Guilty by association: note to conservatives; most immigrants aren't terrorists.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns

SHORTLY AFTER TWO men were arrested in last October's sniper shootings, ending a crime spree that had terrorized the D.C.-Baltimore area and left 10 people dead, a detail emerged that galvanized a large segment of the American punditry. One of the suspects, 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, was an illegal alien--a Jamaican who had entered Florida as a stowaway. Moreover, in December 2001 the U.S. Border Patrol had taken him and his mother into custody. A month later, despite their admission that they were here illegally, the Seattle office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service released them on bond instead of deporting them.

Writing in National Review, the syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin--author of the book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores (Regnery Gateway, 2002) and the first to break the story of Malvo's brush with the INS--charged that such "catch and release" decisions have "cost scores of American lives," now including the victims of the snipers. Pat Buchanan put it even more bluntly on Fox News: "Whoever turned him loose in the INS has got blood on his hands."

Never mind that, at the time of Malvo's detention, no one could have predicted that he would engage in homicidal violence. True, he lived in a homeless shelter with his Svengali-like "stepfather," John Allen Muhammad. But he was a clean-cut boy who attended school and had never been in trouble with the law. Blaming the INS for the sniper deaths makes no more sense than blaming a highway patrol officer who lets a motorist with an expired car registration get back behind the wheel if, five miles down the road, that motorist holds up a convenience store and kills the salesclerk.

Never mind, too, that while Malvo may have been the actual triggerman in most of the shootings, the U.S.-born Muhammad was clearly the mastermind. There is little doubt that Malvo, who apparently had a troubled relationship with his mother, wanted only to please the surrogate father he idolized. "There is a large pool of messed-up teenagers in the United States," points out Daniel Griswold, a trade and immigration analyst at the Cato Institute. "John Muhammad did not need to recruit an illegal immigrant to do what he did."

One could easily turn around and argue that the shootings could have been prevented if Malvo's mother, Uma James, had been free to seek the authorities' help in extricating her son from Muhammad's clutches. (In...