IRONCLAD: The Irrefutable Link Between Immigration and Terror

By Dan Cadman

Last month I refuted the argument put forward by some observers that women, children, and the aged ("widows and orphans" in the thoroughly disingenuous language of Obamaspeak) would be safe populations to admit as refugees.

On December 2, Tashfeen Malik, jihadi bride of Syed Rizwan Farook, proved conclusively false the notion that these subpopulations represent no threat. Malik did this by participating in a massacre with her husband in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead and many wounded.

While Malik entered on a fiancee visa, not as a refugee, the point to be made is the same: We cannot simply assume that because of age or gender, individuals have not been tainted by the belief system of violent Islamic extremism.

We should not be surprised. It is only when viewed through the prism of Western sensibilities that such an inference has any logic. But isn't it clear to us by now that Islamists vehemently reject our worldview and our moral structure? Their aim is to inculcate whole populations, young or old, male or female, into a cult of death whose sharp point is aimed at the West.

The second point that should be driven home to us unambiguously is that the vetting systems used by the Departments of Homeland Security and State are fallible. This, too, should be no surprise. It would be easy, but simplistic, to blame the individual officials involved in the vetting. When there is no adverse information to retrieve from the various government systems checked, everyone (including those officials) presumes all is well. But those systems are not the impenetrable walls that the administration has striven so hard to make us believe.

No, the fault lies instead with the White House and its cabinet officers, who have deliberately misled us into believing that "no information equals safe to admit". Clearly it does not, for all of the many reasons I have laid out before.

Notwithstanding all of the evidence pointing directly to the flaws in the vetting system, including public statements from the FBI director, it is not clear that Congress will take any meaningful steps to defund or pause the refugee admissions program (see here and here), even as they move to defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood.

As important as those issues may be to Republican lawmakers, in the hierarchy of priorities poll after poll shows that ordinary Americans, including Republican voters, are much more concerned about acts of terror in the homeland (see here and here).

Ultimately, the question to be posed is going to be this: At what point will our legislators and our chief executive come to accept the nexus between immigration policies and susceptibility to terrorist attacks in American communities, and act to limit the risks?

Come soon, or come late, the question will become inevitable, because there is no reason — no reason whatever — to believe that Islamic extremist organizations are going to abandon their aim of terrorizing the West, most particularly the United States, and immigration in all its present forms remains one of the weakest links in the armor of our homeland security.

Read more at CIS.org