Borderline insanity.

• Author: Krikorian, Mark

PRESIDENT BUSH has pledged to expend political capital to pass an immigration plan that would legalize illegal aliens currently in the United States as "temporary workers" and import an unlimited number of new workers from abroad--something he reiterated in his State of the Union address. One of his principal arguments has been that such an initiative would enhance America's security by allowing enforcement authorities to focus their efforts more narrowly, by shrinking the haystack that the terrorist needles are hiding in. To use a different analogy, a guestworker or amnesty program would deny terrorists cover by draining the pool of ten million illegal aliens and ensure that an ongoing flow of foreign workers comes through legal channels.

On the surface, this appears reasonable. Terrorists have indeed benefited from our lawless immigration system. A 2002 study by the Center for Immigration Studies found that the 48 Al-Qaeda-affiliated operatives in the United States from 1993 to 2001 had compromised virtually every facet of the immigration system. Mass illegal immigration creates a large market for fraudulent documents, allowing the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, to amass more than sixty U.S. driver licenses. Mass illegal immigration also overwhelms the resources available to law enforcement, creating the conditions whereby Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian who was part of the 1997 conspiracy to bomb the subway in Brooklyn, was actually caught by the Border Patrol but was released into the United States on his own recognizance because of inadequate detention space. Even in a more general sense, the transience created by mass illegal immigration helps terrorists. As the New Fork Times noted about Paterson, NJ: "the hijackers' stay here also shows how, in an area that speaks many languages and keeps absorbing immigrants, a few young men with no apparent means of support and no furniture can settle in for months without drawing attention."

Nor is this merely a retrospective problem. There are persistent reports of Middle Easterners illegally crossing the Mexican border amid the ordinary mass illegal flow. They are classified by the Border Patrol as OTMs, Other Than Mexicans. Though opponents of strict immigration enforcement frequently claim that no terrorist has sneaked across the border, this is no longer true: Mahmoud Kourani, "a member, fighter, recruiter and fund-raiser for Hizballah", according to the federal indictment against him...