There were two summits this week and if you can’t guess which
was more productive, please repeat the last four years’ classes.
One was held in Cancun, Mexico, between President Bush, Mexican
President Fox, and Canadian PM Stephen Harper. The other one took
place in Beirut, where Hizballah leader Sayyed Nasrallah and Hamas
chieftain Khaled Meshaal sought money and other support from the
assembled “Fourth General Arab Conference to Back the Lebanese and
Palestinian Resistance,” according to a report in the Beirut
Daily Star. (John Batchelor’s report yesterday on AmSpecBlog adds
representatives of Imad Mugniyah, Abu Musab al Zarqawi and Islamic
Jihad. That would make the Beirut meeting the terrorist equivalent
of the 1957 Appalachian summit of the five mafia families.) We
cannot doubt that whoever was there also seized the opportunity to
meet, in safety and in secret, to discuss future terrorist
operations. It took a third event to place the first two in their
correct and deadly context.
Hizballah — the Iranian-backed Lebanese/Syrian terrorist
organization — has more American blood on its hands than any
Islamic terrorist ring with the sole exception of al-Qaeda. On
Thursday, FBI Director Robert Muller announced that though the FBI
and Customs had caught others, Hizballah had succeeded in smuggling
some operatives across the Mexican border into the U.S. He said,
“This was an occasion in which Hizballah operatives were assisting
others with some association with Hizballah in coming to the United
States…That was an organization that we dismantled and identified
those persons who had been smuggled in. And they have been
addressed as well.” These are the ones that were caught. But of the
half-million or so illegals who entered this country last year, how
many others like them remain undetected?
My friend and former CIA undercover operator Wayne Simmons has
been warning of this problem for years. He spent almost two decades
posing as an intelligence operative working with Colombian drug
lords and risking his life to thwart their operations. Simmons’s
warning is dire. He asks, how many former intelligence operators
from the KGB and GRU and others such as they are hiring out to plan
terrorist smuggling operations through Canada and Mexico? Those who
smuggle drugs and illegal aliens across our borders won’t scruple
at bringing terrorists and their weapons in for the right fee. And
for enough money they can hire people just as good as Wayne Simmons
to get their cargos past our border operations. It would be foolish
to think they are not.
The pinata of platitudes that was burst over Cancun proved
redundantly that we aren’t serious about protecting our borders. If
we were, the guys and gals working for Muller would be backed up by
everything in our arsenal of economic, military, and political
muscle. Have you noticed that there is roughly no coverage of the
Cancun results? There’s a reason for that. There weren’t any.
Except for giving Mexico de facto license to get away with at least
one more year of promoting illegal immigration, there’s not one
thing that came out of this summit. It didn’t have to be so. The
president could have lowered the boom on Fox and done what
Americans have been yearning for: establishing the framework of a
real border policy that both of our neighbors would sign on to.
PERHAPS THE GREATEST SCANDAL of our time, one that will make our
society permanently less American and less secure, is that our
politicians seem so scared of losing Hispanic voters’ support that
they won’t give more than lip service to enforcing America’s
borders. To be fair to FBI Director Muller and the other folks
working hard against the smugglers, some success is being achieved.
But how much are they missing?
We can, like Sen. McCain, choose to parse words over what is
amnesty for illegals and what isn’t. We can, like Sen. Reid,
demagogue the issue as Republican racism. Or we can — unlike the
whole sorry lot of them — look at what we can do to secure the
borders and then deal with the illegals that are here.
The president — who earlier promised to veto any immigration
bill that didn’t contain his guest worker program — caved
preemptively during the Cancun meeting. Which leaves us caught
between McCain’s pride and Hispanic accusations of prejudice,
between sense and Sensenbrenner. On one side is Rep.
Sensenbrenner’s bill to make illegal entry into the U.S. a felony.
That proposal has brought hundreds of thousands of protesters
waving Mexican flags to the streets of Los Angeles, New York, and
many other cities. It has the benefit of appealing to our emotions,
but as I pointed out last week it’s anything but serious.
On the other is the McCain-Specter-Kennedy formula of “earned
citizenship,” which does almost nothing to prevent more illegals
from entering the nation. Neither approach addresses the real
issues we face. Let’s take a deep breath, step back, and define the
problem. Congress’s “ready, fire, aim” approach should be brought
to a crashing halt, and both sides should regroup around three
issues.
FIRST, WHAT WILL IT TAKE to end the massive flow of illegals across
the Mexican and Canadian borders? In other words, what will it take
to increase the effectiveness of the FBI, Customs and Immigration,
Coast Guard and other agencies’ efforts to stop the people
smugglers, and catch the individuals who come in? There’s an
objective measure for this. If an estimated half million illegals
are getting in each year, what will it take to cut that number down
to one-tenth the current rate? To one one-hundredth?
Second, what shall we do with the eleven million or more
illegals that are here? We won’t ship them all home. But we can’t
allow a huge subculture in our nation that is used to disregarding
the law. A guest worker program sounds good, but why should we have
any confidence in our government’s ability to organize it and
enforce whatever limits we choose to place on it? And why should
anyone bother to follow McCain’s “earned citizenship” plan if they
can stay here for decades without being penalized for disregarding
the law?
Third, how can we ensure that those illegals who are to become
citizens truly assimilate and become Americans? We don’t want to
follow the French example and create such obstacles to assimilation
that a whole smoldering, angry alien underclass forms in our cities
and towns. Actually, we’ve already created that deeply entrenched
set of obstacles. It’s called multiculturalism.
How can we expect anyone to become an American when we don’t
agree what that means? How few among us even think of ourselves in
un-hyphenated terms? To ensure assimilation, we have to remove the
obstacles to it in schools, in business, and in government. We know
what they are, but lack the courage to state them. Let’s make it
easy by killing a few sacred cows. In the schools, eliminate
multilingual education and teach American history and American
government as our history and our government, not an abstraction.
Continue in the business world by removing preferences for
minority-owned businesses and let the market work. And, in
government, scorn those who trade on race or ethnicity. No, it’s
not about to happen. But it could if we were honest about it.
Si, si puede.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004).
