OPEN DOOR TRADE/IMMIGRATION POLICY PAVED WAY FOR ATTACK ON UNITED STATES

By William J. Gill

Americans For Trade Defense

In the wake of the cataclysmic attacks on the World trade Center and the Pentagon with the loss of nearly 7,000 lives, a number of theories have been advanced about what drove the fanatic Muslim terrorists to commit these devastatingly terrible crimes.

Some blame our Mideast policy for being so weighted in favor or Israel against the Arabs.  Others claim our ignoring Afghanistan after helping it win its was against Soviet Russia played a key role.

However, these and other speculations ignore the fundamental question:  How and why were the terrorists able to get into our country, use private flying schools to train for the attacks on New York and Washington, and keep their plans secret from our  FBI, CIA and other security agencies for the up to five years it is believed they spent getting ready for these spectacular assaults.

We owe a realistic analysis of this question to the innocent victims of the terrorists, to the courageous New York police and firemen who died trying to rescue them, and to the brave passengers aboard the airliner downed near Pittsburgh who probably kept the fanatics from ramming the plane into the Capitol in Washington.

Immigration & Trade—The Siamese Twins

Just days before the terrorists struck, a U. S. Customs officer on the Mexican border told a TV network newsman about the biggest twin problem his service faces every day. “Trade and immigration,” he said.  “You have to say them in the same breath.”

Indeed, to a very large extent, it is trade that is driving our lax immigration policy.  Several years ago the then U.S. Commissioner of Customs asked the Secretary of the Treasury for more funds to expand use of x-ray type equipment on our borders to interdict smuggled drugs and illegal immigrants.  “Forget about interdiction,” the Secretary told him.  “Trade is the name of the game.”

Actually, trade has been the propelling force behind the ever-rising illegal immigration and drug invasions of our country for decades, through both received substantial boosts from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the creation of the World Trade Organization in the 1990s.

The unwillingness of the United States to defend its borders is known to all the poor peons of Latin America, to the hungry hordes of Asia and Africa, to the destitute denizens of China and Japan, to the pitiful peoples of the Russian steppes.  Ever since the Kennedy Round trade agreements of 1963 and the revolutionary immigration law hammered through Congress by President Lyndon Johnson two years later, the world had become completely aware the United States no longer was serious about protecting its borders.

Now, since September 11th, our government apparently has rediscovered that the nation does have borders and they need to be defended.    “The United States has sharply intensified inspections and anti-terrorist surveillance along its Canadian and Mexican borders,”  reports the Associated Press.

Before the recent slowdown, AP points out, “On a typical day, more than one million passengers in 350,000 private vehicles, along with 30,000 commercial trucks, rumble past more than 150 established U.S. border sites with Canada and Mexico, according to Customs data.”

In short, our undermanned and inadequately equipped Customs and Immigration services are quite plainly overwhelmed.  And what is the real rationale for this?  AP got it right:   “The three nations (in NAFTA) have been dropping  travel and commercial barriers over the years to forge the biggest free-trade zone on the planet.”

IMMIGRATION REACHING ASTRONOMICAL PROPORTIONS

The immigration invasion of the United States is not only overwhelming our border patrols, it is overwhelming the entire country.  The scope of this is only now coming to light.

Mary Beth Sheridan of The Washington Post disclosed in an excellent article a week after T-Day that “from fiscal 1981 until 1998, the latest data available, the number of annual admissions of visitors with visas nearly tripled to about 30 million, according to INS data.   Millions more didn’t need visas, such as Canadians, or (those  who) crossed into the country illegally.”

Rep. Lamar S. Smith, a Texas Republican and member of the House immigration subcommittee, pointed out that “about 40 percent of all undocumented immigrants are people who came to the United States with visas but didn’t leave when the visas expired,” Ms. Sheridan writes.

What this means is that the number of illegals in the country must be far more numerous than anyone hitherto had guessed , though the evidence of our eyes in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington has certainly made many of us doubtful.  The official estimate of some 11 million was high enough.

Congressman Smith and others are calling for tighter enforcement at our borders. But Rep. George W. Gekas of Pennsylvania,  Republican chairman of the immigration subcommittee, is still for liberalizing the present law, making it easier for illegals to become legal as both President bush and Mexico’s Vicente Fox have proposed.

Gekas said, Ms. Sheridan reports, “he saw no reason to drop from the House’s agenda a pro-immigrant measure expected to be considered soon.  The measure, known as 245 (i) would allow undocumented immigrants with family or business sponsors in the United  States to apply for permanent residency here instead of returning  home first.  The Senate has approved a similar bill.

“Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came into the country on tourist or business visas,” Ms. Sheridan was told by an anonymous official.  Since her story it has been learned several of the others entered with vocational visas requested by the private flight schools which taught them how to fly the airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon .