New York Magazine (Opinion)
By Ed Kilgore
January 15, 2016
It's
now old news that Donald Trump is leading much of the GOP presidential
field into a conflation of immigration and terrorism as an integrated
and urgent threat to
America's security and identity. The once-fanciful idea that ISIS is
deploying hordes of agents as illegal immigrants and refugees flooding
across our "porous" borders to turn America into one vast San Bernardino
is now becoming an accepted "fact" in conservative
discourse. And the would-be GOP presidents are mostly responding with
less-bigoted variations on Trump's proposal to bar entry to Muslims, not
to mention his rhetoric of the U.S. as an embattled and thoroughly
breached fortress where we should all look with
fear and suspicion toward our dusky new neighbors.
No
one is happier at this turn of events than Marco Rubio, whose long
march back from a fatally miscalculated stand as a champion of
comprehensive immigration reform —
a.k.a. "amnesty" — has now culminated in the retroactive claim that the
terrorist threat justified his abrupt about-face on the subject. It is
clear, he said in last night's Republican candidates' debate, that all
border crossings, legal or illegal, must now
be given fresh scrutiny:
The
issue is a dramatically different issue than it was 24 months ago.
Twenty-four months ago, 36 months ago, you did not have a group of
radical crazies named ISIS who
were burning people in cages and recruiting people to enter our country
legally. They have a sophisticated understanding of our legal
immigration system and we now have an obligation to ensure that they are
not able to use that system against us.
The
entire system of legal immigration must now be reexamined for security
first and foremost, with an eye on ISIS. Because they're recruiting
people to enter this country
as engineers, posing as doctors, posing as refugees. We know this for a
fact. They've contacted the trafficking networks in the Western
Hemisphere to get people in through the southern border. And they got a
killer in San Bernardino in posing as a fiance.
This issue now has to be about stopping ISIS entering the United States, and when I'm president we will.
As
Ted Cruz quickly rejoined, the timing doesn't quite work out well for
Rubio to claim that some new threat of terrorist infiltration forced him
to change his positions
and his attitude:
[R]adical
Islamic terrorism was not invented 24 months ago; 24 months ago, we had
Al Qaida. We had Boko Haram. We had Hamas. We had Hezbollah. We had
Iran putting operatives
in South America and Central America. It's the reason why I stood with
Jeff Sessions and Steve King and led the fight to stop the Gang of Eight
amnesty bill, because it was clear then, like it's clear now, that
border security is national security.
That's
more than a little disingenuous, too; it's reasonably clear Cruz &
Co. were more concerned about (to use King's memorable phrase) those
drug mules with "calves
like cantaloupes" than anyone who might face Mecca to pray.
But
beneath the jockeying for position here there is a party-wide drift
far, far away from the debate Republicans were having just a few years
ago on whether a "path to
citizenship" or some guest worker program (or in the absence of either,
"self-deportation") is the right way to handle undocumented immigrants.
Now legal immigration is in question, and for the candidate who
desperately wants to blur all the old lines on the
issue that nearly wrecked his national political career, that's
progress.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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