Stronger Vetting Won’t Fix It

Since at least the 1960s, immigration policy in America has operated according to the needs of immigrants rather than the good of their hosts. The more unstable an immigrant’s home country, the more worthy they have been deemed to be to seek asylum here.

The Biden-era refugee program that brought the D.C. National Guard shooter to America reflects this misplaced altruism. Ironically named Operation Allies Welcome, the program explains why the 29-year-old suspect was permitted to enter our country, where he allegedly struggled to thrive and then felt called to carry out this callous attack. The shooting happened last week, just as people were gathering to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, and resulted in the death of National Guardsman, Sarah Beckstrom, while another, Andrew Wolfe, remains hospitalized and is fighting for his life.

While we still do not know precisely what motivated this attack, we can make certain educated guesses based on what we do know. The suspect is said to have shouted “Allahu Akbar.” He traveled by car from Washington state to Washington, D.C., the seat of American power. No honest person is shocked to learn that his name is strange and difficult to pronounce: Rahmanullah Lakanwal.

Democrats, and their media surrogates, have reflexively blamed President Trump for placing the victims in harm’s way with his National Guard deployment. If only Trump had ceded control of the nation’s capital to the criminal underclass, this attack could have been avoided, they say.

But this murder—it should not be called a tragedy, as tragedies strike without warning or agency—is totally unsurprising to clear-eyed observers of what is happening across the West. The failure of “assimilation,” the elusive ideal of conservatives unwilling to say plainly that Third Worlders as such add nothing of value to our societies, has been laid bare in one unnecessary atrocity after another.

While red flags are sometimes missed in vetting, dangerous individuals do not always give warning signs, and they often are easily radicalized after they resettle. It is entirely possible that Lakanwal was vetted as well as he could have been.

Indeed, Lakanwal had been part of a secret CIA-sponsored unit of Afghans that hunted down and killed members of the Taliban. He had been trained as a military asset, and it seems he has now deployed that training against the United States. In the eyes of the Biden administration, this service was to his credit, but it turns out to have made him even more dangerous to our country.

The fact that Lakanwal had no known criminal history proved nothing. We have heard it said that Trump is wrong to target illegal aliens who are merely present without authorization, without committing any other crime. But we should not treat foreigners like friends simply because we are not certain they are enemies. We should raise the bar higher than that.

Stronger vetting will not eliminate the risk of foreign terrorism. Indeed, there have been many instances of immigrants or their first-generation descendants lashing out without warning in acts of atavistic violence against their adopted Western homelands.

Acts of terror are just the tip of the civilizational iceberg. Trump adviser Stephen Miller articulated the point well in response to the pro-immigration Wall Street Journal defending Afghans from “collective punishment” after the D.C. attack. Miller noted that immigration is a collective phenomenon, not an individual one, and we must be clear-eyed about this reality. “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” Miller wrote.

President Trump made a similar point, more colorfully, on Tuesday in response to the horror show unfolding in Minnesota, where a fraud-prone Somali diaspora population has been robbing taxpayers blind. With the refreshing simplicity that is uniquely his, Trump called upon ungrateful Somalis like the world-class hater Ilhan Omar (D-MN.), who do “nothing but bitch,” to return to their countries of origin and get to work building something of their own. “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Trump said.

The Trump administration has responded to the D.C. attack by restricting asylum from a list of 19 countries. This is a good step, but we can do even better. Let’s stop gambling with American lives and close our borders, permanently, to those countries that have nothing to offer us but misery and destruction.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/stronger-vetting-wont-fix-it