As President Obama prepares to scuttle what remains of our immigration system with executive orders, let us pause to remember that border security is national security. There is no way that millions of illegal aliens can be given amnesty without weakening border security, which means national security will be compromised as well, and we'll be seeing more stories like this one from the Washington Times:
Four men flew from Istanbul through Paris to Mexico City in late August, where they were met by a Turkish-speaking man who stashed them in a safe house until their Sept. 3 attempt to cross into the U.S. over the border with Mexico.
Their capture by the Border Patrol in Texas set off a fierce debate over the men???s intentions, with some members of Congress saying they were terrorist fighters. Homeland Security officials, including Secretary Jeh Johnson, countered that they were part of the Kurdish resistance which, like the U.S., is fighting the Islamic State???s advance in Iraq.
But whether the men are linked to anti-U.S. jihadists or not, they admitted to being part of a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and their ability to get into the U.S. through the southern border ??? they paid $8,000 each to be smuggled into Texas ??? details the existence of a network capable of bringing terrorists across the border.
That seems like the salient point here, more than pinning down exactly which pro- or anti-ISIS group they might belong to. It matters that $8,000 a pop got them across the border. ISIS can afford eight grand per fighter as easily as the alphabet soup of Kurdish groups these fellows may, or may not, have come from:
As of a month ago they were being held at the South Texas Detention Facility in Pearsall, Texas.
The men initially claimed to be members of the Revolutionary People???s Liberation Party/Front, known by the acronym DHKP/C. The group is a Marxist insurgency that claimed credit for a 2013 suicide bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey???s capital, last year.
But U.S. counterterrorism officials said the men were more likely members of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers??? Party, which has been battling for Kurdish rights within Turkey for decades, though recently PKK and Turkish leaders have tried to broker a political agreement.
Both the PKK and DHKP/C are listed by the State Department as terrorist groups.
Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the fact that avowed members of terrorist groups got into the U.S. shows it???s possible to sneak across a porous border.
This business about initial claims not lining up with subsequent revelations isn't raising any hackles over at the Department of Homeland Security? They're just going to leave it with a statement that claims the four have direct ties to ISIS is "categorically false, and not supported by any credible intelligence or the facts on the ground" and call it a day, even though their nebulous status doesn't match up very well with statements Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson gave Congress?
Even if Homeland Security is satisfied these four individuals are more likely to be asylum-seekers than a terrorist threat, the fact remains that their method of entry was disturbing, and we're going to see a lot more chaos at the border if Obama's rumored executive actions on amnesty move forward. Look at the sheer hell he unleashed with his "DREAM Act by fiat" antics last year: a human tidal wave that overwhelmed the entire immigration system, and ended up with taxpayer-funded shipments of alien children to undisclosed locations across the country. That's a walk in the park compared to what will be coming if Obama essentially waves U.S. citizenship laws away with his magic wand, as part of an act to conjure up five or ten million more Democrat voters. The current hot rumor, coming from a Fox News exclusive, is that a 10-point amnesty bomb could be blowing up in America's face by next Friday:
The plan calls for expanding deferred action for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children - but also for the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.
The latter could allow upwards of 4.5 million illegal immigrant adults with U.S.-born children to stay, according to estimates.
Critics in the Senate say those who receive deferred action, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, receive work authorization in the United States, Social Security numbers and government-issued IDs.
Another portion that is sure to cause consternation among anti-"amnesty" lawmakers is a plan to expand deferred action for young people. In June 2012, Obama created such a program for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, entered before June 2007 and were under 31 as of June 2012. The change would expand that to cover anyone who entered before they were 16, and change the cut-off from June 2007 to Jan. 1, 2010. This is estimated to make nearly 300,000 illegal immigrants eligible.
One of the architects for the president's planned executive actions at DHS is Esther Olavarria, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's former top immigration lawyer.
Under the changes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers also would see a pay raise in order to "increase morale" within the ICE workforce.
DHS also is planning to "promote" the new naturalization process by giving a 50 percent discount on the first 10,000 applicants who come forward, with the exception of those who have income levels above 200 percent of the poverty level.
Tech jobs though a State Department immigrant visa program would offer another half-million immigrants a path to citizenship. This would include their spouses as well.
They won't just be "staying"; they'll be on the fast track for a full panoply of federal benefits, and of course those who aren't illegally voting already will be turning up at the polls. The most grimly amusing thing about the plan foreshadowed by the Fox News report is supposed to buck up the morale of immigration officers by giving them a raise... as if a bit of extra pay will armor their morale against the unbelievable stampede that will come blasting across the southern border when word gets out about Obama's citizenship giveaway. And there's no telling what sort of interesting characters will be mixed into that tsunami, because the loss of a sane, legal immigration system by definition means losing the ability to screen the people who enter the country.
Looks like we'll soon have a final answer on whether the Democrats' midterm election defeat frightened its leadership away from grabbing that amnesty brass ring. They'll get creamed in 2016 too... but after that, they will have permanently reshaped the American electorate to their tastes, and they must feel that kind of transformation is worth a bad election or two, just as they calculated ObamaCare would be. Those calculations might be wrong, if the rest of the American electorate takes so much umbrage at the unconstitutional destruction of our immigration system that they overwhelm the 4.5 million new Democrat voters. Does the electorate care enough about citizenship, the Constitution, or even national security to make that happen, especially if the Beltway media complex terrorizes Republicans out of putting the question to them bluntly?
On the bright side, at least we'll be able to dispense with the smokescreen of claims that legalized aliens will be some sort of economic boon to a country that can't generate enough jobs for legal citizens as it is. If Obama's going to use dictatorial powers to accomplish this, there is no further reason for anyone to waste time persuading the American people to accept the results. For anyone still keeping score, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows that "both legal and illegal immigrants and their minor children made up 42 percent of Medicaid growth from 2011 to last year." If this immigration wave was the glittering economic asset we were assured it would be, the new arrivals wouldn't end up on Medicaid in such enormous numbers. It hardly makes sense to pour a fresh wave of beneficiaries into a system as shaky as Medicaid... but then again, this is all about stripping the American people of the right to make rational decisions about how many new citizens the country should accept, and what sort of people they should be.
