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Boston Bombing Should Stop Rush to Amnesty
The Boston Marathon Bombing, where 3 were killed and 264 wounded, many with legs or feet blown off, continues to be a big media story, but we are still waiting for answers to many questions. How did our government miss so many clues that the Tsarnaev brothers were a deadly danger to Americans?
They came into the United States as visitors from Kazakhstan, where many ethnic Chechens live without persecution, then cooked up a claim to be refugees, which was a fraud. After a few years the father returned to Dagestan, Russia, where he now lives safely.
Once admitted into the United States, the entire family cashed in on generous U.S. welfare benefits, cash and food stamps. Those receiving taxpayer handouts included the two criminal sons, both of their parents, and ultimately Tamerlan’s wife and child.
When accused of domestic violence against a girlfriend in 2009, he had the benefit of a taxpayer-funded attorney to get his case dismissed. Welfare was terminated only in 2012 when his wife’s salary pushed their income outside of eligibility limits.
Tamerlan can be said to have financed his radicalization with welfare handouts from our taxpayers. Those were the years when Tamerlan became a more devout Muslim, gave up drinking in order to devote himself to “God’s business” (according to his uncle), and sought out jihadist websites.
Why did our government ignore the federal law that requires immigrants, before they are admitted, to prove they will not become a public charge? For years, the sons did not have jobs or any visible source of income.
Meanwhile, Tamerlan’s mother began wearing a hijab and telling conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Towers, which she said Tamerlan had told her. She was accused of shoplifting $1,500 worth of clothes from the upscale Lord & Taylor, but flew back to Russia, so the judge issued a bench warrant for her arrest.
The government of Russia contacted our FBI and warned us that Tamerlan was a dangerous risk. The FBI investigated, but reported there was no problem.
In 2012, Tamerlan left for a six-month visit in Russia and Dagestan. Where did Tamerlan get the money for that expensive airline ticket? Wasn’t the FBI interested in where he went and who he saw, even after Russia told us that he joined “underground groups in Russia”?
What did Tamerlan do in Russia? Receive training in bomb-making, terrorist tactics, or handling weapons? Did he attend a radical mosque? Were the brothers directed by foreign operatives?
One of the government’s ridiculous excuses for not tracking Tamerlan’s flight to Russia was that the airline misspelled his name on passenger list. The Obama Administration is always blaming someone else for its own failures.
Apparently, the FBI wasn’t interested in doing another investigation when Tamerlan returned from his trip. Russia then took its warning about Tamerlan to our Central Intelligence Agency, but got no response there, either.
Tamerlan’s own web postings showed his sympathies with radical Islam, and in April 2013, Tamerlan’s YouTube video account included a playlist celebrating “Terrorists.” Because the FBI had closed his case, no one in our government was watching.
Gang of Eight member Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) admitted on Fox News: “The FBI either dropped the ball or our system doesn’t allow the FBI to follow this guy in an appropriate fashion.” Is the FBI’s failure a result of political correctness and blindness to the threat of Islamic jihad? Is the FBI is forbidden to use terms such as “jihad” or “Islamic terrorism”? Does the FBI have a policy of playing down Islamic links to terrorism?
When the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was naturalized as a citizen, he would have been required to swear that he renounces “all allegiance” to any previous country and that “I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” What did our naturalization bureaucrats do to assure that Dzhokhar was not using the Koran-authorized practice of taqiyya, i.e., tell a lie in order to advance Muslim objectives?
Dzhokhar enjoyed free education, a scholarship (even though his college transcript shows failing grades), expensive cars, a party trip to New York, computers and cellphones. Where did he get the money?
Why didn’t our FBI recognize the signal that the older brother was named for one of the most brutal murderers in all history? The name Tamerlan is known throughout Asia as a 14th-century Muslim who called himself the “Sword of Islam” and murdered 17 million people, beheaded many and displayed their heads to showcase his brutality.
Obama’s defenders assert that nothing bad has happened since 9/11, but the Heritage Foundation reports there have been 53 attempted terror attacks since 2001, almost every one perpetrated by a Muslim who had been legally admitted from a region that clearly represents a security threat. Why do we continue to admit people from countries whose whole population is a security risk?
There are 75,000 Muslim students now in the U.S. on visas. Student visas are very easy to get. Many come from countries where they are brainwashed against the U.S. We should stop granting any more student visas to Muslims.
The Boston bombing requires us to stop thinking about new immigration legislation until we remedy our mistakes. The failure to protect us from the Tsarnaev brothers proves there are so many things radically wrong with our legal immigration process.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that “We should not proceed until we understand the specific failures of our immigration system.” Paul’s letter cautioned, “National security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform” to prevent future acts of terror.
The failed FBI investigation of Tamerlan shows that our government does not have the capacity to do adequate background checks on 11 million illegal aliens. Amnesty may even facilitate terrorism. We need to take Ronald Reagan’s advice: Before we do more of what we are doing, let’s find out if what we are doing is part of the problem.
Immigration Not Only a Border Problem
The Boston bombing crime shows that comprehensive immigration reform should not be only a southern border problem or even just a problem of illegal aliens. It’s also a problem of foreigners who are admitted legally but should never have been admitted, and of others admitted legally on a visa but are not tracked to make sure they depart when their visitor’s time expires, as U.S. law requires.
For starters, why would our government have admitted the Tsarnaev family whose son was named Tamerlan? That should have been a red alert because that is the name of one of the world’s notorious mass murderers, a 14th-century Central Asian warlord named Tamerlan, who killed 17 million people.
Why did the Tsarnaev family receive such generous welfare benefits from the United States? The Boston Herald reported that the family received cash, food stamps and Section 8 housing worth $100,000.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said that the Boston bombers’ crime poses questions similar to those we asked after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, such as “How did 19 people get in here to kill 3,000 people?” He said the Boston marathon crime is “a reminder that we’ve got to do better than what we’ve done. They were evidently here legally.”
Grassley said the Boston crime should trigger the U.S. “to understand the gaps and loopholes in our immigration system.” He asked, “How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?”
The leftwing politicians and media outlets are disappointed with the outcome of the investigation into the Boston bombing. They can’t blame it on lack of gun control, the NRA, the tea parties, right-wing extremists, or budget cutbacks required by sequestration.
Salon columnist David Sirota wrote, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” What he meant, of course, is that he hoped the bomber would be a mainstream Christian American so the atrocity could be blamed on the American culture.
What worries America-hating liberals and progressives is that we will wake up to the fact that our government is now importing refugees, Muslims, polygamists, and other difficult-to-assimilate foreigners in unprecedented numbers. From a distance, rebels in Chechnya, Syria and Egypt might seem like freedom fighters, but they may be terrorists who have no desire to be American.
It’s long overdue for Congress to have a series of hearings on the loopholes, broken promises, and disobeyed laws involving both legal and illegal entry into the United States. It would be useful to reinstate the House Committee on Un-American Activities so we can have a look at those in our midst who may be jihadists, or dupes of violent Muslim indoctrination, or (in old Communist lingo) fellow travelers or useful idiots.
We need hearings to find out why the Tsarnaev family was not thoroughly vetted before it was admitted to our country, or even after Russia tipped off our FBI that Tamerlan could be a dangerous risk, or especially before Tamerlan was re-admitted to the U.S. after his trip to Russia in 2012. Russia told the FBI that Tamerlan “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”
Dealing with the widespread fraud in our easy acceptance of refugees should also be part of comprehensive immigration reform. After all, the Tsarnaev family came into our country as refugees.
The vetting of immigrants should make sure that the applicant really wants to become an American. The immigrants of earlier generations, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc., certainly did want to be Americans; like Irving Berlin, their attitude was God Bless America.
There is plenty of evidence that legal and illegal immigrants of various nationalities, in contravention of our citizenship pledge, retain their loyalty to the land they came from. Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington, says, “I think there’s often a sense of divided loyalties in these cases where Americans turn to violent jihad — are you American first or are you Muslim first?”
Our government should investigate thoroughly and reject those who do not want to become Americans, obey our Constitution and laws, speak our language, and salute our Flag. And they have to accept the rule that disputes in our courts must be decided according to U.S. law, not any foreign law.
Comprehensive Must Include Guestworkers
The word comprehensive is usually attached to current references to immigration reform, but the Gang of Eight’s bill is stumbling over reform of guestworkers. That’s the biggest bone of contention between pro-amnesty and anti-amnesty folk.
The highly paid lobbyists assigned to this issue are split. Big business interests (chanting “let the market decide”) are trying to bring in as many low-paid workers as possible, while the unions want to save jobs for their members and votes for the Democrats.
H-1B visas are capped at 65,000 and supposed to be for jobs that require technical expertise (scientists, engineers, computer programmers) and be used when U.S. citizens are not available. Business welcomes the crush of applicants from Indian body shops (i.e., placement agencies), and the top ten users of H-1Bs are offshore outsourcing firms.
Asians make up half of San Jose’s technology workforce, according to November Census Bureau data. That’s a sharp rise from ten years ago when it was about 39%.
Employers prefer to hire foreigners because they are paid less, can’t quit, and are treated like indentured servants. Guestworkers are supposed to go back home when their visas expire, but we have no guarantee that they depart.
The wage differential is significant. In New York City, the prevailing wage for an entry-level computer systems engineer is $68,370, but is $120,037 for a fully competent worker. The foreigners are usually hired as entry-level.
The guestworker system explains why college students tell me they have been opting out of engineering, and switching to a business major. American student enrollment in graduate Science and Engineering fell 10% after 1993, while enrollment of foreigners rose 26%.
Estimates are that at least 50% and as many as 70 or 80% of our nation’s agriculture workers are here illegally. Guestworker shepherds brought in from Peru to tend U.S. sheep just “disappeared” to hunt for better jobs.
According to Senator Jeff Sessions’ (R-AL) “10 Questions for the Gang of Eight,” the U.S. allows 700,000 guestworkers to enter our country each year. He estimates that the Gang’s proposal will increase the number to over a million a year, not counting the legalization of those now illegally in the U.S. and anticipated future immigration. Business is now demanding a large new “lesser-skilled” guestworker category to take restaurant, retailing and janitorial jobs.
Economist Jared Bernstein, in his book Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? accuses the guestworker program of being a power play by the business class and a disruption of the free market which actually shifts wealth to the powerful. The free market is supposed to let prices and wages rise whenever there is a shortage, but that doesn’t happen when our government artificially nullifies any shortage by bringing in more lower-paid workers.
The guestworker system is hurting black Americans, too. Yolanda Lewis, president and CEO of the Oakland-based Black Economic Council, stated bluntly, Tech companies “do not want to employ Americans. They import labor from overseas, pushing for H-1B visas. Check the job boards. They basically say, ‘H-1B Visa. Americans need not apply.’ For years, women, blacks and Latinos have been kept out of the tech job market. Now white men are being forced to train their replacements.”
H-4 visas are given to spouses of all classes of H-visa holders (H-1B, farm workers (H-2A), and non-ag unskilled workers (H-2B). There were 74,205 H-4s issued in 2011, and it’s been estimated that the total population of H-4s (not counted by the government) is a quarter million.
When President Obama took an unexpected question from a woman whose engineer husband is unemployed, Obama replied, “Industry tells me that they don’t have enough highly skilled engineers.” But Census Bureau data show that there are 1.8 million U.S.-born engineers under age 65 who are unemployed or not working as engineers.
Other industries are using H-1B visas for jobs for which there is obviously no shortage of Americans, such as teachers. Prince George’s County in Maryland was discovered to have 10% of its teaching staff working with H-1B visas, and the Muslim charter schools imported hundreds of teachers from Turkey on H-1B visas.
The House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy discovered that H-1B visas were even used to hire fashion models, dancers, chefs, photographers, and social workers. The Government Accountability Office found that the government approved more than a million H-1B visas to foreign nationals from 13 “countries of concern” (withholding the countries’ names for security reasons).
And don’t forget J-1 visas that take summer jobs which have traditionally been so important to young people, giving them an opportunity to learn the work ethic. Now summer jobs go to seasonal hiring of foreign students.
Illegals Bring Drug-Resistant TB
The United States practically eliminated tuberculosis many decades ago with our good hygiene and good drugs. But TB is coming back with a vengeance over our open border with Mexico and in a form that is highly contagious, fatal, and drug resistant.
We got a shock recently when the national news carried information about an illegal alien from Nepal carrying this ancient disease across our southern border illegally after traveling through 13 countries. He probably infected people all along the way.
This Nepal man is now in an Immigration and Customs detention facility in Texas in so-called medical isolation. We don’t know how many of our U.S. Border Patrol and medical personnel may have been infected before his life-threatening disease was diagnosed.
A full-page account of the TB problem in the Wall Street Journal described in detail the worry of our health officials that our 2,000-mile southern border could become a breeding ground for fatal, drug-resistant TB.
These diseased illegal aliens who show up on our doorstep in Texas and Arizona, requiring years of medication and isolation while being a danger to the lives of Americans assigned to care for them, are very costly. A recent CDC study estimates the cost of treatment on average to be $140,000, and some cases run as high as $700,000.
Tuberculosis is a debilitating disease that has shortened human lives since ancient times. It is caused by infectious bacteria that easily pass airborne from person to person through casual association, coughing and breathing.
Since 1950, TB has been fully treatable with drugs that cost pennies to make. The problem is the people who quit taking their medicine as soon as they feel better, before the infection has been completely eliminated from the body. The vast majority of cases of MDR TB in the United States are with people born in other countries who have come to the U.S.
Irresponsible behavior by people all over the world, especially in developing countries such as India and Mexico, has led to an explosion of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) versions of TB. Such cases are rampant in countries that supply cheap labor (both legal and illegal) to the United States.
During the heyday of immigration through Ellis Island, prospective immigrants were medically screened and sent back to their home country if there was evidence of TB. Today, instead of screening undesirable people at the border, we are asked to pay our health workers to treat them. However, it’s not enough to supply and dispense the anti-TB drugs. We have to watch them take their drug every day.
Our government should obey our laws, and that includes the law that requires building a fence on our southern border. The fence law was signed by President George W. Bush, who staged a photo op of his signing to emphasize its importance.
The fence was never built. The government spent nearly $2 billion experimenting with a stupid “virtual” fence, which didn’t work and has been abandoned. We expect a fence like the one that works so well in San Diego: a 12-feet high double fence.
