RAA is based on three principles for regulatory reform William Kovacs, U.S. Chamber Senior Vice President, Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs, laid out earlier this year:

·  Accountability. Federal agencies need to show that the costliest rules are truly needed and are written to use the least costly option available to achieve their objective.

·  Transparency. Agencies must be open about why and how they make key decisions to regulate, and avoid making those decisions in secret under pressure from special interest groups, entirely outside of the normal rulemaking process.

·  Participation. Agencies should be required to inform the public of pending regulatory decisions on high-impact rules early in the process, share their data and economic models, and allow those who will be affected adequate time for public input.

The RAA would focus federal agency efforts on proposed regulations that would have the biggest effects on the economy. The federal government would still have the ability to write necessary regulations. The RAA would only require additional effort on the most-expensive ones in order for them to achieve their intended goals at the lowest cost to our economy.

“Our bipartisan bill would make federal regulations smarter and more effective for everyone impacted by them, support job growth, create certainty, and provide an important check and balance on the president no matter who is in charge,” said Sen. Heitkamp. “Can you imagine if we still used telecommunications systems from World War II? They might get the job done, but they would be slow, potentially faulty, and incredibly inefficient. The same goes for the current 70-year old law which still governs the way federal agencies propose and establish regulations.”

“This legislation would bring our outdated federal regulatory process into the 21st Century by requiring agencies to use the best scientific and economic data available, strengthening checks and balances, and giving the public a voice in the process,” Sen. Portman added.

Business groups support the RAA. Neil Bradley, U.S. Chamber Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer, said in a statement:

The rules governing the federal regulatory system were written in the Truman administration, with few updates since then. Now, under the Trump administration, it’s past time to modernize the process. The Regulatory Accountability Act would increase scrutiny of the most expensive rules that cut across industries and sectors, requiring greater transparency and agency accountability. We encourage all Senators to support this bipartisan reform legislation that can encourage business expansion, spur job creation, and ultimately help grow the American economy.

After the House passed the RAA earlier this year, business groups urged the Senate to do the same. “The RAA stands for good governance and getting rules right by bringing transparency, accountability, and integrity to the rulemaking process at federal agencies,” the letter stated. “With the passage of RAA, Congress would be restoring the checks granted to it by the Constitution over a federal regulatory bureaucracy that is opaque, unaccountable, and at times overreaching in its exercise of authority.”

President Trump and the Congress have done quite a bit in the first 100 days of the new administration to lower regulatory burdens on businesses. By passing the RAA into law and improving how federal regulations are made, it would be a victory for a more competitive economy.

Watch Sens. Portman’s and Heidkamp’s press conference where they introduced the RAA.

MORE ARTICLES ON: REGULATORY REFORM

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by photographer Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg.

Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill

Fraud: Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain

en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fraud

1 a:  deceit, trickery; specifically :  intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right : was accused of credit card fraud
b:  an act of deceiving or misrepresenting : trick : automobile insurance frauds
2 a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :  impostor : He claimed to be a licensed psychologist, but he turned out to be a fraud; also :  one who defrauds :  cheat
b: one that is not what it seems or is represented to be : The UFO picture was proved to be a fraud.

Merriam-Webster

Fraud is a common crime that occurs in a wide variety of areas. So-called “con artists” seek to gain the confidence of their intended victims. In point of fact, the term “con” is a contraction of the word “confidence,” wherein the criminal tricks their victims into trusting him so they can be taken advantage of.

Most “white collar crime” involves fraud.

Think of how many victims, for example, were defrauded out of their life savings by the infamous Bernie Madoff, who conned his victims into trusting him.

Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme is similar to a “Ponzi Scheme” — named for Charles Ponzi, who in the 1920s, used the monies paid to the initial investor-victims by those who came on board subsequently. Ultimately such schemes fail but enable the perpetrator to pocket huge sums of money before the collapse.

Insurance fraud generally involves individuals filing false claims to bilk the insurance company out of money.

Welfare fraud involves individuals concealing assets and sources of income to be eligible to receive assistance that they would not be entitled to if all of the material facts were known by the authorities who administer the welfare program.

Not unlike other forms of fraud, immigration fraud is a serious crime committed by aliens, and those who may conspire with them, to enable aliens to game the immigration system to circumvent the immigration laws in order gain entry into the United States and/or gain lawful status or other immigration benefits to which they are not lawfully entitled.

Examples of these benefits include being granted political asylum, lawful immigrant status, or even U.S. citizenship via the naturalization process.

The nexus between immigration fraud, terrorism, and national security is of considerable concern, and, in point of fact, when aliens engage in immigration fraud to facilitate terrorism, they generally face a maximum of 25 years in federal prison.

There are generally two forms of fraud that concern law enforcement: document fraud and immigration fraud schemes.

Fraudulent documents involve the production of counterfeit or altered documents such as birth certificates, passports, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, or other such identity documents, or supporting documentation such as diplomas or marriage licenses. Immigration fraud schemes involve such deceptions as marriage fraud and false statements in immigration applications.

There are several federal statutes that establish the elements of crimes involving immigration fraud. Title 18 U.S. Code § 1546 — Fraud and misuse of visas, permits, and other documents are key sections of federal law that address such fraud.

Another federal statute that pertains to identity theft and the false use of identification documents is Title 18 U.S. Code § 1028 — Fraud and related activity in connection with identification documents, authentication features, and information.

Identity theft has become one of the most significant “white collar” crimes. There are many criminal schemes that are furthered by identity theft, but one of the key motivators for those who engage in identity theft is to provide illegal aliens with false identities that enable them to work and/or otherwise take on the appearance of normality as they go about their day-to-day lives in the U.S., even though their very presence represents a violation of our immigration laws.

Identity theft is hardly a “victimless crime.” It can create a major problem for those whose identities are stolen. When illegal aliens steal another person’s identity and then work illegally, they also deprive American workers and lawful migrant laborers of jobs they need to support their families. Yet American workers who lose their jobs to illegal aliens are never discussed by those who talk about how illegal aliens are simply trying to get their slice of the “American Dream.”

Immigration fraud is of major importance because it undermines national security and public safety.

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud and visa fraud as the key methods by which the majority of terrorists enter the U.S. and embed themselves as they prepare to carry out deadly attacks.

Immigration, in fact, has a profound impact on virtually every challenge and threat that Americans face today. Our immigration laws were enacted to protect American lives and the jobs of American workers. Our nation’s borders are our first and last line of defense against foreign spies, international terrorists, and transnational criminals.

However, globalists, whether politicians or those who seek to influence our politicians, see in our borders an impediment to wealth — their wealth. Therefore they seek to overcome that impediment no matter the cost — whether it’s the jobs of hard-working Americans or even the lives of the victims of terrorism or transnational criminals.

Having raised the issue of the cost of immigration law violations — let us begin by considering the victims of these crimes.

Our immigration laws were enacted to prevent the entry of aliens into the U.S. whose presence would pose a threat to the safety and well-being of Americans.

Title 8, U.S. Code, Section 1182 is a section of law within the Immigration and Nationality Act and enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded from entering the U.S. Among these classes of aliens to be prevented from entering the U.S. are those who suffer from dangerous communicable, diseases or extreme mental illness.

Additionally, convicted felons, human rights violators, war criminals, terrorists, and spies are to be excluded, as well as aliens who are likely to become public charges, or would seek unlawful employment, thus displacing American workers or driving down the wages of American workers who are similarly employed.

Aliens who violate our immigration laws therefore must be seen as a potential threat to national security, public health, and public safety and/or to the livelihoods of American workers.

President Obama’s executive orders, misuse of what he referred to as “Prosecutorial Discretion,” which I have come to refer to as “Prosecutorial Deception,” through the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for so-called “DREAMERS,” and other actions made a mockery of our nation’s borders and immigration laws.

On the state and local levels, so-called, “Sanctuary Cities” have become safe havens for illegal aliens, including transnational criminals, fugitives, terrorists and their supporters, as well as aliens who work illegally, and thereby displace American workers.

Consequently, government officials have actually become the facilitators of immigration-related crimes. Indeed, President Obama, through his various executive orders and policy decrees, became the Facilitator-in-Chief for aliens who seek to enter the U.S. illegally and remain in the U.S. thereafter to work or commit crimes.

Under his orders, even aliens who were convicted of committing felonies and caused the deaths of innocent people were released from custody and not removed (deported/expelled) from the U.S.

Therefore, given the importance of how our government acts, or fails to act, to address immigration fraud and other crimes, we must begin by considering the third form of immigration fraud: the fraud that is perpetrated on the citizens of the U.S. by their elected officials and “representatives” from both political parties and their allies in the “Third Estate” — journalists and pundits — who have created and propagated falsehoods about immigration, which have created a toxic environment where honest discussions about immigration are all but impossible.

The way that polls are conducted about immigration and other issues also skews public perceptions about how many Americans, for example, consider the immigration crisis to be important. This provides cover for duplicitous politicians and the globalists who are “pulling their strings.”

The number one job politicians have is to get elected and then get re-elected. Today this often involves heavy-duty “fund-raising,” which virtually amounts to pandering for bribes.

Most Americans are adamant about their desire to end illegal immigration. This is why, in my judgment, Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency was so successful. His call to “Build a wall” on the Mexican border reverberated among huge numbers of Americans, irrespective of their political orientation.

However, it must be noted that while much attention has been paid to the lack of security along the southern border which separates the U.S. from Mexico, our nation is, in reality, a nation of 50 “border states.” Any state that lies along our northern or southern borders is a border state, as are states that lie along our nation’s 95,000 miles of meandering coastline or have international airports. All are border states.

The focus on the Mexican border to the exclusion of so many other dysfunctional components of the immigration system is a part of the bigger issue of the creation of distractions by open-borders/immigration anarchists.

Make no mistake, the U.S.-Mexican border must be secured. However, simply making that border totally secure won’t end the immigration crisis. As I pointed out last year:

If the U.S.-Mexican border had been protected by the mythical “deflector shield” from the Starship Enterprise, the terror attacks of 9/11, the attack of the Boston Marathon by the Tsarnaev brothers, the terror attack at San Bernardino, and all of the other terror attacks America has suffered would not have been prevented.

Clearly the first myth that we have debunked is that a wall on the Mexican border by itself will solve our immigration crisis .

I compare securing the southwest border to closing one of many holes in a colander. Simply plugging a hole in the bottom of a colander will not turn it into a water-tight bucket.

Aliens may enter the country illegally by evading the inspections process conducted along the northern as well as the southern borders. They may enter without inspection along America’s 95,000 miles of meandering coastline.

It is absolutely important to understand that aliens who gain access to the U.S. by entering without inspection (EWI) are also not vetted and no record of their entry is created. Open borders/immigration anarchists refer to aliens who enter the U.S. without inspection as being “undocumented.” This is one hell of a lie.

POPULAR FALSEHOODS

It is worthwhile to consider some of the falsehoods that are endlessly repeated by politicians, pundits, and pollsters, which are designed to mislead the public about our immigration crisis.

False Argument Number One: The presence of millions of illegal aliens supposedly proves that the immigration system is “broken” and hence the solution is “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

In reality this is about more than simply reforming immigration. The principal failure of the immigration system is its lack of integrity and a lack of enforcement resources. The lack of integrity to the immigration system mirrors the lack of integrity of our elected representatives.

Providing lawful status to unknown millions of illegal aliens would irrevocably undermine national security. There is no way to conduct in-person interviews, let alone actual field investigations. While it is claimed that this would get these aliens “out of the shadows,” there would be no resources for agents to track down and arrest illegal aliens who would not voluntarily emerge from the shadows. This would, disturbingly, include aliens who know that their fingerprints would identify them as criminals, terrorists, or fugitives.

False Argument Number Two: Inasmuch as we cannot deport all of the aliens who are here illegally, we must provide them with lawful status. The Democrats claim that these aliens, who would pay taxes and learn English, would have “earned” the right to U.S. citizenship, while Republicans claim that “once the border is secured,” we should “only” provide them with lawful status and permission to work and bring their families to the U.S.

Generally, law enforcement efforts only involve finding and punishing a very tiny percentage of law violators. Yet no one would ever say that if you cannot identify and arrest all drunk drivers, we should therefore not seek to arrest any drunk drivers. The same can be said about a laundry list of other such violations of law. Statements by our politicians that call for providing legal status for millions of law violators have essentially fired the starter’s pistol for aspiring illegal aliens from around the world for whom the finish line is the [U.S.] border.

Immigration law enforcement should not be treated differently from other violations of law — efforts need to be made to identify and arrest as many aliens as possible who violate our laws and seek their removal (deportation) from the U.S. Not unlike the strategies of law enforcement and politicians where drunk driving, texting while driving, and other violations of law are concerned, public service announcements need to emphasize the efforts being made to enforce our immigration laws to deter those who might be contemplating violating these laws.

This would also honor those millions of lawful immigrants who waited their turn and followed the law and abided by the provisions of those laws.

False Argument Number Three: We need to be “compassionate” and reunite families of illegal aliens in the U.S.

In this instance, the fraudsters are counting on the extraordinary compassion Americans are known to possess. This is about finding in the kindness and compassion of Americans a weakness that can be easily taken advantage of.

Exploitation is not a demonstration of compassion. Unscrupulous employers hire illegal aliens because they know that those employees can be exploited — paid substandard wages under substandard conditions. Re-uniting families by permitting illegal aliens to bring their family members to the U.S. puts the horse before the cart. Effective immigration law enforcement would deter illegal aliens from entering the U.S. in the first place. This way families in other countries would not be split up when a family member travels to the U.S. to work illegally.

Permitting huge numbers of foreign nationals to enter the U.S. takes pressure off of the corrupt regimes of their home countries, whose oligarchies are behind the rampant poverty in countries such as Mexico. Propping up oligarchies flies in the face of traditional American values. However, today America is transitioning from being a republic to being an oligarchy. This is antithetical to the American Dream and what America has, until recently, stood for.

False Argument Number Four: Mandatory E-Verify is the solution to the employment of illegal aliens.

In reality, effective enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S. would deter unscrupulous employers. E-Verify must be made mandatory, but without adequate numbers of immigration agents available to conduct field investigations, employers who want to hire illegal aliens will simply employ them “off the books.” Thus E-Verify, by itself, will not be able to stop the criminal and corrupt practice of employers hiring illegal aliens.

Focusing on mandatory E-Verify while ignoring the abject shortage of enforcement personnel at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is apparently designed to distract the majority of Americans from noticing the lack of enforcement resources. Proponents for Comprehensive Immigration Reform may call for hiring more Border Patrol Agents — this is consistent with the notion that all that needs to be “fixed” is to secure the U.S.-Mexican border. However, they never call for hiring more ICE agents to enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S.

This means that employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens will most likely not be detected; illegal aliens will likely not be arrested or deported (removed). And this also means that immigration fraud will likely go undetected.

False Argument Number Five: Our schools are failing to educate the huge numbers of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) professionals that we need for America to be successful.

This lie has been perpetrated by a large number of organizations, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to CEOs of Silicon Valley and other industries that have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into massive lobbying efforts to push this agenda. The goal of this effort is to drive down the wages of professionals.

Consider that nearly every month newspaper accounts abound that disclose a long list of American companies that have fired their computer programmers and other highly skilled loyal employees. Most recently McDonald’s fired 70 American accountants [and] replaced them [with] foreign workers…. The “shortage” of such employees was manufactured by unscrupulous employers who simply want to lower their labor costs.

DON’T FORGET PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER

President Jimmy Carter ordered INS personnel to identify aliens who evade the inspections process as “undocumented immigrants.” Carter recognized and exploited the political opportunities offered by massive illegal immigration. His use of deceptive language created a fraudulent impression to mislead Americans, not unlike the way that a con artist swindles his/her victims. Carter blithely ignored the way that his actions and mandates undermined national security threats. For Carter and others, creating a narrative that was conducive to their political agenda was far more important than protecting Americans.

Repeated deadly terror attacks have been conducted in the U.S. by radical Islamist terrorists who easily gamed the immigration system that was deliberately weakened by Mr. Carter.

It is estimated that nearly half of all illegal aliens in the U.S. did not enter the country without inspection, but actually were admitted at ports of entry and then, subsequent to admission, went on to violate the terms of their admission.

Nonimmigrant aliens, that is to say, aliens who were admitted for a temporary period of time for a variety of purposes, become deportable (subject to removal) if they violate the terms of their admission as required by the category of visa under which they entered the U.S. For example, this applies to aliens who remain beyond their authorized period of admission, accept unauthorized employment, or, in the case of foreign students, fail to maintain their status as students by failing their courses or failing to attend their schools.

NOT ANTI-IMMIGRANT, BUT PRO-ENFORCEMENT

Often journalists and politicians refer to those of us who want our immigration laws enforced as lacking compassion and being “Anti-Immigrant.” This is one of those false accusations that has somehow taken hold in America today. We need to dispel it.

Anyone who is labeled as being “anti” anything faces a tough uphill battle. Consider that where the highly contentious issue of abortion is concerned, the two sides are described as being either “Pro-Life” or “Pro-Choice.” Neither side is described as being, for example, “Anti-Life” or “Anti-Choice.”

In reality, anyone who favors secure borders and effective immigration law enforcement should actually be described as being “Pro-Enforcement.” Anyone who is pro-enforcement is actually “Pro-Immigrant.”

Our immigration laws were enacted to protect national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans. They are completely blind on issues such as race, religion, and ethnicity.

While, under our immigration laws, American citizens have an absolute right to enter the U.S., aliens do not. This is not unique to America but is how all countries operate.

This is not unlike the homeowner who has the right — in fact, the imperative — to look through the peephole before opening the front door to his/her house before admitting a stranger, being careful not to let someone in who may pose a threat. We want to live in communities that are as crime-free as possible.

We want our schools to provide American students with first-rate educations that will qualify them for careers that will enable them to use their training and degrees to have the opportunity to be successful. This is the American Dream that all Americans, irrespective of race, religion, or ethnicity, want for themselves and their children.

In other words, Americans want opportunities to use their talents to be as successful as they can and want their children to have even greater opportunities than they have. Period!

VISA FRAUD

Failure to enforce our immigration laws undermines national security and public safety. Failures of the immigration system, including visa fraud, enable more foreign workers to enter the U.S. each month than the number of new jobs that are created.

Those who lie and commit fraud for gain are criminals. Usually that “gain” is money or something of material value. However, where immigration fraud is concerned, the gain is access to the U.S.

The ability of aliens to enter our country and embed themselves once here is a matter of national security and public safety. We live in a perilous era when members of ISIS and other terrorist organizations seek to enter the U.S. to commit crimes to fund and carry out their deadly terror attacks. Therefore, preventing these terrorists from carrying out that fraud is as important as is the necessity to prevent terrorists and criminals from running the physical borders of the U.S.

Effectively combating visa and immigration fraud is at least as essential to protecting Americans from international terrorists and transnational criminals as is securing our northern and southern land borders from aliens who seek to enter the U.S. without inspection.

Investigations into suspected fraud can untangle those webs of deception, but only if there are adequate numbers of investigators who can work those cases. This work is labor intensive and requires an appropriate number of personnel to get this job done. The immigration crisis we are currently experiencing is directly attributable to an abject lack of resources — by design.

Failures to investigate fraud allow those who perpetrate that fraud to escape detection and punishment. This encourages still more fraud, which creates a vicious cycle where more individuals are encouraged to file still more fraud-laden applications, creating an increasing burden on those who adjudicate applications and on those whose mission is to uncover fraud and those that perpetrate fraud. As the number of applications increases, the amount of time and resources that can be brought to bear against fraud dwindles. This encourages still more fraud.

What is generally not known is that approving an application is far less time-consuming than denying an application. An application for immigration benefits can be approved in minutes, while denying an application is an involved process that can take days — evidence has to be gathered, reports have to be written, and then any denials generally have to be reviewed by attorneys to make certain that the denials can stand up to anticipated challenges when appeals of the denials are filed.

All government agencies on the local, state, or federal level are also at risk of fraud when individuals provide false or misleading information to the agency they are interacting with.

Fraud involves an individual filing an application in which material facts are omitted or misrepresented to enable the person committing that crime to acquire something he/she would not be entitled to if all of the material facts were known.

We have all read stories about welfare cheats and those who commit tax fraud.

Most agencies take aggressive action to combat fraud to recover their lost funds and also to deter anyone who would even contemplate defrauding that agency.

When people cheat on their tax returns, they can expect the IRS to hunt them down and not only demand payment of the taxes they failed to pay initially, but also likely hit them with a hefty fine and penalty that may well be a multiple of the money they owe, because they concealed earnings or other sources of income. They may, in fact, face criminal prosecutions.

The expectation most people have of the IRS, namely that it will relentlessly discover their crimes and doggedly track them down, has been fostered through its reputation to aggressively enforce the laws under its jurisdiction. To reinforce this expectation, the IRS often stages highly publicized arrests of people who have committed fraud against the IRS. This includes extensive media coverage when IRS agents round up citizens from every walk of life, charging them with tax fraud as Tax Day (April 15) approaches. This effectively reinforces the public perception of the IRS as the federal agency that is not to be trifled with.

The IRS uses intimidation against those who might be contemplating committing tax fraud to convince them to file honest tax returns.

I refer to this tactic as “Deterrence Through Enforcement.”

The message is clear — commit tax fraud and your crimes will be discovered and you will face severe punishment.

However, as I noted previously, where immigration fraud is concerned, there is an abject lack of resources dedicated to investigating fraud and bringing criminal charges against those who commit such fraud and/or enter into criminal conspiracies. Rather than deter fraud, this encourages fraud and endangers national security and the lives of our citizens.

While politicians claim they want to write new laws to “fix” our broken immigration system, they never appropriate adequate funds to hire a sufficient number of ICE agents and other personnel to enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S. effectively.

Today the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employs more than 45,000 people. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employs more than 60,000 people including more than 20,000 CBP inspectors at ports of entry to screen people to keep out aliens who under our immigration laws are excludable because they would pose a threat to the safety and wellbeing of America and Americans.

CBP also employs approximately 20,000 Border Patrol agents to interdict smugglers who would enable individuals and contraband to circumvent the inspections process conducted at America’s 325 ports of entry.

Since 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not been divulging the number of its employees. The ridiculous claim of the Obama administration was that they don’t want the “bad guys” to know how many there are. In reality I am convinced that they didn’t want Americans to know how few there are.

ICE reportedly has “an estimated 5,800 deportation agents” (out of a bureaucracy of 20,000 employees, according to Politifact). Furthermore, it is estimated that over half of those agents are engaged in conducting investigations of violations of custom laws, which have nothing to do with immigration. Customs laws are all about collecting duties and tariffs and preventing contraband from entering the U.S.

This means that the primary task of some 3,000 ICE agents actually focus on the deportation of illegal aliens.

To further put this in perspective, there are more than 35,000 police officers in the New York City Police Department.

This is why we have an immigration crisis — illegal aliens and aspiring aliens have absolutely no fear of detection or arrest once they get past the Border Patrol or the inspector at a port of entry. They are further encouraged by politicians from both parties who insist that since we cannot arrest and deport all of the illegal aliens who are here, sooner or later, they will get lawful status if they can only enter the U.S. — one way or another.

This includes criminals and terrorists.

Consider the lunacy known as “Catch and Release,” whereby Border Patrol agents are ordered to release illegal aliens whom they apprehend and simply provide them with the equivalent of a summons, a document known as a “Notice to Appear.” The Border Patrol agents, out of anger and frustration, have come to refer to these documents as “Notices to Disappear,” because they know that more than 90 percent of these aliens will simply discard those documents and never show up for a hearing.

What you may not know is that “Catch and Release” is hardly a new concept. It is how the Border Patrol has attempted to do its job for many decades. During the Obama administration these valiant and beleaguered agents had to resort to this insane tactic more than ever before.

Once those aliens head for the interior of the U.S., there are no ICE agents to follow up and track down any of these disappearing aliens. In fact, on those extremely rare occasions when ICE agents arrest illegal aliens, they may also have to play the game of “Catch and Release.”

However, the INS perpetrated its own “Immigration Fraud” by reporting to Congress on how many aliens were apprehended, rarely if ever noting that ever so many illegal aliens were simply processed for deportation and released.

Considering the breadth and depth of immigration fraud and the profound impact it can have on America — undermining national security, public safety and the well-being of Americans and their ability to earn a decent living — you would think that immigration fraud would be a key area of concern for our politicians and journalists.

However, nothing could be further from the truth, even though the 9/11 Commission Report and the testimony of a long list of national security/counterterrorism experts before Congressional committees and subcommittees have identified immigration and visa fraud as keys for the entry and embedding tactics of terrorists.

For example, page 54 of the 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel contained this excerpt:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the U.S. terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attacks.

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the U.S. government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

Please pay attention to the first sentence of the last paragraph; here it is again:

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity.

This issue has been repeatedly noted in the 9/11 Commission Report, yet nothing has been done to enhance the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S. Indeed, under the Obama administration interior enforcement of our immigration laws all but stopped.

In spite of the clear warnings issued by the 9/11 Commission about the nexus between immigration and visa fraud and the threat of terrorism, the Obama administration insisted on admitting thousands of refugees from Syria who cannot be vetted. This means that our officials, no matter how much time they may be given, will not be able to verify the true identities of those who claim to be citizens of Syria seeking refugee status.

The lack of an adequate number of investigators who can work those cases has plagued the immigration system for decades. Consequently, these failures to identify and investigate fraud can and, in fact, have enabled huge numbers of aliens who have perpetrated fraud to escape detection, prosecution, and deportation. Some of these cases involved terrorists whose frauds went undetected until after they participated in deadly terrorist attacks.

Failures to identify, investigate, and prosecute those who perpetrate fraud encourage and embolden additional aliens worldwide to file fraud-laden applications. This creates the dreaded “backlog,” resulting in pressure applied to the adjudications officers to work more quickly, to dispose of these cases at a faster pace. This makes it even more difficult to scrutinize the applications. The vicious cycle continues to accelerate.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the virtual mantra of our leaders in Washington was that in order to succeed the terrorists had to get it “right” only once. For our government to defeat the efforts of the terrorists to protect American lives, we had to get it “right” 100 percent of the time. Every alien who succeeds in gaming the immigration system creates the potential for the terrorists to get it “right,” yet this clear threat to national security has been blatantly ignored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and our leaders.

When the issue of stopping illegal immigration is discussed, the immediate knee-jerk response is to focus on the need to simply increase the number of Border Patrol agents and erect a fence on the southern border.

Last year the DHS issued a report, Entry and Exit Overstay Report, Fiscal Year 2015 that focused only on the arrival and departure of non-immigrant aliens (temporary visitors) though international airports and seaports but did not include aliens who were admitted at land border ports of entry.

The report noted that more than 400,000 aliens who had been admitted into the U.S. during 2015 failed to depart when they were supposed to. If land border entries were taken into account, that number of illegal aliens would have likely been considerably greater.

These aliens would have been able to enter the U.S. if CBP employed one million Border Patrol agents and if the mythical “Deflector Shields” from the Starship Enterprise were installed along that problematic border.

The only way to deal with aliens, who violate the terms of their admission through ports of entry, is for ICE agents to arrest them. Yet this important issue is another of those immigration failures that seldom sees the light of day on news programs that refuse to discuss the utter lack of resources to enforce our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S.

On those all too rare instances when the issue of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S. is discussed, the need for mandatory E-Verify generally becomes the focus of that discussion, and the need to identify criminal aliens and seek their removal.

It is more than a coincidence that the very same political “leaders” who demand that the government hires more Border Patrol agents never demand that more ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents be hired to enforce the immigration laws.

The abject lack of resources for the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S. is a problem that has plagued the immigration system for many decades. As far back as May 4, 1999, the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims conducted a hearing on the topic, “Designations of Temporary Protected Status and Fraud in Prior Amnesty Programs.”

One of the witnesses at that hearing was a John Shaw, a true gentleman and former Assistant Commissioner for Investigations, Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was the official at the very top of the immigration enforcement program for the interior of the country.

On the day of that hearing in 1999 he testified about how the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under whose “leadership” he worked, demonstrated utter disdain for the enforcement of our immigration laws. Consider this extract from his testimony:

In its determined efforts to establish control of the border by tightening security on the perimeter, Congress has seemingly ignored the critical, complementary roles and responsibilities of Interior Enforcement … and these fall mainly on the shoulders of Investigations. I believe that the concept of Interior Enforcement, supported by a well-articulated strategy document, ought to be as familiar in the nomenclature of immigration enforcement as the concept, or term, Border Control. Although, I must admit that even in-house at INS, the Commissioner has said that Interior Enforcement is a term of usage invented by Investigations and devoid of meaning.

That Commissioner was Doris Meissner, whose disregard for the enforcement of our immigration laws — especially from within the interior of the U.S. — was reflected by the agency she directed. She was the Commissioner of the INS during the Clinton administration.

Meissner did everything in her power to make certain that the term “interior enforcement” was, indeed, “devoid of meaning.” She continues to work against any efforts to enforce our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S.

During her tenure as INS Commissioner, she created Citizenship USA (CUSA), which had the stated goal of naturalizing a record number of new citizens — at least one million, in roughly one year. A Justice Department, Office of Inspector General (OIG) report about this ill-conceived program, stated that when she assumed her position, Meissner was focused on vastly increasing the number of new citizens the INS could crank out. Not surprisingly, the number of applications for naturalization exploded.

She became consumed with the need to clear the backlog of applications. As a result she hired many more employees to adjudicate the applications. According to a subsequent report by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, these new hires did not have adequate training. She also re-engineered the entire naturalization process to streamline it. Among the ways that the process was “re-engineered” included not actually interviewing all of the applicants for citizenship and taking other shortcuts that enabled ultimately thousands of aliens who should not have been naturalized, including criminals, to become U.S. citizens.

In its first year, 1996, CUSA awarded citizenship to 1.2 million foreign nationals. The program, which ran through 2000, was vigorously promoted by President Clinton. Critics called it an election-year ploy to speed naturalizations for Democrat voters. Districts in heavily Democratic Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and San Francisco were targeted.

One of the key persons involved in this program was T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who became one of 
Barack Obama’s top immigration advisors. It was under Aleinikoffs “leadership” that U.S. citizenship was awarded to thousands of convicted criminals. Hundreds of thousands of naturalization applications did not undergo proper FBI fingerprint analysis, including 80,000 who had fingerprint checks that generated criminal records, but who were naturalized anyway.

Aleinikoff went on to become Dean of the Georgetown University School of Law, and then, in 2009, Deputy High Commissioner on Refugees at the United Nations. This is the agency that, in part, determines America’s admission of refugees into the U.S. And both Meissner and Aleinikoff are senior fellows at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.

When, under the administration of President George W. Bush, the DHS was created in response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the various missions of the former INS were split off into separate and unwieldy agencies under the DHS umbrella. The adjudication of applications for various immigration benefits went to a new agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The first Director of that agency was Eduardo Aguirre, who, according to his official bio on the USCIS website, apparently made clearing up the backlog of applications for immigration benefits his priority — as it had been for Doris Meissner.

Consider this portion of his DHS bio:

Director Aguirre fundamentally transformed the delivery of services by the U.S. immigration system. He leads a team of 15,000 who annually serve over 6 million applicants. The USCIS basic mission is to make certain that the right applicant receives the right benefit in the right amount of time, while preventing the wrong individuals from obtaining benefits. Under Director Aguirre’s leadership USCIS established three basic priorities: eliminating the immigration benefit application backlog, improving customer service, and enhancing national security.

In that last sentence he made “enhancing national security” his third priority behind “eliminating the benefit application backlog” and “improving customer service”!

Aguirre has been an executive in international banking positions. Consider this further excerpt from his bio:

For over three decades Mr. Aguirre has traveled extensively in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, promoting economic growth, international trade, and business opportunities as a banker, civic leader, and representative of the U.S. government. He joined the Department of Homeland Security from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. where he was appointed by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer. From December 2001 to December 2002, he served as Acting Chairman of the Export-Import Bank and guided the agency through its Congressional reauthorization. During Mr. Aguirre’s leadership the Bank reorganized its structure to become more market-focused and customer-driven while enhancing risk management.

Prior to joining Export-Import Bank, Mr. Aguirre served as President of International Private Banking for Bank of America. In this capacity, he ran a highly profitable unit of this industry leader. Over the course of his 24-year career with Bank of America, his team was consistently acknowledged for excellence in customer service and employee satisfaction.

I cannot make this statement strongly enough — I am not making any claim, whatsoever, that Mr. Aguirre had any involvement in the malfeasance allegedly committed by the Bank of America or any other organization. I have never seen anything that would even suggest any such connection.

However, I am concerned that the goals and culture of the banking industry are often in direct opposition and antithetical to the best interests of America and Americans. Banks are globalists. To a globalist borders are not lines of defense but impediments to wealth.

The Bank of America was one of the very first banks to accept Mexican identity documents known as Matricula Consular cards, which are issued to illegal aliens by the government of Mexico. These cards were the focus of a Congressional hearing in 2003 by the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims. Among those testifying was Steven C. McCraw, then Assistant Director, Office of Intelligence, of the FBI.

McCraw made it clear that such cards are not only unreliable for use as identity documents for business purposes, but also created opportunities for criminals and terrorists to use those cards to obfuscate their true identities. He told the Committee:

These criminal threats are significant, but it is the terrorist threat presented by the Matricula Consular that is most worrisome. Federal officials have discovered individuals from many different countries in possession of the Matricula Consular card. Most of these individuals are citizens of other Central or South American countries. However, at least one individual of Middle Eastern descent has also been arrested in possession of the Matricula Consular card. The ability of foreign nationals to use the Matricula Consular to create a well-documented, but fictitious, identity in the U.S. provides an opportunity for terrorists to move freely within the U.S. without triggering name-based watch lists that are disseminated to local police officers. It also allows them to board planes without revealing their true identity. All of these threats are in addition to the transfer of terrorist funds, mentioned earlier.

In the 2004 article, “Terror route seen in bank program,” the Washington Times reported that Bank of America honored the SafeSend program that enables people to send money directly from the U.S. to Mexico.

What is unfathomable is how, all too often, the leadership at the immigration enforcement agencies has not come from within the agency, but all too often are individuals who have no law enforcement background. To my knowledge, this has never happened at any other law enforcement agency.

SHORTCOMINGS WITH FINGERPRINTING

The need to identify and remove (deport) criminal aliens from the U.S. is widely recognized. But what needs to be considered is how DHS can identify criminal aliens in the first place, and whether there is an adequate number of agents to do this critical job where innocent lives hang in the balance.

The public perception is that when an individual is fingerprinted, a magic computer spits out page after page of accurate information about that person. While this is sometimes true, where foreign criminals are concerned, if that person has never before been arrested or fingerprinted in the U.S. and lies about his/her actual identity, it is entirely possible that the computer will not identify any relating information about that individual. Law enforcement officers will have to rely on the information that he provides to those who arrest him.

If such an individual claims to have been born in the U.S., then it is entirely possible that ICE will not be notified about him, even if that police department cooperates with ICE. Of course where Sanctuary Cities are concerned, no matter what the defendant says about immigration status, ICE will not be notified.

We often hear about how someone “fell through the cracks in the system” and went on to commit more crimes. This lack of personnel to accurately identify criminal aliens in custody is far greater than a mere “crack.” It is bigger than the Grand Canyon!

Because of this haphazard situation, the actual number of criminal aliens in the U.S., as reported by the various government agencies, may well be much higher than published statistics claim.

Therefore it is essential that an adequate number of INS personnel be assigned to interviewing prisoners in the many local and state prisons to determine if prisoners in custody are U.S. citizens or aliens who should be subject to deportation. If an alien runs our borders and is subsequently arrested by local police or other law enforcement agencies, simply running that person’s fingerprints will likely not disclose the true identity of such illegal aliens or even the fact that they are aliens.

It is not uncommon for aliens from Latin America to claim to be from Puerto Rico. Likewise, illegal aliens from Jamaica, Trinidad, and other Caribbean countries often claim to have been born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, thereby violating 18 U.S. Code § 911 — False Claim to U.S. Citizenship, a felony that is described below:

Whoever falsely and willfully represents himself to be a citizen of the U.S. shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

False claims to U.S. citizenship by illegal aliens are common, but it takes a highly skilled immigration agent to break such false claims. Aliens who succeed in conning local jail officials into believing they are U.S. citizens, when in fact they are aliens, will never be deported.

While the laws of nature are immutable, legislated laws are meaningless unless violations of those laws are uncovered and appropriate action is taken by law enforcement officers.

E-VERIFY AND EMPLOYMENT AUTHORIZATION

Certainly the use of E-Verify must be made mandatory for all employers. However, that alone won’t stop aliens from entering the country and taking jobs that should go to Americans.

ICE agents need to be available to conduct investigations of employers to make certain that they are not defrauding the E-Verify system. These agents are needed to audit the applications and physically conduct investigations at various job sites, and, where appropriate, arrest illegal aliens to deter them from entering the U.S. and to deter those aliens who were legally admitted with visas that did not provide them with the lawful authority to work in the U.S.

However, we need to keep in mind that the immigration system is not unlike a balloon. If you squeeze a balloon at one place it will bulge at another place. Even if it became impossible for illegal aliens to be employed in the U.S., aliens who are determined to work in the U.S. would simply commit immigration fraud in order to get lawful status to enable them to work in the United States.

When political leaders from both the Democratic and Republican parties insist that the only “solution” to the current illegal immigration crisis is to provide illegal aliens with employment authorization, they simply encourage a human tsunami of aliens from around the world to cross our borders, convinced that ultimately they will be granted employment authorization and, depending on which political party is in power, whether they will also receive U.S. citizenship as a further reward for their violations of our borders and immigration laws.

This is a manifestation of the desire of our duplicitous political leaders from both parties to make certain that nothing is done to discourage or impede the huge numbers of foreign workers and foreign students from entering our country — even if it undermines national security and public safety.

TRADITIONAL IMMIGRATION FRAUD

Immigration fraud, as discussed previously, generally falls into two broad categories — document fraud and fraud schemes. Furthermore, immigration fraud is generally perpetrated by aliens to enter and then to operate freely within the U.S. In the parlance of the 9/11 Commission, this ability to operate freely in the U.S. is known as embedding. I have come to refer to this as “hiding in plain sight.”

Companies also may commit immigration fraud to facilitate their ability to bring in foreign workers to displace American workers. They fraudulently claim that these foreign workers are “exceptional,” yet the only thing exceptional about them is their willingness to work for exceptionally low wages under exceptionally adverse conditions.

USCIS operates under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security and adjudicates applications for immigration benefits for aliens. Among the benefits are the granting of political asylum, authorizing aliens to change their nonimmigrant status so that they may, for example, attend school in the U.S., conferring lawful immigrant status upon aliens, providing such aliens with Alien Registration Receipt Cards (Green Cards) to signify this status, and finally naturalizing aliens, thus conferring U.S. citizenship upon them.

USCIS is also the agency that processes the applications for the administration’s controversial DACA Program, which has enabled hundreds of thousands of illegal alien DREAMERS to file for temporary lawful status. While this program has been “sold” to the American public as involving “children,” in reality these “kids” may be as old as 31 years of age.

All that these illegal aliens must do is file an application in which they claim that they entered the U.S. prior to their sixteenth birthday. There are no interviews and no field investigations. The approval rate for this program is well over 90 percent.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about illegal aliens who entered the U.S. without inspection. They have trespassed on America. Only they know who they are, when they got here, and what their actual backgrounds are. Yet Mr. Obama provided hundreds of thousands of these illegal aliens with lawful status, ordering the hapless employees at USCIS to take at face value the word of aliens whose identities and backgrounds cannot be verified.

USCIS is already overwhelmed with its workload, yet this inept agency and its beleaguered employees would be pressed into service to process potentially tens of millions of applications for any legalization program that our politicians promise (threaten?) they want to foist on America and Americans.

USCIS processes approximately 6 million applications for various immigration benefits annually, including conferring U.S. citizenship upon hundreds of thousands of lawful immigrants through the naturalization process.

Fraud is a serious issue for this adjudications process, undermining its integrity. Again, this issue and the threats it poses to national security were amply discussed by the 9/11 Commission, insofar as the tactics for terrorists to embed themselves in the U.S. are concerned.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 includes a section of law that enumerates the categories of aliens that are excludable from the U.S. The list of excludable classes of aliens includes aliens who suffer from dangerous communicable diseases, or from severe mental illness, fugitives from justice, convicted felons, spies, terrorists, war criminals, human rights violators, and aliens whose presence would undermine national security and/or public safety.

Finally, aliens who are likely to become public charges or would seek employment that would displace Americans who are similarly employed, or, by providing unfair competition, would drive down wages and/or working conditions of Americans, are not supposed to be admitted

Aliens who know that they cannot be lawfully admitted into the U.S. because they belong to one or more categories of excludable aliens but are determined to enter the U.S. nevertheless have two basic options to gain entry. First, they can enter without inspection by evading the inspections process conducted at ports of entry by the Inspectors of CBP (Customs and Border Protection), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security). This can be done by running America’s northern or southern borders or by stowing away on a ship or otherwise entering illegally along America’s 95,000 miles of coastline.

Second, they can engage in immigration fraud by seeking to enter the U.S. by assuming a false identity through the use of counterfeit or altered passports and travel documents, or by bribing a passport official of another country to provide them with an authentic passport that misrepresents their true identity because they know that their true identities or backgrounds would bar them from entering the U.S. This includes aliens with criminal histories who may also be fugitives from justice in other countries and/or aliens who are engaged in terrorism or are affiliated with terrorist organizations.

These individuals use immigration fraud to mask their true identities the same way that a chameleon uses changes in coloration in order to hide in plain sight.

Some aliens may not have criminal histories and are not known to law enforcement authorities or intelligence authorities, but intend to work illegally in the U.S. and misrepresent material facts when they apply for visas to enter the U.S., or when they are interviewed by a CBP inspector at a port of entry into the U.S.

Sometimes aliens will apply for a job that will enable them to get a visa to enter the U.S. As an INS agent in the late 1970s, I became aware of a large number of aliens from Jamaica and Panama who had been admitted into the U.S. on agricultural work visas to work in the orange groves of Florida and the apple orchards of upstate New York. Most of these aliens never reported for work on those farms, but simply used the visas they received as a means of entering the U.S.

I encountered and arrested many such illegal aliens when I worked with members of the NYPD to investigate a number of extremely violent drug posses that were operating in New York City trafficking in marijuana and cocaine. Most of the members of the posses were deportable aliens who had entered the U.S. through ports of entry with those agricultural work visas.

We found that some of these aliens had hooked up with a small number of Navy recruiters who were being pressured by their superiors to meet enlistment quotas. These recruiters entered into a criminal conspiracy to provide these illegal aliens with false identity documents so that they could enlist in the Navy and the Marine Corps.

Members of what was then the Office of Naval Intelligence, today known as Naval Investigative Service (NIS, now known as NCIS), joined in the investigation as did members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Many of these aliens went AWOL after they completed tactical combat training, stole high-powered weapons, and subsequently used their military training to carry out a series of extremely violent, commando-style bank robberies throughout the New York City area.

We ultimately arrested a large number of these violent illegal aliens. Working closely with the NYPD, I helped bring federal criminal charges where appropriate, while many of these thugs were simply charged in state court with murder, armed robbery, and other such crimes.

Meanwhile, the Naval Intelligence officers dealt with the recruiters for their crimes.

To tie up the last of the loose ends, I lodged detainers with the local prison officials to make certain that once these criminals were released from prison, they would be immediately taken into immigration custody to arrange for their deportation from the U.S.

Back then there was no question that such detainers would be honored — unlike today, where out of a bizarre concept of “compassion” such detainers would be blatantly ignored and criminal aliens would likely be released back into their communities, where they could continue their criminal “careers.”

This is why I am vehemently opposed to the enlistment of illegal aliens in our military. The notion of providing individuals whose true identities may not be verified with access to our military bases and tactical firearms training is the stuff of nightmares.

However, I suspect that, for all too many of our elected officials, our national security and public safety are not important.

The entry tactic of aliens obtaining work-related visas and then not reporting to their jobs is not limited to agricultural visas. Some aspiring illegal aliens enroll in schools, enter the U.S. with student visas,such and then fail to attend those schools.

Additionally, there are various criminal enterprises that can conspire with aliens who seek to enter the U.S. by creating the illusion that they have a job offer. These criminal enterprises may then submit visa applications for aliens to enable them to enter the U.S. with a visa to which they would not have been entitled if all of the facts were known.

ICE disclosed that a New York City attorney was sentenced to five years for operating such a fraud scheme. What is significant is that this attorney, Earl Seth David, operated his fraud scheme for many years, and reportedly at least 25,000 aliens availed themselves of his “services” to acquire legal status by committing fraud. When his law license was suspended in 2004, he continued to practice law, and apparently applications filed by his law firm continued to be processed by immigration authorities.

If this doesn’t provide sufficient evidence of massive incompetence by ICE, consider that, according to its own press release, in 2006 David fled to Canada when he found out his law firm was under criminal investigation, and was able to continue to receive funds from his fraud scheme in Canada.

Furthermore, while being convicted of a serious felony, he committed multiple felonies involving many sections of law that involve massive criminal conspiracies, corruption of government officials, and the use of a highly sophisticated set of schemes. His punishment was minor considering the major crimes he committed and the impact that those crimes continue to have. Consider that there were apparently no efforts to identify the tens of thousands of aliens who may now be “legally” residing in the U.S. thanks to his work. By not seeking to arrest these many thousands of alien clients, the government once again failed to deter aliens from engaging in fraud.

FOREIGN STUDENTS POSE DANGER

Aliens who enter the U.S. with student visas may also pose a serious threat to national security. For years I have been warning about the danger of educating our adversaries. What is the point of educating “Engineers of Jihad” at U.S. universities? The legal immigration system allowed al-Qaeda-linked terrorists to attend American colleges and roam free among us.

Sometimes bogus schools provide the appropriate documentation to enable aliens to enter the U.S. as students, where the schools are actually “mills” that crank out the appropriate paperwork, for a fee. These “schools” may not even exist in a physical building.

The problem is that currently more than 9,000 schools are authorized to file the appropriate applications for foreign students. Some of these schools teach hair dressing, woodworking, and pet grooming.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with running a training facility to teach any skill, but the likelihood that someone, especially from a Third World country, would travel half-way around the world and pay hefty tuition fees to learn to groom pets is highly suspect, at best. Yet the lack of personnel at ICE to conduct these essential investigations makes it easy for some of these bogus schools to operate for many years before they are detected — if, in fact, they ever are determined to be bogus.

In fact, the lack of integrity to the foreign student program depends on foreign student advisors, employed by the schools, to keep track of foreign students and notify immigration authorities if students fail to attend their schools or to maintain a passing grade level. In the case of legitimate schools, this generally does not pose a problem. The foreign student advisors of these schools generally dutifully report foreign students who fail to maintain their status as students.

However, when the school exists simply to produce applications to be used by foreign students, the “wolf is truly guarding the hen house!”

In any event, when foreign students go missing, the lack of ICE agents means that when these aliens play the game of “hide-and-seek,” they hide, and ICE has no one available to seek them.

In 2014, ABC News aired “Lost in America: Visa Program Struggles to ‘Track Missing Foreign Students.’” The segment noted,

The Department of Homeland Security has lost track of more than 6,000 foreign nationals who entered the U.S. on student visas, overstayed their welcome, and essentially vanished — exploiting a security gap that was supposed to be fixed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“My greatest concern is that they could be doing anything,” said Peter Edge, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who oversees investigations into visa violators. “Some of them could be here to do us harm.”

ABC News found that immigration officials have struggled to keep track of the rapidly increasing numbers of foreign students coming to the U.S. — now in excess of one million each year. The immigration agency’s own figures show that 58,000 students overstayed their visas in the past year. Of those, 6,000 were referred to agents for follow-up because they were determined to be of heightened concern.

“They just disappear,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, (R-OK), “They get the visas and they disappear.”

Coburn said since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, 26 student visa holders have been arrested in the U.S. on terror-related charges.

Tightening up the student visa program was one of the major recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, after it was determined that the hijacker who flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, had entered the U.S. on a student visa but never showed up for school.

Despite repeated concerns raised by Congress, federal immigration officials have also continued to grant schools certification to accept overseas applicants even if the schools lack accreditation, state certification, or any obvious measure of academic rigor.

There are now more than 9,000 schools on the government approved list. The list includes such top-flight American colleges as Harvard and Yale, but it also includes 86 beauty schools, 36 massage schools, and nine schools that teach horseshoeing. Foreign students can enter the U.S. on a visa to study acupuncture, hair braiding, or join academies that focus on tennis and golf.

Once the student arrives in the U.S., it is up to the schools to keep track of the visa-holder’s whereabouts — and report to the government if they repeatedly miss class.

That is a serious concern, Coburn said, because a number of for-profit schools appear to have been operating with a primary goal of selling visas, not educating students.

Once in the U.S., aliens who had been admitted as nonimmigrants, that is to say, for a temporary period of time, may decide, for whatever reason, to remain permanently in the U.S. In point of fact, they may have entered the U.S. initially planning to not leave when required, and entered with the intentions of not only remaining in violation of their authorized period of admission, but working in violation of our immigration laws.

These arriving foreign visitors lied when they were interviewed to the CBP inspector at the airport or other port of entry when they entered the U.S., when they answered questions about their purposes for entering the U.S. and the length of time they planned to stay. They may well have completed the charade by providing the inspector with a return airlines reservation for a flight they had no intentions of taking. That ticket was provided simply to convince the inspector at the port of entry that the alien would be leaving when he said he would.

Furthermore, if the inspector decided to hold the alien for an exclusion hearing by an Immigration Judge, that ticket would likely convince the judge of the sincerity of the alien.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 contained many provisions to bolster the enforcement of our immigration laws. One of the provisions was the requirement that a biometric system be created that would track the arrival and departure of aliens, to know when nonimmigrant aliens who were admitted for a temporary period failed to depart from the U.S. when they were supposed to.

It is important to note that there are other ways that aliens may also violate the terms of their admission into the U.S. For example, aliens who are admitted as tourists must not be gainfully employed. When aliens accept such illegal employment, they become deportable (removable). Aliens who are admitted to attend schools and then fail to attend those schools are similarly removable for violating their immigration status, as are aliens who are admitted to work in the U.S. and fail to go to their authorized jobs. The point is that aliens may violate their terms of admission even before they overstay their authorized period of admission.

CURSORY INSPECTION PROCESS

CBP inspectors have a minute or two to do the most cursory of interviews of people seeking U.S. entry. The first issue is to make certain that the applicants for admission are who they claim they are. The next task is to separate aliens from citizens. Citizens may never, under any circumstances, be denied entry into the U.S. Aliens, on the other hand, must provide evidence that they are not on any watch lists that screen for terrorists, criminals, and others whose presence, under our immigration laws, would be harmful to the U.S. or its citizens. Aliens must prove they have the financial wherewithal to not be likely to work in the U.S. in violation of the law. Aliens who seek to deceive the CBP officials may have “show money,” which is the term we used to describe a wad of bills that do not belong to the alien presenting them, but will be given back to the person or organization that lent it to them to provide (false) evidence of financial self-sufficiency to pay for expenses in the U.S.

Aliens are supposed to provide an address in the U.S., but when aliens seek to tour across the country, often those addresses are less than worthless.

The Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) supports the DHS’s responsibility to protect the nation by providing biometric identification services that help federal, state, and local government decision makers to accurately identify the people they encounter and determine whether those people pose a risk to the U.S. OBIM supplies the technology for collecting and storing biometric data, provides analysis, updates its watchlist, and ensures the integrity of the data.
OBIM was created in March 2013, replacing the U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program. OBIM is part of the National Protection and Programs Directorate. The DHS website makes it clear that this program is vital for our nation and our citizens, yet it is still not fully implemented.

Once again, the abject lack of ICE agents guarantees that nothing can or will be done to track down and arrest these illegal aliens who, although they did not evade the Border Patrol, defrauded the visa process and the inspections process conducted at ports of entry by CBP. Stop and think about the lack of agents to arrest illegal aliens. Simply tracking illegal aliens is absurd because those aliens are not arrested and deported (removed).

Simply tracking aliens who violate our laws makes as much sense as the BATF agents who, under the auspices of “Operation Fast and Furious,” provided guns to Mexican drug traffickers and then tracked the guns as they disappeared across the border into Mexico.

Could you imagine a police officer telling his/her superiors that he/she had encountered a criminal committing a crime and simply tracked that thug to determine where he went after he mugged someone, and then wrote a report about how many crimes the crook may have committed?

Yet when illegal aliens violate our borders and our immigration laws, our wonderful members of Congress and the Obama administration, as administrations before had done, make a big deal about tracking aliens who violate our laws. They have done nothing to arrest them and seek their prosecution for crimes and ultimately their removal (deportation) from the U.S. Agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement work for a division of the Department of Homeland Security. How secure is our nation when an agency that is charged with securing our nation is content to spend billions of dollars to sort of track law violators?

MARRIAGE FRAUD

Some aliens may enter into sham marriages where they marry an American citizen or lawful immigrant who then files an application on their behalf. They don’t live with their spouse and their spouse may be paid money for this business arrangement.

This constitutes a serious crime, notwithstanding that this sort of arrangement has been portrayed in a number of romantic comedy films as a sort of light-hearted adventure. Such marriage fraud is seldom detected and even less frequently prosecuted.

The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel (2004) took a radically different view of immigration and marriage fraud. They most certainly did not see it as a laughing matter.

This paragraph is found on page 98 of that official government report under the title “Immigration Benefits”:

Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the U.S. if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the U.S., acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.

In fact, marriage fraud had a nexus with the deadly terror attack in San Bernardino, California. On December 2, 2015, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook carried out a terror attack in San Bernardino that left 14 dead and 22 wounded. The guns the terrorists used are alleged to have been provided by Enrique Marquez.

On December 3, less than 24 hours after that horrific attack, Enrique Marquez was scheduled to be interviewed at the San Bernardino offices of USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) in conjunction with the application for lawful immigrant status he had filed on behalf of his Russian wife, Mariya Chernykh. Consequently, five special agents of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), operating in conjunction with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, went to the office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) hoping to locate Marquez, not only because of his allegedly providing assistance to the two terrorists who had carried out the deadly attack one day earlier, but because of concerns that he might have information or, in fact, be connected to upcoming attacks. Time was vital because of the concern that more terrorists might carry out still more murders.

Incredibly, the ICE agents were prevented from entering the USCIS office by the manager of that office, Irene Martin. It must be pointed out that both ICE and USCIS are agencies that operate under the aegis of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security).

‘VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT’ OPEN TO FRAUD

The notion of providing the spouses of U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants with lawful immigrant status was to provide an important service to Americans and lawful immigrants to enable them to marry foreign nationals and bring them to the U.S. so that they could live together in matrimony. At some point politicians decided that it was important to facilitate the entry of aliens into the U.S. These politicians raised concerns that some unscrupulous Americans might abuse their spouses and hold lawful immigrant status over their heads so that these aliens would be intimidated into not complaining that they were being abused by their American husbands.

Under an innocuous-sounding law they created, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994, any alien spouse could self-petition for lawful immigrant status if, after marrying an American, they filed a criminal complaint against their spouse. It is important to know that it is not uncommon for a foreign national to dupe an American into marrying them so that they could acquire lawful immigrant status and the Alien Registration Receipt Card (also known as the “Green Card”) that signifies that they have been granted lawful immigrant status.

In these instances, hapless Americans marry a citizen of a foreign country, and for several months they believe that they have been fortunate in marrying the “girl of their dreams.” (It could also involve the American woman who marries the “man of her dreams.”) However, once the petition for resident alien status is filed and the alien spouse is issued a Green Card, their loving spouse suddenly undergoes a radical change in behavior. Their once loving spouse refuses to sleep with them and otherwise makes it clear that they really don’t want to remain with their American husband/wife. For such aliens, their marriage was a scam, done to enable them to remain legally in the U.S.

If the American who was duped can provide evidence that their alien spouse had duped them, although it might be difficult, an investigation could provide the evidence that the alien had conned the American and could be stripped of lawful immigrant status. However, under VAWA, a truly unscrupulous alien can now claim to have been assaulted by his/her citizen spouse and be granted lawful immigrant status even if the American seeks to withdraw his/her petition. This incentivizes aliens who engage in such duplicitous conduct to falsify claims to have been assaulted by their spouse. The spouse may face a jail sentence while the alien gets to remain in the country permanently. This situation is the result of making the needs of aliens more important than the needs of American citizens. When politicians dare suggest that the law needs to be modified, they are accused of not being compassionate to abused women. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

ASYLUM FRAUD

Sometimes aliens may make a claim of “credible fear” that they cannot return to their home country because they would face persecution, or worse, if they returned, thereby filing an application for political asylum.

The Tsarnaev brothers who participated in the deadly terror attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, had, along with their other family members, successfully applied for political asylum, claiming that they could not return to their native Russia. Shortly after being granted political asylum, they voluntarily flew back to Russia. Obviously they had lied, but nevertheless they not only did not lose their immigration status or face punishment for their fraudulent claim, they were subsequently provided with lawful immigrant status. One of the brothers became a naturalized citizen prior to carrying out that attack.

Ramzi Yousef, one of the leaders of the deadly 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six innocent victims, injured more than one thousand people, and inflicted roughly one-half billion dollars in damages to that major New York City landmark, which occupied a prominent place in the lower Manhattan skyline, attempted to enter the U.S. in 1992 with a false passport under a false alias. He was detained by immigration inspectors at John F. Kennedy International Airport and then, after he claimed “political asylum,” was ultimately released from INS custody, purportedly because of overcrowding in the detention facility. His release enabled him to lead the bombing of the World Trade Center a year later.

On December 11, 1994, nearly two years after the bombing of the World Trade Center, Yousef also planted a bomb on Philippine Airlines Flight 434 that killed one passenger and nearly brought that packed Boeing 747 airliner down. He was a key player in what came to be known as the Bojinka plot, which had it been carried out, would have blown multiple U.S. airliners out of the sky on the same day.

Although he fled the U.S., he was subsequently arrested by Pakistani and U.S. officials and extradited back to the U.S. to stand trial. He is currently serving two life sentences.

Two deadly terror attacks were carried out in the U.S. in 1993 by radical Islamist terrorists who entered the U.S. through ports of entry, either by committing visa fraud or by using counterfeit or altered passports. In a number of instances, they had successfully applied for immigration benefits, such as acquiring political asylum or amnesty through the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) provisions of the 1986 Amnesty program, which were an intrinsic element of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986.

On January 25, 1993, a citizen of Pakistan, Mir Amal Kansi, stopped a borrowed station wagon at a traffic light at the entrance to the CIA complex in Virginia, emerged from his vehicle, and fired his AK-47 into the vehicles of CIA employees reporting for work that winter morning. When the smoke cleared, two CIA officers were dead and three others were wounded. After his deadly attack, Kansi fled the U.S. but was subsequently captured in Pakistan by American law enforcement agents.

It is worth noting that Kansi’s strategy of fleeing the U.S. after the attack is a tactic often employed by alien terrorists and criminals to evade U.S. law enforcement authorities. These foreign nationals have a sort of “trap door” they can escape through, and all too often, this tactic is successful. In the case of Kansi, however, because of the nature of his crimes, our government took the extraordinary measures of tracking him down and returning him to the U.S. Many other such individuals have been successful in fleeing from the U.S. and never facing justice, and hence never having to pay for their crimes.

Just one month later, on February 26, 1993, a bomb-laden truck was parked in the garage under the World Trade Center complex and detonated. Ramzi Yousef, whose background and involvement in this and other attacks were noted previously, was one of the perpetrators.

That attack too was carried out by alien terrorists who managed to not only game the visa process in order to enter the U.S. and get past the inspections process at ports of entry, but game the immigration benefits program as well. This enabled them to remain in the U.S. and embed themselves as they went about their preparations to attack the U.S. and cause massive casualties. Aliens had to have found a way to enter the U.S. and then manage to hide in plain sight as they went about their deadly preparations. Yet the former INS faced no pressures to change the way that this important agency carried out its multiple missions.

On September 11, 2001, the very same failures of the immigration system enabled the most horrific and massive terror attack to be conducted on U.S. soil.

Still, today, the mission of enforcing our immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S. has not only been ignored, but was savaged by the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton promised that she would increase the number of Syrian refugees being admitted into the U.S. by 500 percent and would provide a massive amnesty program.

Indeed, she repeatedly charged that the Obama administration had actually been far too aggressive in enforcing our immigration laws.

VISAS GIVEN TO CITIZENS OF TERRORIST-SUPPORTING COUNTRIES

The Trump administration has been under fire for trying to limit the entry into the U.S. of citizens from countries that have a record of supporting terrorism. How many of Trump’s vocal critics know that as far back as February 24, 1998, the Senate Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information of the Committee on the Judiciary, held a hearing on “Foreign Terrorists in America: Five Years After the World Trade Center.” Their report discloses how foreign students who were citizens of countries associated with terrorism, including Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq, were studying various science disciplines that could have trained them to carry out biological or nuclear attacks on the U.S.

Even Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) was alarmed. In her prepared statement she suggested that aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism should not, perhaps, be granted visas to enter the U.S.:

There are also a number of glaring loopholes in our immigration laws.

I have some reservation regarding the practice of issuing visas to terrorist-supporting countries and INS’ inability to track those who come into the country either using a student visa or using fraudulent documents through the Visa Waiver Pilot Program.

The Richmond Times recently reported that the mastermind of Saddam Hussein’s germ warfare arsenal, Rihab Taha, studied in England on a student visa. And England is one of the participating countries in the Visa Waiver Pilot Program, which means, if she could have gotten a fraudulent passport, she could have come and gone without a visa in the U.S.

The article also says, regarding Rihab Taha, also known as “Dr. Germ,” that her professors at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, speculate that she may have been sent to the West specifically to gain knowledge on biological weaponry.

What is even more disturbing is that this is happening in our own backyard.

The Washington Post reported on October 31, 1991, that UN weapons inspectors in Iraq discovered documents detailing an Iraqi Government strategy to send students to the U.S. and other countries to specifically study nuclear-related subjects to develop their own program. Samir al-Araji was one of the students who received his doctorate in nuclear engineering from Michigan State University. He eventually returned to Iraq to head its nuclear weapons program.

The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy found in September 1997 that many terrorist-supporting states are sending their students to the U.S. to get training in chemistry, physics, and engineering, which could potentially contribute to their home country’s missile and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs.

Yet the State Department often does not do in-depth background checks on the students, and once they are in the U.S., the INS has no ability to track the students to make certain they actually study the subjects they claim to study and to attend the schools they said they would attend.

Between 1991 and 1996, the State Department has issued about 9,700 student visas to students from terrorist-supporting states such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria to attend undergraduate and graduate studies in the U.S.

Additionally, a survey done by the Institute of International Education indicates that most students from terrorist-supporting countries major in the sciences, and the percentages: 71 percent from Iran; 65 percent, Iraq; 47 percent, Libya; 53 percent, Sudan; 68 percent, Syria.

Currently, the State Department does not do any special background checks for students coming from Syria or Sudan. An intermediate background check is required for Iranian students and a more extensive check for Iraqi students.

The defendants in the World Trade Center bombing are also an example of those coming in through nonimmigrant or employment-based visas or abusing our political asylum process and then committing crimes.

For instance, Nidal Ayyad, one of the defendants in this case, used his position as a chemical engineer for Allied Signal to obtain the chemicals used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

There is Gazi Abu Mezer, who was arrested in a suspected terrorist plot to detonate bombs in Brooklyn last year. He came in illegally across the Canadian border to Washington State and attempted to seek asylum, but withdrew his application and agreed to leave the country. Once he was released on voluntary departure, he fled Washington to Brooklyn, New York, where he was arrested for plotting suicide-bomb attacks in Brooklyn.

After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, FBI Director Louis Freeh sent a memo to the Deputy Attorney General on September 26, 1994, and made the recommendation that the State Department needed to establish a uniform system of communication on visa denials and that the Visa Waiver Pilot Program could be used by terrorists holding fraudulent documents and that asylum procedures and student visas can be abused by people trying to get into the country.

The INS then formed a Task Force on Foreign Student Controls in 1995, in response to Freeh’s memo, and found that INS had no ability to track the students in the U.S., that INS had no idea if the students leave, drop out, transfer, interrupt their education, violate their status, or commit crimes.

Mr. Chairman, under the 1996 Immigration Act, Congress requires the INS to create a pilot project to track information on foreign students — where they are, what they are studying, if they commit any crimes, and if they are studying the subjects they planned to study. The act requires INS to submit a report by 2001. The act also tightens up the asylum process by making it harder for aliens to claim asylum fraudulently, and section 110 of the Immigration Act requires an entry/exit system at all ports of entry by September 1998.

However, I cannot stress enough the importance of having the ability to track international students, particularly those from terrorist-supporting countries and having an entry/exit system ability so we know who is coming in and out of the country.

I also believe we need to re-evaluate the Visa Waiver Pilot Program as is. In fact, without additional controls to screen out those travelling from terrorist-supporting states, the Visa Waiver Pilot Program would make us vulnerable to allowing aliens from terrorist countries to enter without any detection.

Nearly twenty years later, although the Visa Waiver Program was identified as posing a threat to national security, it was not only permitted to remain in place but has continually been expanded.

A system to track foreign students was implemented. But simply tracking foreign students does little good if they are not arrested and removed from the U.S. when they fail to maintain their status as students. This is not a hard concept to understand.

Yet, as I noted earlier in this article, as of 2014, immigration officials have struggled to keep track of the rapidly increasing numbers of foreign students coming to the U.S. — now in excess of one million each year. The immigration agency’s own figures show that 58,000 students overstayed their visas in the past year. Of those, 6,000 were referred to agents for follow-up because they were determined to be of heightened concern.

When someone calls 911 for police, an ambulance, or for firefighters to put out a blaze, simply tracking those emergencies would achieve nothing. It is expected that when such emergencies occur there will be an adequate number of emergency personnel who are appropriately equipped and trained who will swiftly respond to effectively address the emergency.

Likewise, simply knowing that there are illegal aliens present in the U.S. does nothing to actually bring those persons into custody and seek their removal from the U.S. When there is no law enforcement response to violations of laws, these present a threat to our safety. The message to aliens contemplating illegally entering the U.S., and the terrorists and criminals among them, is clear — violations of the immigration laws are of no consequence. This creates an incentive for aliens to violate our immigration laws, secure in the knowledge that there will be no adverse consequences for committing those violations of law.

When our elected officials make it clear that no matter how aliens may have entered the U.S., we simply will not deport them but instead will provide them all with lawful status, then we really need to ask why the federal government bothers with a legal entry system for foreign visitors.

Most terrorists have been able to game the background check by providing false identity documents. Other aliens simply decide to not leave the U.S., confident that with the all but nonexistent enforcement of our immigration laws within the interior of the country, no one will look for them. They may purchase a stolen identity or assume a fabricated identity to hide in plain sight.

Yet nothing has ever been done to instill integrity in these processes. The lack of integrity in the various categories of our immigration system simple mirrors the lack of integrity where our elected “representatives” are concerned.

DANGERS IN CURRENT LEGALIZATION PROPOSALS

The legalization programs that leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties tout as a supposedly “commonsense solution” to dealing with millions of illegal aliens who are too numerous to all be deported, would provide terror organizations and transnational gangs with unparalleled opportunities to enable their operatives to enter the U.S. and embed themselves in American communities. This could lead to the greatest invasion any country has ever witnessed, and it would have been orchestrated and facilitated by the political leaders of our own nation.

The Reagan Administration claimed that the amnesty program that was part and parcel of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 would enable roughly one million illegal aliens to emerge from the “shadows.” In reality, when the bureaucratic dust settled, nearly four million illegal aliens had availed themselves of the opportunity to gain legal status.

Today our official, optimistic claim is that there are about 12 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. If the same ratio of undercounting and/or underestimating the actual numbers continues as it did in 1986, the actual number of such aliens who would have to be processed would exceed 40 million.

To reassure Americans that it is in America’s best interests to get millions of illegal aliens out of the shadows, politicians tout the fact that every alien would have to undergo a “background check.”

“Background checks” cannot and must not be equated with “background investigations.”

A background check simply involves running a name and a set of fingerprints through a series of databases. Contrary to what many people may believe, fingerprints do not always identify the person who is fingerprinted and may not disclose his/her true background or criminal or terrorist history. This is especially true for aliens from Third World countries, where there may not be any fingerprints available for comparison. A person whose fingerprints are not on file and who uses a false name will almost invariably beat this system.

A “background investigation” is an entirely different process. It requires that investigators interview people in the field. This would include neighbors of the subject of the inquiry, along with family members and friends as well as colleagues at work. Such an investigation may also include surveilling the subject, reviewing his/her bank records, phone records, and other such documentation. This is a time-consuming and costly process.

There would be no way to interview these millions of aliens and hence no way to conduct any field investigations to verify any information contained in their applications. No way to know who they are, no way to know anything about their possible connections to criminal or terrorist organizations. There would be no way to know when they actually entered the country.

Establishing a cutoff date of arrival to determine eligibility of these aliens would simply be a charade. When illegal aliens evade the inspections process, no record of their entry is created. These aliens would simply have to make certain to have claimed to have entered the U.S. prior to whatever that cutoff date is.

Only aliens who wanted to emerge from the “shadows” would do so. Aliens who know that their fingerprints would disclose that they are the subjects of criminal arrest warrants or know that they would be identifiable as belonging to criminal or terrorist organizations would, without fear, be able to continue to reside in those shadows. Meanwhile that massive legalization program would tie up immigration personnel at DHS for years to come.

Additionally, this would also mean that aliens who have done everything they were supposed to in order to comply with our laws would likely find that they would have to endure many years of waiting for their applications to be adjudicated.

Finally, each and every one of these newly legalized aliens would have the right to immediately apply to have their spouses and minor children lawfully admitted into the U.S. to join them here. This could result in millions of children suddenly being enrolled in public schools in towns and cities across the U.S.

Aliens have been easily able to game the visa process, the inspections process conducted at ports of entry, and the immigration benefits program to acquire lawful status. Most of the time aliens have done this to be able to work in the U.S. While not a violent crime, these aliens are, nevertheless, displacing American workers and driving down wages.

However, as the 9/11 Commission discovered and as has been disclosed at a series of Congressional oversight hearings, terrorists have also committed fraud to gain entry to the U.S. and then embed themselves. Yet most of our politicians, including the mayors and governors of “Sanctuary” cities and states, blithely ignore the damage being done to Americans who are losing their livelihoods and, all too often, their lives, to aliens who are violating our laws and our borders.

For these politicians, the harm being done to Americans is “collateral damage,” or, as the father of a young man who was killed in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, during the terror attacks, “the cost of doing business.” Our politicians are arguably conducting the biggest con game in the history of our nation.

The multiple failures of the immigration system have never been addressed and are not likely to be addressed any time soon with the current crop of political “leaders” from both political parties. Wanting campaign contributions, politicos have made placating the U.S. Chamber of Commerce their chief aim. The Chamber represents the interests of corporations from a broad swath of businesses that want an unlimited supply of cheap and compliant labor for bottom-rung economic jobs all the way up to high-tech jobs that employ STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) professionals.

Corporations that depend on tourism want an unlimited supply of foreign tourists to spend their money in the U.S., and schools want an unlimited supply of foreign students.

Today the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its ultra-deep-pocketed allies and associates from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are truly getting “the best government money can buy.”

Meanwhile, Americans are losing their livelihoods and their lives. That is the truth.

Muslim legislator thinks Islamic terrorists should get their life insurance policies

By voting against a bill that would block life insurance payments to terrorists killed while killing Americans, Minnesota legislator Ilhan Omar shows her allegiance to her people.

From Leo Hohmann at WND:

Omar as the inspiration for a Somali Muslim Barbie doll.

She burst on the scene last August when she upset a 44-year incumbent Democrat in the Minnesota state primary elections to become the nation’s first female Muslim state legislator.

Ilhan Omar, the 34-year-old community organizer who came to America as a refugee from Somalia, was touted by Democrats as a model success story.

“From a refugee camp to the State Capitol with intelligence and insight,” beamed former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who endorsed Omar. “This is a wonderful story to tell as Americans, and a great source of pride for the state of Minnesota’s open arms.”

But on Thursday Omar made her mark in another way.

She was one of only two members of the Minnesota State House to vote against a bill that would allow life insurance companies to deny payouts to the beneficiaries of terrorists who die in violent attacks on Americans.

The House voted 127-2 to pass the bill, which now moves on to a vote in the State Senate.

Omar, who represents the heavily immigrant Cedar Riverside area of Minneapolis, was joined by fellow Democratic Rep. John Lesch of St. Paul in voting against the bill.

Omar’s vote sticks out because at least 42 Somali refugees have been confirmed by the FBI to have left the U.S. to join overseas terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the al-Qaida affiliate in Somalia, and ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

[….]

The Minnesota insurance bill was introduced by Rep. Joe Hoppe, R-Chaska, in response to Syed Farook’s jihadist rampage in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015 in which he shot and killed 14 people and injured 22 at an office Christmas party. Farook made sure his life insurance policies worth $275,000 were valid before conducting the deadly shooting with help from his wife, Tashfeen Malik.

After Farook died in a shootout with police, his mother fought to remain the beneficiary of the life insurance policies. The insurance company balked and the case has gone to court.

There is much, much more including an interview with our friend Debra Anderson, continue here.

See our previous posts on Omar by clicking here.

Why can’t someone in Congress introduce (and get passed!) a federal bill to bar life insurance payouts in cases like the San Bernardino slaughter.  There will surely be more as the US Muslim population increases!

EndNote: There will be many more Muslim legislators like Omar as well if this group has it’s way:  See Jetpac Inc.

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