On the heels of yet another thwarted bombing by an Islamic terrorist mentored by Yemeni cleric-and American citizen-Anwar al Awlaki, we now discover that an Albanian Muslim living in the United States has been convicted of immigration fraud. That, however, is not the story. This website has extensively chronicled the extent of fraud present in our overburdened, dysfunctional immigration system, which too often serves as a revolving turnstile for criminals and terrorists of all stripes. As the Washington Post explains, the reason this conviction is so significant is because Brahim Lajqi also threatened to blow up the White House and the U.S. Treasury Building, among other vital targets lying within the District of Columbia.
How he entered the United States illegally is an interesting story unto itself.
Lajqi, an ethnic Albanian who came to the United States through Mexico in the mid-1980s, is a self-described “extremist militant,” who said he was trained by Bosnian Muslim rebels, according to court papers.
Apparently, Islamic terror networks and terrorists have been exploiting the poorly secured southern border many years before Hezbollah got into the business. What makes this story even more infuriating is the purported rationale for Lajqi’s decision to wage jihad against the institions of the American government and its citizens. He was angry at American involvement in Kosovo. That would be the involvement on behalf of Lajqi’s fellow Muslim Albanians living inside of what was then part of Yugoslavia, which ineluctably led to Kosovar independence, which again was supported by the United States government. In other words, the man whose people would not have an independent state were it not for American benevolence was in the process of trying to murder and/or maim hundreds-or possibly thousands-of people whose country not only allowed him to live here illegally for years but who gave his people an identifiable homeland recognized by the international community.
This case illustrates two fundamental aspects of our baffling immigration system.
1. The choke points leading into the United States are too accessible to terrorists and criminal syndicates. Even though securing every inch of a 2,000 mile-long border is impossible, there are methods to keep the number of illegal aliens entering this country to a minimum, and thus minimize the risk to American citizens. This is something that even President Bush-hopelessly misguided on immigration issues throughout most of his two terms in office-grudgingly recognized.
2. Pretending that people who come from a completely different culture can seamlessly integrate into American society, despite multiculturalism’s dilution of the bonds of American citizenship, is a recipe for disaster. The incompatibility between a free, pluralistic society and exiles or migrants whose conception of freedom is entirely different from that of the West is something that astute writers have been pointing out in Europe for years. The notion that a radicalized, anti-American minority of Muslim immigrants-or in this case, illegal aliens-is not yet a problem for this country is not born out by the evidence.
Despite the misleading portrayals of these newcomers, fueled equally by a fantasy notion of past waves of immigration and an attachment to discredited multicultural platitudes, there are many people whose sole objective in coming to the United States is to do us harm. And when they can’t make it to the United States itself, they attempt to murder Americans overseas, as the deadly assault outside of an American base in Germany-by another Kosovar-demonstrates. It’s time to do away with the sentimentality that has characterized our approach to this subject for decades and accept the fact that some people do not belong on American soil, regardless of what heart-warming media narrative the media constructs on their behalf.
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