The Enemy Is Here—Not Just In Afghanistan

By an overwhelming majority of 77 percent, the American public believes "the government is not doing enough to control the border and screen people allowed into the country," according to a Zogby poll just released last week. The American public, in other words, has learned something from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, if indeed it ever believed otherwise. But there has yet to be any suggestion from the American leadership class, political or cultural, that it has learned anything at all.

There are two dimensions to the relationship between immigration and the attacks. One is the problem of loopholes and lax security measures in our current laws and entry procedures. That sort of thing is receiving attention and is, relatively speaking, easy enough to fix with more money, training, personnel, and tighter regulations. Fixing it doesn't seriously reverse the mass immigration-open borders policies that have prevailed over the last 30 years.

The other dimension does affect those policies and is far more difficult to fix, for at least two reasons to be mentioned anon. This dimension concerns what I have termed the "alternative societies" that mass immigration has created and which allow alien terrorists to live and operate without being noticed. The New York Times last week carried a story about just such a society in New Jersey, where four of the 19 Sept. 11 mass killers hung out.

"In this neighborhood of Latinos, African-Americans and recent immigrants speaking dozens of languages," the Times reported of Paterson, N.J., "the handful of young Arab men who came and went drew almost no notice. In their apartment above a bodega, they did not play loud music. They appeared not to speak English." (New York Times, September 27, 2001,A Hub for Hijackers Found in New Jersey)

The area was "one of several East Coast staging areas for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon," and the "hijackers' stay here also shows how, in an area that speaks many languages and keeps absorbing immigrants, a few young men with no apparent means of support and no furniture can settle in for months without drawing attention." A spokesman for Paterson's mayor notes, "we have 72 identifiable nationalities here, 170,000 people in eight square miles. With a lot of different folks moving in and out of the city, unless you raise a ruckus, you could live here for a while without anyone noticing."

Nor is the United States alone in its enjoyment of such diversity; Europe too has its immigrant subcultures. Holland, for example, is a country where Osama bin Laden's cadres have been able to take advantage of the "cultural tolerance" that mass immigration both demands and supplies. British researcher Dr. R. Gunaratna warns that, "especially in The Netherlands, because of its total lack of anti-terrorism laws and its very high level of religious, cultural and judicial tolerance, Muslim-fundamentalist terrorist groups are allowed to thrive. They use Amsterdam and Rotterdam as central bases in the West from which they garnish funds, recruit activists from the local Muslim youth cultural groups, and purchase highly sophisticated arms in the world's largest trading hub: Rotterdam harbor." There are several lessons, fairly obvious to most Americans, to be drawn from such facts.

Lesson One is that the enemy is not in Afghanistan; the enemy is here. Precisely because of mass immigration and open borders policies, perhaps thousands of unnoticeable young men have been able to enter the United States (and Europe) to prepare jihad against their enemies. Short of expelling entire populations in a massive act of ethnic cleansing, [VDARE.com note: Columnist Anne Coulter, as intrepid as she is beautiful, has actually called for this] there is virtually nothing the United States and the West can do about the new enemy within.

That brings us to Lesson Two, and back to why this dimension of the immigration problem is so hard to repair. The leadership class of the United States and the West simply is not prepared to embark on such a campaign of ethnic cleansing; even many "closed borders" advocates shrink from supporting such a policy, simply because of the suffering and uprooting that would be involved.

But Lesson Three is that at least we can start by closing the borders now and doing what we can to root out the terrorists and their comrades. Unfortunately, the leadership class won't allow that either.

It won't allow it because closing the borders and halting immigration would thwart its own interests and ideology—its need for cheap labor, a new underclass, and a multiculturalist and globalist hegemonic doctrine. The reason we have mass immigration is that the ruling class wants it, regardless of what the American public wants, and that's also the reason why in all the palaver about how to control terrorism and all the restrictions on liberty, wiretapping, surveillance, possible assassinations, and outright wars we have to endure, establish, permit, and wage, hardly once has any member of the ruling class suggested that we halt or even reduce immigration.

October 01, 2001