The first step in problem solving is to identify the components of the problem and then devising the best strategies to deal with it. Sometimes the problems we face may be life-threatening.
There are some folks who, when they are told that they suffer from potentially fatal illnesses, curl up in the fetal position, at least metaphorically, and attempt to go about their lives as though they had not been given that terrifying diagnosis. Almost invariably, such people do not survive.
Other people who receive such a diagnosis will do their homework and research to find the best doctors and the best treatments and aggressively pursue recovery. Obviously, this group has the best chance for a cure that will save their lives.
It is not a “news flash” that we are living in an extremely perilous era that poses an existential threat to America — the terrorists who have carried out a long series of deadly worldwide attacks the goal of which has been to intimdate through acts as violent and grotesque as possible. Simply stated, today our nation is suffering from a potentially fatal disease — the threats posed by international terrorists and transnational criminal organizations.
To date, nearly every terrorist who has committed or attempted to commit a deadly attack in the United States has been a foreign national who, in one way or another, managed to gain entry into the United States and then managed to hide in plain sight by keeping a low profile, a method the 9/11 Commission referred to as the “embedding process.”
If our goal is to prevent the entry of such individuals, then it must be recognized that making immigration law enforcement as effective as possible is the key tool at our disposal. This does not take a stratospheric IQ to understand. However, there are many, many individuals, industries and special interest groups who are inalterably determined to eradicate the borders of the United States and facilitate the flood of aliens, including foreign students, foreign workers and foreign tourists into the United States.
The outrageous strategy that they are employing toward this end is to convince as many Americans as possible that, as one member of Congress actually told me during a hearing into the failures of the immigration system, “immigration has nothing to do with terrorism!”
Michael W. Cutler is a retired senior special agent, Immigration and Naturalization Service.
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