What Trump Gets Right on Immigration

I am surely not the only one noticing the extent to which the corporate
media worldwide are damning Donald Trump. In the wake of Brexit, his
supporters were repeatedly likened to the Brits who voted Leave, both
groups being characterized as white and less well educated. And over the
past week, the Washington Post has been examining and damning nearly
everything The Donald has said and done, hammering the presumptive GOP
nominee with an average of six heavily editorialized news articles daily, plus
op-eds.
To be sure, Trump has earned much of the opprobrium, with his often
contradictory and scattershot presentations of the policies he intends to
pursue, as well as the provocative language that has left him legitimately
open to charges of racism and sexism. Trumps racially flavored warnings
about homegrown terrorists certainly have considerable popular appeal in
the wake of San Bernardino and Orlando, but the reality is that Muslim
Americans as a group exhibit low crime rates, achieve higher-than-average
levels of education, and are financially successful. Police sources reveal that
they frequently cooperate with law enforcement regarding members of their
community who are flirting with militancy.
Trump is also presumed guilty of several other Democratic Party-defined
capital crimes, including failing to enthusiastically embrace diversity and
multiculturalism. But at the core of his appeal to voters is the one issue that
he largely gets right, and that is immigration, both as a cultural phenomenon
and as a law-and-order issue.
His up-front condemnation of illegal immigration can be seen as the
launching pad for his successful campaign for the GOP nomination. From a
rule-of-law and national-security perspective, many Americans have long
been dismayed by the federal governments unwillingness to control the
nations borders, and many blue-collar workers have a more personal stake
in the issue, being appalled by the impact of mass illegal immigration on
their communities.
While Trumps proposed blanket ban on Muslim travelers is both
constitutionally and ethically wrongheaded and, in my opinion, potentially
damaging to broader U.S. interests, his related demand to temporarily stop
travel or immigration from some core countries that have serious problems
with militancy is actually quite sensible. This is because the United States
has only a limited ability to vet people from those countries. The Obama
administration claims it is rigorously screening travelers and immigrants
but it has provided little to no evidence that its procedures are effective.
The first step in travel limitation is to define the problem. While it is popular
in Congress and the media to focus on countries like Iran, nationals of such

countries do not constitute a serious threat. Shia Muslims, the majority of

Iranians, have characteristically not staged suicide attacks, nor do they as a
group directly threaten American or Western interests. The Salafist
organizations with international appeal and global reach are all Sunni Muslim.
In fact, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, and al-Nusra all self-define as Sunni
Muslim and regard Shias as heretics. Most of the foot soldiers who do the
fighting and dying for the terrorist groups and their affiliates are Sunnis who
come from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, and
even the homegrown Europeans and Americans who join their ranks are
Sunni.
It is no coincidence that the handful of Muslim countries that harbor active
insurgencies have also been on the receiving end of U.S. military
interventions, which generate demands for revenge against the West and the
U.S. in particular. They would be the countries to monitor most closely for
militants seeking to travel. All of them represent launching pads for potential
attacks, and it should be assumed that groups like ISIS would be delighted to
infiltrate refugee and immigrant groups.
U.S. embassies and consulates overseas are the choke points for those
potential terrorists. Having myself worked the visa lines in consulates
overseas, I understand just how difficult it is to be fair to honest travelers
while weeding out those whose intentions are less honorable. At the
consulate, an initial screening based on name and birth date determines
whether an applicant is on any no-fly or terrorism-associate lists. Anyone
coming up is automatically denied, but the lists include a great deal of
inaccurate information, so they probably catch more innocent people than
they do actual would-be terrorists. Individuals who have traveled to Iran,
Iraq, Sudan, or Syria since 2011, or who are citizens of those countries, are
also selected out for additional review.
For visitors who pass the initial screening and who do not come from one of
the 38 visa waiver countries, mostly in Europe, the next step is the visitors
visa, called a B-2. At that point, the consulates objective is to determine
whether the potential traveler has a good reason to visit the U.S., has the
resources to pay for the trip, and is likely to return home before the visa
expires. The process seeks to establish that the applicant has sufficient
equity in his or her home country to guarantee returning to it, a recognition
of the fact that most visa fraud relates to overstaying ones visit to disappear
into the unregistered labor market in the U.S. The process is documentdriven, with the applicants presenting evidence of bank accounts,
employment, family ties, and equity like homeownership. Sometimes letters
of recommendation from local business leaders or politicians might also
become elements in the decision.

In some countries, documentary evidence can be supplemented by police

reports if the local government is cooperative. Some consulates employ
investigators, generally ex-policemen, who are able to examine public
records if there is any doubt about an applicants profile or intentions, but
most governments do not permit access to official documents. Recently,
background investigations have sometimes been supplemented by an
examination of the applicants presence on the internet to determine
whether he or she is frequenting militant sites or discussing political issues
online. If the visa applicant is seeking to become a U.S. resident, the process
is, of course, much more rigorous.
Both travel and immigrant visas are nevertheless a somewhat subjective
process. I knew a visa officer in Turkey who delighted in turning down Iranian
applicants on principle. It was a seemingly arbitrary actbut this was
shortly after the U.S. embassy hostage crisis in Tehran, and it was plausibly
based on the fact that there was no embassy any longer in Iran and
documents presented in Turkey would be impossible to verify.
Most of those convicted in terrorism-related cases in the U.S. are foreignborn. The real issue that Trump should be addressing is the federal
governments inability to vet visa applicants to a level that could be
considered sufficient from a national-security perspective, a failure that has
led some conservatives to complain that White House policy is to invade the
world, invite the world.
In many places, official documents are easy to forge or can even be obtained
in genuine form from corrupt bureaucrats. If one is unable to go the source of
the document for verification, papers submitted in support of a visa
application are frequently impossible to authenticate. So what does one do
when applicants from countries in the throes of civil warlike Iraq, Syria, or
Yemenshow up at a visa window, some of them with no documents at all?
Or when such applicants constitute not a trickle but a flood? It gets
complicated, and Trump has a point in saying we should deny visas to all of
them until procedures can be established for making those judgments in a
more coherent fashion.
Another steady stream of immigrants into the U.S. comes from the refugeeresettlement process; Washington is a signatory to the United Nationsadministered agreements to resettle refugees. Much of the background
vetting is carried out by the UN in a not-completely-transparent fashion, and
the resettlement of the refugees in various places is done by quotawith the
U.S. being the largest recipient country, expected to receive 100,000
refugees in 2017. But does the Obama administration have a clue regarding
the reliability of the information it gets on the new would-be Americans? If it
does, it is not letting on.

The mostly Saudi attackers on 9/11 used temporary or tourist visas to enter
the country, so the threat from that source should be clear to everyone
involved in the entry process, and consulates are acutely aware of the
danger. But beyond that, the Obama administration has been complacent. It
would no doubt point to the fact that no refugee to the United States has
carried out an act of terror once admitted to the country, which would be
true but somewhat misleading: The estimated 77,000 Somali refugees who
have somehow wound up in Minnesota have included a substantial number
of younger men and women who have returned home to join the al-Qaeda
affiliate al-Shabaab. And it would in any event be prudent to be cautious
when relying on past behavior models, as groups like ISIS have indicated
their desire to hit the United States and have proven to be highly adaptable
in their tactics.
Trumps demands to block many visitors and would-be residents might seem
an overreaction, but until a broken immigration system is fixed, he is more
right than wrong.
This article has been reproduced from Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is
executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
By: Marcus Fontain, J.D.
President and CEO
Unimundo Corporation
www.unimundo.tv
marcus@unimundo.tv