Outrage

Dick Morris, Eileen McGann

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061748813
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Half of all illegal immigrants came into this country legally—and we have no way of knowing they're still here!

Congressmen are putting their wives on their campaign payrolls—so that campaign contributions are really personal bribes!

The ACLU won't allow its own directors free speech.

Liberals want to strip us of the tools to stop terrorism.

The UN is a cover for massive corruption—and eighty countries, who pay 12 percent of the budget, are blocking reform.

Drug companies pay off doctors to write scripts—whether we need them or not.

Teachers unions block the firing of bad teachers—and battle against higher education standards!

Katrina victims are being stiffed by their insurance companies!

Special interests cost our consumers $45 billion—through trade quotas that save only a handful of jobs!

Never heard of these abuses? You won't in the mainstream media. That's why Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote Outrage. Their proposals:

• Ban immigration from terrorist countries
• Ban Congress putting spouses on their payroll
• Ban lobbyists who are related to senators or congressmen
• Ban nicotine additives to cigarettes
• Ban trade quotas that drive up prices and save few jobs
• Ban drug company bribes to doctors
• Ban teachers unions' work rules that stop education reform
• Ban insurance companies from backing out on Katrina coverage

In Outrage, you'll get the facts—and learn what we can do about them. You won't read about these outrages anyplace else; too many people are working hard to cover them up. Get them here instead—and learn how to fight the special interests of the left and right.

1

IMMIGRATION:

The Wide Open Door

For the average American, the issue of immigration is synonymous with the U.S.-Mexican border and the difficulty of curtailing illegal crossings over our vast southern boundary of rivers and deserts. Images come immediately to mind: droves of men, packed inside trucks, seeking to enter our country to find work and new opportunities. As a nation, we have a lot invested in protecting our perimeter from uninvited—and unwanted—visitors. Volunteer “Minutemen” patrol the border, acting as the eyes and ears of the Border Patrol. The Customs and Border Protection Division of Homeland Security deploys 11,300 guards on the frontier, and President Bush has recently ordered another 6,000 National Guard troops to join them.

This story of outwitting the illegal immigrants who secretly cross over from Mexico has received all of the attention and generated most of the heat in the current debate. But it is only one half of the problem of illegal immigration—and not the most important half. The biggest problem we face is caused by those who openly enter our country for a limited period of time—with the express permission of our government—and then refuse to leave.

On 9/11, we learned just how serious this problem is. It hasn’t gotten any better.

It’s time for America to adopt an aggressive program to identify and deport people who have deliberately and illegally overstayed their visas. Unless we do so, our efforts to secure our country will fail.

Consider this: of the 11.5 million illegal immigrants who lived in the United States in 2005, half did not cross the border with guards nipping at their heels. Instead, they came here legally, arriving by plane, train, car, or boat, with U.S. government entry visas in hand. Depending on their country of origin and their purpose in coming to the United States, these visitors were allowed to stay for a specific period of time. When their visas expired, however, they did not go home. Such visa overstays account for an estimated 50 percent of the illegal immigrants now living in the United States.¹

Remember, the 9/11 terrorists were in this immigrant category—people who entered our country legally, with legitimate visas. Seven of the terrorists had illegally overstayed their visa time limits.

Despite the well-documented problems with these temporary-visitors-turned-permanent-immigrants, critics of our system generally ignore them and continue their preoccupation with the permeable Mexican border alone. The vocal condemnation of illegal aliens by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), members of Congress, media talk shows, and the White House generally makes no distinction between those who entered with visas and those who sneaked across our border.

When it comes to immigrants, in other words, America is like somebody who puts bars on his windows, securely bolts his back and side doors, and then leaves the front door unlocked and wide open.

We spend enormous resources policing our borders, but we do little or nothing to make sure that visitors whose visas have expired, do, in fact, leave our country.

Make no mistake about it: the door is wide open! We legally admit 33 million³ people a year into the country, most of them with visas. This is up from 9.5 million in 1985. Sometimes they use forged or fraudulent documents to gain entry. We try to detect them, but we’re not always successful. Frequently their stated reasons for coming here have not been fully verified. It’s our policy to check up on them, but sometimes we can’t reach their references. But at least we try.

There’s one critical thing that we don’t do at all, however. We don’t kick out those people who remain here after their legally issued visas expire. Once they cross the threshold, we don’t pay much attention to them.

So about four to five million people who have no right to be here—who were granted permission to stay in the United States for only a limited time—are still here, and unlikely ever to leave. And it gets worse. Not only will many of them overstay their welcome, but lots of them will formally ask the government to change their status and let them remain, even though they’re here illegally. And guess what? The government actually says yes to hundreds of thousands of them every year! Two of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were actually granted status changes. One of these, terrorist leader Mohamed Atta, had long overstayed his visa.

According to a study by immigration expert Jessica Vaughan, “in 2001, more than 60 percent of all those who obtained permanent residency (653,259 out of 1,064,318) did so not by obtaining an immigrant visa, but through an ‘adjustment of status,’ which means that they were already present in the United States, sometimes legally, sometimes not.”⁴

For the 650,000 people every year who change their status from temporary to permanent, the strategy is much easier than the alternatives. Why wait on line for the immigration quotas to become available? Why hassle with crossing illegally and at great risk? Instead, they just come here as tourists or on work visas and stick around, knowing that the government will probably let them stay.

ICE, now under the Department of Homeland Security, works hard to protect our borders, to check the identities of those who arrive on our shores, and to stop those who might turn into permanent immigrants from coming to the United States. But it does almost nothing to be sure that, once people enter on visas, they actually leave when they’re supposed to.

This should not be a difficult task. In fact, it would be very simple to confirm the names of those who leave as required, and thus of those who have blatantly ignored their visa requirements and remained in the States illegally. For example, ICE could initiate a system of checking the identities of noncitizens as they leave the United States, and then simply subtract their names from the list of those who had previously arrived on temporary visas. The remaining names would be a master list of those who had no right to be here. We could accomplish this by checking fingerprints as visitors leave the country, just as we now do on the way in. Under current US-VISIT policies, most immigrants have both index fingers fingerprinted as they arrive. In addition, all visitors have a digital photo taken, which is then compared with and matched to their passports and other travel documents. If that program were expanded to verify their identities on the way out, that would be another way to monitor expired visas effectively. But ICE doesn’t have any nationwide system or policy of that sort in place.

Last year, very few people leaving this country were fingerprinted as they left. Customs agents have discretion to fingerprint and photograph green-card holders at land ports, but technical and policy hurdles have limited the number of people fingerprinted to roughly four million.

Crystal Williams, the deputy director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, has lamented the absence of any effective process for tracking who is leaving the country and who is not. “They’ve only got one-half of the US-VISIT program working at all. You would have thought they would be concentrating on a viable exit solution,” Williams said.⁵

Why aren’t they? Our guess is that the government doesn’t want to know—because it would find itself unable to deal with the huge backlog of people who are staying here illegally.

We’ve seen this before. When Dick worked for President Clinton, he proposed that illegal immigrants be prohibited from receiving driver’s licenses and that traffic cops be equipped with computers that could tap into the INS database. As he explained to the president, this would make the average traffic police officer an enforcer of the immigration law. After all, the most frequent contact regular people have with the police is on the road. The system he was proposing would have allowed traffic officers to determine whether a traffic violator was here legally—or not.

Congress has since passed this measure into law, but, at the time President Clinton—and, particularly then first lady Hillary Clinton—as well as George Stephanopoulos, all opposed the idea, concerned that it would lead to racial profiling…and alienate the Clintons’ Hispanic political base.

But the Clintons weren’t the only ones opposed to the idea. Harold Ickes, then the White House deputy chief of staff, checked out the idea with the INS—and discovered that they opposed it, too. And their reason was not political at all. Rather, they feared the idea because they already had an unmanageable backlog of deportation cases on their plate, and they didn’t want to add hundreds of thousands of new cases—and a hefty dose of embarrassment—to the list. “We can’t handle the ones we have already identified,” they wailed.⁶ They didn’t want to know who was here that shouldn’t be. It seems like they still don’t.

That’s too bad, since the 9/11 terrorists all came into the United States through the front door. None of them slipped over our border under cover of night. A routine check of expired visas would have allowed us to kick seven of the hijackers out of the country, including ringleader Mohamed Atta. Indeed, traffic police actually stopped Atta and two other hijackers in the months before 9/11. But the cops had no way of knowing either that they were on terror watch lists or that their visas had expired, so the terrorists were released.

Although many of the hijackers came here with visas, a study conducted by National Review magazine came to a shocking conclusion: fifteen of the nineteen hijackers should never have been issued visas in the first place. So lax was our review of visa applications that we welcomed fifteen men into our country who clearly should have been kept out—men who went on to smash airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

National Review asked a panel of six experts to review the original visa applications of the 9/11 hijackers. The panel included “four former ...