Oregon Magazine

a book review

INVASION
by Michelle Malkin

"Awesome book....an absolute must-read....just fantastic....You won't find more diligent research anywhere." --Rush Limbaugh, October 23, 2002

Michelle Malkin, in her book "Invasion" tells us that not long after September 11, 2001, a high official in the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) announced to reporters and ethnic advocacy groups that illegal immigrants need not worry, that breaking the federal immigration laws was not a federal crime and would not be treated as such.

My suggestion is that the Internal Revenue Service and the INS swap officials and personnel. Official sanction for ignoring federal laws to pay our federal taxes looks very attractive; it would provide a tremendous boost to our economy, and certainly would be the "compassionate" thing to do for millions of hard-working American citizens.

In fact, as Malkin spells out, the INS is reputedly the most corrupt bureaucracy in the federal government; its agents have the highest incidence of involvement in crime. They do not share information with other law enforcement agencies, nor cooperate with them in apprehending violent criminal aliens. When illegals are apprehended and turned over to them, the INS regularly turns them loose, sometimes with a suggestion that they leave this country. Negligence and corruption is entrenched at every level of government charged with guarding our borders, from the State Department to the Border Patrol.

This is not an anti-immigrant book. It is a hard look at the corruption in our federal, state and local governments, the greed of businesses and banks, and the venality of politicians on the hunt for votes. Lawyers, lobbyists, corporate executives, university officials and political strategists promote lax enforcement of federal immigration law for selfish reasons and with no regard for the security of the nation.

It is also a book about the devastation visited on individual Americans by criminal aliens, some of whom were repeatedly convicted of violent crimes in at home and in this country and just as repeatedly turned back onto the unsuspecting public. Malkin tells us, for example, about the victims of Angel Resendiz (dubbed the Railway Killer) "...twelve innocent Americans who lost their lives because the INS failed to do its job and keep dangerous aliens out of the country....little known victims ...of an alien from Mexico whose criminal career made a bloody mockery of our borders and our immigration laws."

After Resendiz was finally apprehended (he turned himself in to the Border Patrol), "the INS sought vainly to pin the blame on everyone and anything but itself," complaining of a lack of money, of inadequate equipment and insufficient manpower. The real problem was the refusal of the INS to cooperate with local and federal law enforcement. As Malkin points out, "the feds are able to subject each and every law-abiding American buying a gun from a federally licensed dealer in the United States to instant background checks -- using a much cheaper and more efficient computer system".

Malkin says that "For every lazy bureaucrat who shirks the serious job of protecting American lives from alien menaces" there are heroic federal agents and policemen "who put their lives on the line to save Americans.[but] are no safer than civilians..." She reminds us that "Seventy-two law enforcement officers died on September 11 because of foreign terrorists, and countless more around the country have been killed by alien crimnals who shouldn't even be in the United States in the first place."

Political and financial corruption undermines American liberties and our prosperity. Ask the victims of recent notorious corporate criminals, such as the executives of Enron and Worldcom. Ask the citizens of any Third World country -- which all share one common characteristic: widespread corruption. The laws are flouted, bribery is a fact of life; violence and threat of violence, as well as theft of public funds and private property are common. Citizens of those countries very much want to come to live in safe America.

That safety is being eroded daily and that erosion has not been slowed by the massacre of September 11. Even a year after the terrorist attacks, Malkin says, "the avenues for death and destruction remain virtully unobstructed....Everything a terrorist needs to know about penetrating this country is readily available from newspapers, television broadcasts, the Internet and government publications." And there are employees in our embassies abroad and state drivers license offices at home willing to assist the terrorists in obtaining illegal documentation for a bribe. One such employee died in an "arson-caused" crash the day before she was to testify in court.

By land, sea and air, north, south, east and west, as Malkin describes so well, our borders are sieves for foreigners determined to bypass the regulations that were designed for our protection. Some of those foreigners are merely looking for work, but they provide cover for criminals who are looking for unsuspecting victims. There's a clear message in Malkin's book: the bureaucracies charged with enforcing immigration laws have to be cleansed of corruption and laziness masked as phony "compassion."

It is not impossible to destroy a powerful, rich nation. Corruption will do it. Read the history of once all-powerful Rome. The country today called Italy is but a faint, corrupt shadow.
-- Peggy Whitcomb

(OMED: We often make the book covers hotlinks to their Amazon page, but for some reasons, this one doesn't work for everybody. This book is available everywhere, but if you habitually use Amazon, go to their website ( http://www.amazon.com ) and in the upper left hand corner click on the category arrow, "books" and then in the white field type in Invasion. Clicking on go will take you to the right page.)