Enemies Within

We are in a fine mess. Foreign terrorists have committed a mass murder, their plot apparently incubated not in the Middle East, but in the West's own cities. A military response-necessary both as revenge and to deter further attacks-risks destabilizing friendly governments. Perhaps Pakistan's regime-guardian of a rudimentary nuclear arsenal-can stand up to the Islamic street mobs if war breaks out in Afghanistan. We better hope so.

The plotters of future attacks are perhaps hidden in Afghan caves, but are just as likely in sleeper cells in Bradford, England; Hamburg; Toronto and New York. We have no idea how many Muslim immigrants eager to kill Americans live, right now, inside our borders. One tenth of 1 percent of the foreign-born Muslim population? That could be several hundred, indeed, several thousand.

In the wee hours my youngest daughter comes crying into her parents' bedroom: she has had a nightmare, she says, that Arabs were going to shoot her while she walked home from school. Four weeks ago, this child was poster girl for politically correct multiculturalism, quick to cry foul at any dinner table remarks implying lack of appreciation for foreign peoples. She liked to argue about politics, exclaiming, "That's so mean, Daddy," when her father maintained that American immigration policy should be based on what is good for Americans, not for the multitudes who desire entry. Now she walks fearfully in her own neighborhood and no amount of reassurance about "Islam is a peaceful religion" and "the overwhelming majority of Arabs are not terrorists" fully calms her.

We have all read the newspaper accounts of how the 9/11 hijackers blended easily into polyglot communities of new immigrants, or into cheap transient motels-neighborhoods now as foreign to the average American as the streets of Calcutta.

Four years ago, a Mexican entrepreneur smuggled into the city several score of deaf mutes, whom he organized into begging squads and sent over into Manhattan. He provided them room and board and pocketed their daily earnings. It was a form of indentured servitude and exploitation of the handicapped, but the remarkable thing is that in the Queens district where they lived, no neighbors familiar with the arrangement thought anything awry. Or if they did, it didn't occur to them to report it or complain. Considering the sacrifice previous generations of Americans had made to end slavery, it seemed a shame to begin importing it all over again.

The Mexicans were harmless, the Arab terrorists not. But the two immigrant communities have managed to demonstrate how weak is our grip on the thoughts, feelings and ambitions of many of those now sharing the American space. The idea of struggling to forge a common American culture out of a diverse population, an heroic achievement of the first half of the century (helped along by a world war and a freeze on mass immigration from 1924 to 1965), now seems almost fanciful, buried under the weight of a million and a half new immigrants a year.

Press reports of the terrorists' passage through the immigration system describe the hapless efforts of INS and State Dept. officers to keep track of the multitudes who receive visas for "tourism" or "transit" or "study." The relevant government agencies are undermanned, lack up-to-date technology. But why are they required to give out so many visas in the first place? Why must they give out any?

The "immigrationist" theology is bipartisan and now rooted in both liberal and conservative establishments. In its most fulsome form, it holds that immigrants are actually better Americans because they are supposedly motivated to come by admiration for the "idea" of America-they didn't just happen to be born here. Belief in this creed is most widespread on the neoconservative right, which in the last decade went to great lengths to squelch immigration restriction sentiments bubbling up from the Republican rank and file. But the idea that the United States should be transformed from a Western country into "the world's first universal nation," while of neoconservative provenance, is now ritually proclaimed by elites in both parties. Its ideological companion is the idea that the United States should meddle militarily in the affairs of other countries all over the globe, act as an "omnipower," in Ben Wattenberg's phrase. The neoconservative Weekly Standard's editors describe their preferred foreign policy as imposing "benevolent global hegemony." They complain constantly that we don't throw our weight around nearly enough. Still, we have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, bomb Iraq regularly, provide extensive military support to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories-three reasons often cited to explain bin Laden's popularity in the Muslim world. Plus, in another neoconservative/neoliberal joint enterprise, we bombed the heck out of Serbia, creating a little statelet in Kosovo, a base from which to facilitate illegal Muslim immigration into Europe.

It is worth asking what benefits ordinary Americans have gotten from these foreign policies, if any, and how they match up with the costs, now that we have been presented with a more realistic idea of what the costs are.