Buckley and Illegal Immigrants

Conservative Nation has always wanted to do something dramatic about illegal aliens. Frankly, they don’t much like legal immigrants, either. With 9/11, they had their best argument; the terrorists were aliens, most of them having gotten into the country legally and then getting lost in the shuffle. So, Buckley has written about the issue again (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=128&ncid=742&e=9&u=/ucwb/20041215/cm_ucwb/illegalizingillegals). He cites a Time Magazine article for the proposition that 2,000,000 illegal aliens are walking around the nation as we speak, so to speak.

Well, if that figure is true, then I’m not sure that it does not support the argument that the fear about illegal aliens is overblown, since only a tiny percentage of those people cause any problems at all in the nation, much less a terrorist attack. Of course, it takes only one person to cause lots of death and destruction, thanks to modern technology, especially if the person is a fanatic who does not mind dying in the process. Worse, it does not even take an alien, illegal or otherwise, to do the damage.

Maybe that is why most of the Congress and the President, who didn’t seem to interested in the new security law in the first place, did not want to hang the law up on issues such as issuing driver licenses to illegal aliens. In other words, it probably doesn’t matter much to the security of the nation whether we issue them or not. More important are issues such as intercepting messages, tracking down leads, etc. and generally being alert to head off attacks.

In a country in which we seem deficient in literally speaking the language of our enemies, not to mention understanding their cultures, you would think we would like to encourage immigration, from which we might find those willing to work for our side.