Imploding Liberal Notions

Alan Caruba
October 16, 2001


A lot of liberal notions that have held back this nation from the ability to protect itself against both foreign and domestic enemies crashed along with the Twin Towers on September 11th. It's always this way. You almost always have to have a death at a dangerous intersection before the town will put up lights and stop signs. For years, conservatives have been demanding measures that could well have prevented what occurred. But that is hindsight. And the death toll continues to climb as this is being written.

Immigration

Let's begin with this nation's immigration policies. New polls all demonstrate that Americans want significant changes in immigration policies. Since Terror Tuesday the notion of allowing millions of foreigners to enter the United States without any means of being able to track their movements seems like the worst folly imaginable. Other nations don't permit this, but we still do.

When asked whether the government was doing enough to control the borders and screen those entering the nation, 76% said no. This figure included self-identified conservatives, liberals and moderates. Fully 85% of likely voters thought that lax enforcement at the borders and of immigration laws made it easier for the terrorists to enter the country. The survey to which I refer was conducted by the famed Zogby organization on behalf of the Center for Immigration Studies. Well, better late than never.

"K mart knows every product purchased every day by the minute and that's billions of products," said Steven Camarota, research director of the Center, "but we can't track millions of people who come into this country." The US issued an estimated 31,000,000 visas in 1999, 76% of them to tourists. Visitors from twenty-nine countries do not even need a visa to enter the US.

Sixteen of the nineteen terrorists who seized the planes that attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were here on either student or tourist visas. There are an estimated 600,000 foreign "students" here and I seriously doubt if the INS could find any of them.

It gets worse. Visitors entering the US from Mexico and Canada are not even recorded. Those who enter through US airports must fill out a form known as the I-94 that is stapled to their passport. When they leave, the forms are collected by airline workers who then transmit them to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The reality is, however, the forms are either not collected or simply get lost.

According to Customs data, on a typical day, more than one million passengers in 350,000 private vehicles, along with 30,000 commercial trucks, drive past more than 150 established US border sites with Canada and Mexico. Want to know how easy it is to get a driver's license, Social Security, welfare and Medicaid cards? In California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, and Texas, it's as easy as asking for them. The 9th Circuit Court and the United States Supreme Court has ruled that no one can be questioned about his immigration status to receive state services!

We have no national borders. What we have are at least three million illegal Mexican or Hispanic aliens living among us. What we have are an unknown number of illegal Arab aliens living among us. The total of illegal aliens from other nations in America is variously estimated by experts to be between six to nine million people! I have a solution. Send them home. Round them up and send them home. This nation has laws by which anyone who qualifies, can legally establish residence, secure employment, and acquire naturalization to become a citizen. Those who obey the laws can stay and all the others can go home.

Racial Profiling

Ask any law enforcement officer and they will tell you they are not engaged in racial profiling. They are looking for criminals. Period. It is an unfortunate, but indisputable aspect of life in America that the Black community represents a disproportional amount of crime. Now we are looking hard for potential Arab terrorists. They look like Arabs.

Clarence Page, a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote recently that "two major polls find that African-Americans are more likely than other racial groups to favor profiling and extra-thorough airport checks for Arabs and Arab-Americans." Well, surprise, surprise. Blacks favor profiling for other ethnic or national groups, but not for themselves. They are not alone. Whites and Hispanics favor it too.

What is profiling anyway? It's just a name given to the law enforcement practice of using available information and common sense to try to identify who is or may be engaged in criminal activity. We never used to call it that until the liberals made a big stink of it. We used to call it good police work!

Gun Control

Following Terror Tuesday Americans voted with their feet on the subject of gun control by going to the nearest gun store and stocking up on arms and ammunition.

Reportedly, sales in Connecticut, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia increased fifty percent in the days following September 11th. Of two hundred gun retailers nationwide, polled by the National Sport Shooting Association, 35% reported sales increases and 15% reported sales that zoomed 25% over normal.

It is time to repeal the laws against carrying concealed weapons in those States that prefer a defenseless citizenry. How many deadly incidents could have been prevented if ordinary, sensible, law-abiding citizens could have responded to the threat of deadly force with some of their own?

The United Nations

Finally, if it is not plain to the most blind of Americans, within a month of the September 11th attack the United Nations elected Syria, a nation that sponsors terrorism, to a seat on its Security Council. In so many ways, with its endless international treaties aimed at destroying our Constitution, our sovereignty, and our economy, the United Nations has proven itself the enemy of this nation and all nations, except for those devoted to its Socialist agenda of being the single, global government.

This is one liberal notion that has long since revealed itself to be an impotent foe of dictatorships and other authoritarian governments. It was and is a Soviet Communist invention, installed after World War II to extend its hegemony throughout the world. Just as the Soviets imploded in the 1990's, it is time to send this nest of vipers to the ash heap of history. It's time to deep-six Secretary of State Powell's idea of turning supervision of any new governments installed in Afghanistan or elsewhere as the result of the military campaigns waged by the United States of America.

These and other liberal ideas have put this nation and its people at great risk from very real enemies while wasting enormous resources on imaginary ones such as global warming and other environmental fantasies. America has now awakened to a new age of realism and it is time to take off the liberal straightjacket and give this nation a chance to defend itself.


Alan Caruba writes "Warning Signs", a weekly column posted on the Internet
site of The National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com) and others. The
Center is a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns designed to
influence public opinion and policy.
Copyright © Alan Caruba, 2001
First North American Serial Rights only.
Permission to publish is granted.

The National Anxiety Center
9 Brookside Road, Maplewood, NJ 07040
(973) 763-6392 ~ www.anxietycenter.com

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19 oct 2001