Excerpts from Unguarded Gates -
A History of America's Immigration Crisis
by Otis L. Graham, Jr.

Chapter 17: September 11 - A Turning Point?

The costs of America's porous borders were stunningly piled even higher on the morning of September 11, 2001. While Mexican President Fox traveled northward to Washington on his mission to open America's southern border to his surplus population, Islamic terrorists commandeered jetliners and struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand persons. The Fox-Bush deal, at least for a time, slipped into limbo.

That day's terrorist attacks harshly illuminated a defect that had not formerly been high on the list of flaws in American immigration policy, that our porous borders and governmental abandonment of virtually all interior immigration controls allowed terrorists to move at will into, around, and out of the country, legally and illegally. A study of the immigration history of the forty-eight terrorists convicted of (or admitting to) acts of terrorism against the United States since 1993 found that they had readily exploited every possible means of entry into the United States. "They came as students, tourists, and business visitors," found Center for Immigration Studies research director Steven Camarota, and seventeen had worked the system to enter and stay despite their terrorist occupations, becoming lawful permanent residents and even naturalized citizens of the country they hated. Some reached this permanent status by making fraudulent marriages or applying for asylum. Twelve were illegal aliens when they attacked, and twenty-one had been in illegal status at some point in the last ten years. Several gave officials false information on entry. Joel Mowbray of National Review obtained access to the visa applications of fifteen of the nineteen September 11 terrorists and expert analysis found so many elementary flaws that "all the applicants among the fifteen reviewed should have been denied visas." Forty-one of the larger group of forty-eight terrorists studied by Center for Immigration Studies had gone to U.S. consulates abroad and received visas, despite their backgrounds. Judging from the experience of these forty-eight murderers who were Middle Eastern young males with terrorist pasts, there are many ways for terrorists to get into America, legally or illegally, and many ways to stay there, some lawful and some not. It is an easy country to attack, from within.