John Adams famously stated, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Knowledge is power. Nations go to great lengths to steal the secrets of their enemies for a variety of purposes. Conversely, nations seek to protect their own secrets jealously and often provide false information, known as “disinformation,” to confuse and confound their enemies.

A historic example of such disinformation was a military operation launched by the Allies during the Second World War known as “Operation Fortitude” also known as the “Calais Deception,” wherein the Nazis were convinced that the Allies would launch an attack as Pas de Calais when in reality, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, was planning to attack German forces at Normandy to begin the liberation of France.

The invasion at Normandy was given the code-name, “Operation Overlord” but history remembers it as “D-Day.”

General Eisenhower and his colleagues were concerned that if all of the German forces were assembled in Normandy that Operation Overlord would fail.  Consequently General George S. Patton created an illusory “invasion force” consisting largely of inflatable vehicles that, from the air, appeared to Nazi pilots to be an actual invasion force.  It was aptly described as “Patton’s Ghost Army.”

By splitting German forces, D-Day succeeded, although the casualties for American, British and Canadian forces were horrific.

Today many journalists and politicians have deceptively focused the attention of Americans on the U.S./Mexican border, to the exclusion of the other dysfunctional components of the immigration system, creating the false narrative that running US/Mexican border is the only way that illegal aliens enter the United States.

This also feeds to bogus and disgusting nonsense about how immigration law enforcement is about race.

In reality, the United States has 50 border states; any state that lies along the northern or the southern border are “border sates,” as are those states that have access to the 95,000 miles of meandering coastline or have international airports.

Furthermore, it has been estimated that nearly half of all illegal aliens did not enter the United States without inspection (without vetting) but entered the United States via the lawful inspections procedures conducted at our nation’s 325 ports of entry and then, in one way or another, went on to violate the terms of their admission.

The focus on the U.S./Mexican border has to be compared with the Calais Deception.  Perhaps it should be called the “Mexican Border Deception.”

Undoubtedly the need to secure the U.S./Mexican border is not bogus, as was the fantasy invasion of Calais.  Make no mistake, that border must be made secure.  However, simply securing that border will not end illegal immigration and will not protect the United States from international terrorist organizations or transnational gangs and criminal organizations.

Securing that problematic border must be a component of a larger strategy that addresses many other failures and vulnerabilities of the immigration system.

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.

We are also told that since we cannot deport all of the millions of illegal aliens, the only “reasonable” way to deal with them is to provide them with lawful status after subjecting them to a “background check.”

The notion that we either deport each and every illegal alien or simply wave the white flag of surrender and provide them all with lawful status is insane.  Aliens who violate the immigration laws are no different from other law violators.  Law enforcement should try to arrest as many such violators as possible and publicize such enforcement operations to deter additional law violations.

No laws are enforced 100% of the time.  Indeed, most laws are rarely enforced 1% of the time.  Speeders are rarely stopped.  Motorists who blow stop-signs are rarely caught.

There are many more licensed motorists with cell phones and driver’s licenses than there are illegal aliens present in the United States.  Many of these drivers may engage in the dangerous practice of texting while driving.  Similarly, there are far more licensed drivers who drive drunk than the number of illegal aliens present in the United States.

Yet while only a tiny percentage of those irresponsible drivers are ever caught or punished, penalties for such reckless and dangerous violations of law have been greatly increased, accompanied by public service announcements warning that anyone caught texting while driving or driving drunk will be severely punished.

No one will ever suggest that motor vehicle laws should no longer be enforced no matter how many law violators may be involved.

As I noted in my prepared testimony when I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 20, 2013 on the topic, “Building an Immigration System Worthy of American Values:”

Law enforcement is at its best when it creates a climate of deterrence to convince those who might be contemplating violating the law that such an effort is likely to be discovered and that if discovered, adverse consequences will result for the law violators. Current policies and statements by the administration, in my view, encourages aspiring illegal aliens around the world to head for the United States. In effect the starter’s pistol has been fired and for these folks, the finish line to this race is the border of the United States.

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

Republican and Democratic “leaders” who duplicitously agree on the supposed impossibility of enforcing our immigration laws, claiming that all illegal aliens already present in the United States should be granted lawful status, are all firing that starter’s pistol I alluded to in my Senate testimony.  Their disagreement over whether or not such illegal aliens should be provided with pathways to U.S. citizenship is bogus.

Most illegal aliens don’t want citizenship, they simply want to work here and send money home.  With or without the prospect of citizenship, it is the prospect of employment that draws most illegal aliens to the United States.

Next, let’s consider politicians who claim that by bringing heretofore illegal aliens “out of the shadows” America will be safer.

Aliens who know that their fingerprints will identify them as criminals or terrorists will simply remain in those “shadows.”  None of the proposals to create any sort of immigration reform include a massive increase in the number of immigration enforcement personnel to hunt down the hundreds of thousands of such criminal aliens.

Furthermore, the supposed “security checks” participating illegal aliens would be subjected to would be worthless.  Aliens whose fingerprints are not on file and who provide false information about their names, dates of birth and even dates of entry or citizenship would, in all probability, succeed in defrauding this system.

There would be no in-person interviews and no field investigations.  Adjudicators would have make their decisions based on the answers the illegal alien applicants provided to the questions found in their applications.

It was recently reported that more than 800 immigrants were mistakenly granted citizenship.  Adding insult to injury, the AP report noted that these aliens were illegally present and were primarily citizens of countries known to sponsor terrorism. This is only the tip of a huge, dangerous iceberg and one that has existed for decades. Here are just a few examples of how this lack of oversight has endangered Americans:

Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square Bomber” was a naturalized citizen who entered the U.S. from his native Pakistan on a student visa.  He was granted U.S. citizenship 13 months prior to setting off a car bomb in Times Square.

On May 30, 2013, UPI posted a report, “Immigrant allegedly failed to reveal Hezbollah membership” about Wissam Allouche, an alleged former member of Hezbollah, who had successfully immigrated to the United States by reportedly concealing his terrorist background.  He used his lawful immigrant status to get a job as a translator for a company hired by our military in the Middle East.

Here is an excerpt from this report:

Wissam Allouche, 44, who became a citizen in 2009, was arrested last week by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, the San Antonio Express-News reported Thursday. He has also been charged with failing to reveal membership in Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group classified as terrorist by the U.S. government, when he sought a security clearance.

My article, “How DHS Ineptitude Facilitates Terrorist Operations” focused on the FBI’s arrest of Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Somalia who was arrested for supporting a terrorist organization, al Nusrah, an al Qaeda affiliate.

This quote from “9/11 and  Terrorist Travel” identifies what really needs to be fixed by the next administration:

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 United States 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.

Unless the entirety of the immigration law enforcement system is reformed, Americans will continue to be put at risk. Focusing solely on the status of the southern border is a dangerous distraction from this fact.

RELATED ARTICLE: Terrorism, refugees and Donald Trump – Washington Times

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.