We need go no further than 9/11 (2001) to realize that even when 2,074 American citizens are murdered Congress will dissemble and obfuscate but do nothing really effective to solve the illegal alien problem. My sister in Atlanta recently met a Hispanic man when she went to obtain a gun permit a few weeks ago. She couldn’t help noticing he was wearing an NRA 30-year hat. “Oh yes! I’m a thirty-year man!” he said. “When I left, the Mexican government had just banned private citizens from owning any guns at all. And now look at the mess they are in!”
Let’s review Congress’ record after the worst attack on American soil in our history. The following was taken verbatim from the 9/11 Commission Report, pages 80-81:
“Midlevel INS employees proposed comprehensive counterterrorism proposals to management in 1986, 1995, and 1997. No action was taken on them. In 1997, a National Security Unit was set up to handle alerts, track potential terrorist cases for possible immigration enforcement action, and work with the rest of the Justice Department. It focused on the FBI’s priorities of Hezbollah and Hamas, and began to examine how immigration laws could be brought to bear on terrorism. For instance, it sought unsuccessfully to require that CIA security checks be completed before naturalization applications were approved. Policy questions, such as whether resident alien status should be revoked upon the person’s conviction of a terrorist crime, were not addressed.
Congress, with the support of the Clinton administration, doubled the number of Border Patrol agents along the border with Mexico to one agent every quarter mile by 1999. [at the time agents were leaving the agency by the hundreds almost every month!]
“Inspectors at the ports of entry were not asked to focus on terrorists. Inspectors told us they were not even aware that when they checked the names of incoming passengers against the automated watchlist, they were checking in part for terrorists. In general, border inspectors also did not have the information they needed to make fact-based determinations of admissibility. The INS initiated but failed to bring to completion two efforts that would have provided inspectors with information relevant to counterterrorism – a proposed system to track foreign student visa compliance and a program to establish a way of tracking traveler’s entry to [specific destination] and exit from the United States.” The computer system for tracking aliens’ exit from the United States was recommended twice by the 9/11 Commission but Congress never funded it. [Just the announcement that this system was being implemented would reduce the estimated 18 million persons living here illegally by half almost overnight.]
“In 1996, a new law enabled INS to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies through which INS provided training and the local agencies exercised immigration enforcement authority [287g]. Terrorist watch lists were not available to them ” [In 2008 an alert Huachuca City female police officer reported conducting a traffic stop of a vehicle containing four Libyans – and couldn’t get any state or federal agency interested in interviewing them. Huachuca City is less than five miles from the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of “Excellence”, home of the Army’s UAV program and Signals Intelligence…] “Mayors in cities with large immigrant populations sometimes imposed limits on city employees cooperation with federal immigration agents.” In the ultimate irony, a deputy chief to the Secretary of Homeland Security was quietly handcuffed and arrested in his office down the hall from his boss for complicity in selling fraudulent passports and visas to terrorist groups! ……. “Congress kept the number of agents static in the face of the overwhelming problem.”
Congress’s true nature is summarized on page 186-187 of the 9/11 Commission Report: “These proposals were praiseworthy in principle. In practice, however, required action by weak, chronically underfunded executive agencies and powerful congressional committees, which were more responsive to well-organized interest groups than to executive branch interagency committees.”
The final “Immigration Reform” will be more amnesty and more unfunded promises of increased security.
