The Gang of Eight’s Porous Immigration Bill Offers No Safety Against Future Terrorism

The Boston marathon bombing perpetrators arrived in the United States on a fraudulent ayslum application, readily apparent as falsified but ignored during the US Citizenship and Immigration Service petition process. ABC News, reporting from Dagestan, providedthe details in its story, Boston Marathon Suspects‘ Twisted Family History. Read it here. As an example of the extent of asylum fraud, 26 individuals including six immigration lawyers were  charged in 2012 with fraud that involved hundreds of bogus asylee petitions. Justice Department report here.

Among the false assurances the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, S.744. makes to Americans is that loopholes which allow terrorists easy access to the United States through asylum and refugee applications will be eliminated. Although we can hope, the probability of meaningful change is near zero.

Beyond terrorism’s life and limb costs are the cold, hard dollar sums. On a strictly return on investment analysis of the recent Boston Marathon murder and mayhem as well as the 9/11 attacks, terrorist-sponsoring nations have performed impressively.

During the April19th Boston lockdown, the city absorbed slightly more than $400 million in financial losses. The Tsarnaevs spent only a few hundred dollars in bomb-making materials.

Compared to 9/11, a $400 million hit is nothing. According to a detailed New York Times interactive study titled 9/11: The Reckoning, Al Qaeda spent roughly $500,000 to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon. The cost to the United States however, both in the public and private sector, is $3.3 trillion and  rising or about $6 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing its attacks. The $3.3 trillion total represents roughly one-fifth of the current US national debt.

Remember that the 9/11 terrorists forced the U.S. into its $3.3 trillion response with a $2 box cutter and the nominal expense of a few airline tickets. The attacks devastated the stock market, closed down at least temporarily airlines and hotels, caused massive lay offs and may have, because of lost market equity, kept thousands of kids out of college.

Based on raw data from the Congressional Research Office and the Congressional Budget Office, the Times calculates the individual costs as follows: Iraq and Afghanistan war funding, $1.650 billion; future war and veterans care, $867 billion, homeland security, $589 billion; economic impact, $123 billion and physical damage, $55 billion.

Since 9/11, DHS and FBI officials claim to have thwarted 30 other terrorist plots aimed at either military or civilian targets including the 2005 Lodi, CA case against Umer and Hamid Hayat. In 2007, Hamid was sentenced to 24 years in a federal prison.

In 2004, a period during which he could have been planning another devastating attack on the US, Osama bin Laden produced a video gloating about his plan of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Today, Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is splintered. So, in retrospect, Bin Laden’s claim may have fallen short of its goal.

However, the Times presents an interesting footnote to its study that it calls “The Price of Lost Chances.” More than $1.6 of the $3.3 trillion was for direct responses including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that crippled the Taliban. But the remaining $1.7 trillion (approximate) could have been spent on rebuilding the nation’s broken education system, developing better methods to compete economically with China or simply reducing the national debt.

Any of these three alternatives would eventually create a better, stronger America. Nevertheless, the Bush and subsequently the Obama administrations opted for the “whatever-it-takes” global war on terror philosophy, long term consequences be damned.

Let’s be honest. Almost anyone can walk into a big box store wearing a bomb-laden backpack to blow the building sky high. The sad truth is that given the current Washington, D.C. globalist agenda which invites terrorists and other ne'er do wells like the Tsarnaevs to the the U.S. on a host of non-immigrant visas, the chance of preventing another small scale attack is slim.