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I’ve Changed. This Is War. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas.
I know this is not my usual position. But this is a war. Therefore I have come to believe there should be no immigration or visa waivers until the US adopts a completely new system to stop radical Islamic terrorists from entering the country. A wartime lockdown. And a big change in my thinking.
ISIS and related Islamic terrorists are already here. More are coming. We must stop them.
Until FBI director James Comey gives us the green light, I say seal the borders.
Here’s what we must do: Completely reform the vetting process for immigrants and foreign visitors. Change the screening process. Come up with a new visa-application review process. Stop this nonsense of marriage-visa fraud. And in the meantime, seal the borders. I agree with Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, who argued many of these points in excellent detail on the National Review website Friday.
Again, why am I taking this hardline position? In the past I have been an immigration reformer, not a restrictionist. But we are at war. That changes everything.
Let me emphasize that my support for wartime immigration restrictions is not based on religion. I think Donald Trump made a big mistake here. Instead, I agree with this Rupert Murdoch tweet: “Complete refugee pause to fix vetting makes sense.”
Fortunately, the Republican House voted to tighten restrictions on travel to the US by citizens of 38 nations who presently enter our country without a visa. This covers 20 million visitors a year who are allowed to stay 90 days. And of course this system is abused, big time.
But I say seal the borders. People hoping to relocate to the US from Syria, Iraq, and anywhere in the Middle East, and people coming here from France, England, Sweden, and wherever will be upset, at least for a while. There may be some unfairness to this. But I don’t care. Wars breed unfairness, just as they breed collateral damage.
We may set back tourism. We may anger Saudi princes whose kids are in American schools. But so be it. We need a wartime footing if we are going to protect the American homeland.
Of course, President Obama doesn’t get it. He never will. Already we should have led NATO into a declaration of war against ISIS. Already we should have pushed a resolution of war against ISIS through the UN Security Council. Already we should have convened meetings with our Mideast allies to formally declare war against ISIS. Already the US Congress should have issued a formal declaration of war against ISIS.
The president had his last chance last Sunday night. And he didn’t do it. He is not a wartime commander in chief. In fact, he is not a commander in chief.
As I have written before, if the US wants to destroy ISIS, it can destroy ISIS. We won’t end terrorism around the world. But we can destroy ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Prominent generals are telling us that. Prominent national-security strategists are telling us that.
So let’s do it.
If there is to be a true wartime effort to destroy ISIS, our leaders must communicate a sense of urgency and energy. Define the clear goal: the destruction of ISIS. Speak to that goal constantly. Take steps at home and abroad to back up that goal. Lead the country. Rally the country.
Republican and Democratic commanders in chief have done this in the past. We must do it again.
I don’t believe a visa or immigration lockdown here in the US will solve the Islamic terrorist threat. Many other steps must be taken. And I am not suggesting this in the name of religious profiling. Instead, I am hardening my position on immigration because we are at war and I fear we may be losing this war.
My shift in thinking comes from a deep desire to strengthen homeland security. Hopefully an immigration freeze will not be in place for very long. But for now I believe we must do it. (By the way, keeping America safe is a prerequisite for growth.)
And let me add, as I have in the past, if the US has the will, the urgency, and the energy to destroy ISIS, then we will destroy ISIS.
Published in Immigration, Islamist Terrorism
I was trying to state the core arguments here, since people seemed to be talking past each other. To be honest, I’ve not made up my mind on the issue. That’s why I mentioned Judith Levy. . . seems if anyone would know how to handle all of this, it would be the Israelis.
Claire, your very sensible questions expose the sheer inanity of Kudlow’s position. This would undoubtedly cause an economic depression.
Not Londonistan. You know what will happen instead? That world-size pool of talent, of scientists, innovators and researchers will head to London instead of New York, Silicon Valley, Boston and Seattle. Our economy will stall for lack of innovation while others zoom ahead. If you go into US universities, most of the graduate students are foreign. We will suffer a shortage of engineers and researchers, for sure.
About damn time.
No. All this talk is about letting somebody else take it in the shorts for once. Not one starving Biafran or homeless Hun is worth another American life. I say, let’s have a targeted military draft. We’ll start by strafing Foggy Bottom until they find their body armor and run out of the building, then we’ll scoop them up into C-130s, like at the end of Hair, and ship their buttocks to the Congo or wherever else our feckless administration has decided that smart power is worth intentionally losing wars.
Then empty out the universities, and anybody with a degree from Princeton, Columbia, or any of the rest of those concern-troll degree-mills. All those leading institutions of statecraft send their students, alumni, staff and royalty — they get to go smell their handiwork up close and personal. Call it a practicum.
What is “just talk” is this infernal notion of an inevitable ground war over there. Go sign up, honey. Then it’s not talk.
I can help. The core argument on my side is that the outside stuff is not my problem, and I resent people who insist that it is. Open borders, immigration, refugee shenanigans, non-enforcement of laws, a lack of profiling yes profiling, and a presumption that there will always be somebody else to go fight are the things that make it my problem.
I don’t care about them, I don’t have to, and the government of the United States, this non-exceptional, non-special, un-free and oppressive country is certainly the last place any of the flower of the United Nations would want to send refugees, immigrants, or any of that.
You haven’t made up your mind — well I have. I’m pretty sure about it, too. Been thinking about it for some time, you could say.
“It’s not my problem — don’t make it my problem.” Who thinks that’s this side’s core argument?
Man. Lotsa likes for that comment. That’s actually the long version of a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago:
http://ricochet.com/i-do-not-care-about-the-refugees/
I don’t know exactly what the percentage is — “most” sounds high — but I certainly know that our restrictive visa policies have already led to a disastrous flight in the very intellectual capital we create. This is fantastic for India, but not in the American interest at all.
Sorry, I meant in the sciences and engineering. There are a lot of Americans in medical schools, MBA and JD programs. Also in political science, economics etc. But very few in science and engineering. I would say less than 25% at the Master’s or higher level.
Aaaand you interpret this as what? Sometimes a group is a wise crowd. Other times, it is a mad mob. See here:
http://ricochet.com/archives/is-ricochet-a-wise-crowd-or-a-mad-mob/
You got anything besides No True Scotsman?
I do actually. Thanks for asking.
http://ricochet.com/archives/our-immigrants-were-better-than-their-immigrants/
http://ricochet.com/how-the-outrageous-becomes-acceptable/
I read your outrageous/acceptable piece when it came out. It struck me that mass poorly managed immigration should be outrageous, but now you can’t convince people that it is A) unusual and B) suicidal.
Seeing that I feel no obligation to admit any immigrants given how the program is being used against us, would I benefit from reading the other one?
HVTs: “Where is it written in the Constitution that because we want equality before the law for citizens, we must therefore never, ever discriminate about anything, towards anyone, at any time?”
You’ll find it in the Imaginary Constitution, the one that Progressives have persuaded many independents and so-called conservatives like Paul Ryan to believe is the real one.
This Imaginary Constitution subordinates the rights of American citizens to abstract principles, propositions and “universal human values we all share.”
For example, the Imaginary Constitution prohibits Anericans from barring entry to this country on the basis of religious belief.
The real Constitution, in case you’ve forgotten, allowed Americans to prevent an entire region from joining the union until the practitioners of the territory’s predominant religion changed one of its core tenets – acceptance of polygamy.
Even today conservatives have only the slightest idea of how many liberal premises they’ve internalized. Why, some seem to believe that Emma Lazarus was a Founder.
I’ve been mentioning an approaching inflection point in our erstwhile societal suicide. (It is evident even here in Ricochet land. More vehemence and fewer platitudes. Except of course for the predictable exceptions, whose blather I’ll continue to highlight.)
You’re so right, Mike!
So, our response may not be perfect, and it may even be difficult. So what! Been there!
We don’t need to parse religious or national identities to secure our borders, just close the gol-durned border. Now. Unless of course you have your own private and superior security force…
This is OUR country, and we owe foreigners exactly nothing. We do owe ourselves safety.
Opinions like yours send me packing to the ammo store.
The danger permeating our discourse these days may mean that you’ll have to wait for answers to your questions. They are intellectual and academic in nature, but we are in existential mode. Autarky, if applicable, and I doubt it, is irrelevant to safety and security requirements.
Thankful that Claire isn’t an opposing counsel, the discovery volume (and precision) would be formidable.
I don’t think Larry was proposing the full (a)-(g) but it’s a fair reading. Total disruption to our economy would be brutal. We are discussing prime pre-multiplier dollars in many cases. Total cost: $2-3 trillion annually?
I never encountered the narrative Claire suggests at Ben Gurion. It’s an effective rhetorical cartoon though. I recall intelligent, insistent questioning and a fine tooth comb run very roughly through every possession. On many trips I was asked very detailed questions about my business purpose, water and wastewater construction contracts. Slow, yes. But the hub of a remarkably dynamic international trading nation many of whose partners would prefer they perish.
We cannot scale the Israeli approach. Luckily we don’t have to. The threats we face are orders of magnitude smaller. Just adopting many of practices at Narita and Incheon would be a vast improvement. Searches are thorough, complete unreasonability re any missing documentation, and on-the-spot security follow-ups are commonplace.
Do they profile? I don’t know. My former partner, a Korean travelling on a German passport, always spent hours longer than I did clearing security at both Narita and Incheon.
What is the effect on national morale of adopting wartime border controls against ISIS threats but not warring against ISIS?
Maybe aggressively and decisively assuming the fetal position is the best we can do under President Pu Yi
Your decision. I was posting it for everyone.
Well said.
Are we at war with radical Islam or not? If we are, it would be as though one awoke December 8, 1941 and thought, “We can’t stop Japanese chain migration—that’s not who we are! Think of what war against Imperial Japan will do to the economy and graduate school admissions!” Instead, Liberals like California Attorney General Earl Warren and President Roosevelt did the unthinkable: they discriminated between potential and unlikely foes.
Before anyone gets the vapours, the point of regaining control of our borders immediately is precisely to avoid monstrously unconstitutional abominations like Liberals imposed on citizens of Japanese descent in 1942.
Today we have wars (poverty, drugs, women) in which putative enemy combatants only get stronger. Our ‘wars’ are often merely misplaced metaphors.
What is really being said about Muslim immigration is this: this war’s casualties are insufficiently troubling to warrant disrupting commerce and other happy circumstances. As I said elsewhere, should the next radical Muslim immigrant attack be at Sidwell Friends School, attended by the President’s daughters, even MSNBC will have had enough of unbridled Muslim resettlement and immigration.
I completely disagree with this. Their religion is their ideology, and vice versa.
I’m not saying that all Muslims should be lumped together. But the problem is the religion of the fanatics, not some “ideology” separate from their religion.
You seemingly ignore the political context of a Presidential candidate’s political rhetoric. Hate to sound pedantic, but one can never make sense of political rhetoric once removed from its context.
I quoted and cited a portion of that context. To reiterate: the number of unaccompanied minors entering from Mexico in October doubled from a year prior. Those are the Obama regime’s figures. (To be clear—another part of the context is the fruit of what the shooters’ family lawyers described as a “typical housewife” in San Bernardino.)
Is that just bad luck? Is the regime just hapless? Do you reject the notion that this reflects a willful disregard of our immigration laws and that purposefully un-securing our border is a product of conscious political choice-making by the President? It seems to me you would have to subscribe to one or another of those views to think that Trump’s stump speeches are without any rational motivation.
I hesitate to put words in your mouth, but you seem also to say we can’t do anything about Muslim immigration or Muslim refugee resettlement without shutting down our economy. Is that your view?
If you would go back and read what I wrote, you would probably reply with something different.
Forgive my flippant response to your legitimate questions, I was commenting under the influence; but, I am not convinced the two choices before us are: do nothing or complete autarky.
It’s of my opinion that all government policies should first and foremost benefit it’s own citizens; they may be mutually beneficial to foreigners, but that is second order.
Now what you and I consider to be beneficial may differ drastically. I am not an internationalist, nor a citizen of the world; you seem to have lived abroad for much of your adult life. I view the restrictionist immigration policies of the first half of the previous century to have been a very good thing for Americans and the immigration acts of ’65, ’86, and ’90 to be utterly disastrous to our Society (so bad in fact, I mostly view these squabbles as futile, demographics is destiny and such).
A nation can certainly devise an immigration and trade regime beneficial to it’s own people first that doesn’t result in outright isolationism.
I will do so. Thanks.
OK. The disagreement isn’t with your opinion, after all. It is that nobody is taking the solution to the effective and logical extreme. Close the borders. Now, please.
Is anyone else concerned that this proposal would turn our nation’s immigration policy over to the discretion of the unelected Director of the FBI? I understand Mr. Kudlow thinks highly of Mr. Comey, but this is precisely the sort of tyranny by “expert” bureaucracy that every principled constitutionalist should find repugnant.
Which is why some of us have come to prefer the political patronage of the old “spoils system” over our “professional” Civil Service. Bureaucrats were responsible to the elected officials who appointed them. Elected officials were responsible for the conduct of bureaucrats.
Even under the spoils system, granting the authority to make such a discretionary decision to an executive branch bureaucrat would run afoul of the proper understanding of the non-delegation doctrine.
The guy is singlehandedly expanding the Overton Window. I don’t care what you think of him. He’s owed a debt of thanks for that alone.