Focus on immigration and visas as Americans fear Islamic State attack

WHAT began as a flippant idea is beginning to pick up steam in the US — and it’s so divisive it’s creating rifts across the globe.

AMERICA has never been so paranoid.

What began as a flippant idea in response to the latest massacre on US soil is beginning to pick up steam — and it’s so divisive it’s creating cracks not only domestically, but internationally. And it’s just what the Islamic State wants.

Since Sayed Farook and Tashfeen Malik fired 75 rounds in a conference room at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, claiming 14 lives and injuring a further 21, much debate has arisen over the issue of immigration.

Malik was a Pakistani national and was in the US on a visa. She pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook during the massacre.

Farook, meanwhile, was born in Chicago, went to public schools and became an environmental health specialist after graduating from California State University in 2010.

Like many young men, he had looked for love online.

He chose an Islamic dating site.

In 2014 Farook met Malik, spent nine days in Saudi Arabia to collect and return to the US with her.

Since the San Bernardino shootings, the US is so paranoid of an Islamic State attack on American soil, it is turning former immigration activists into their own brand of extremism.

In fact, over the weekend, former advocate of immigration reform, Larry Kudlow, called on the federal government to seal its borders and an overhaul on refugee vetting and visa screening.

I know this is not my usual position, but this is war. Stop visas & immigration till we get new info & system. ISIS is coming. Stop them.

— Larry Kudlow (@larry_kudlow) December 11, 2015

“ISIS and related Islamic terrorists are already here. More are coming. We must stop them,” he wrote in an opinion piece for the National Review.

“I know this is not my usual position. But this is a war. Therefore I have come to believe there should be no immigration or visa waivers until the US adopts a completely new system to stop radical Islamic terrorists from entering the country. A wartime lockdown. And a big change in my thinking.”

Kudlow doesn’t want to just block the 10,000 Syrians that President Obama pledged a spot to in the United States — he wants everyone out. Australians. Europeans. Kiwis. All of us.

“I can’t see this is a serious proposal, when you actually try to do something like this I think people see how unrealistic this is,” Hiroshi Motomura, professor of law at UCLA, specialising in immigration, refugees and citizenship, told news.com.au

“You’d have to seal the borders to American citizens as well, you’d have to shut down internet traffic, packages coming in, its theoretically possible but I suspect most people would say, ‘oh I didn’t think that’.

“It’s an interesting slogan but I’m not sure how that would work. All these solutions have all kinds of unintended consequences. Saying to Muslim communities that you don’t belong, that message is going to be a much greater national security threat than the threat that’s perceived from outside.”

Yet the Americans are still listening.

So much so that America’s most notorious loudmouth, Donald Trump, leads the Republican Presidential campaign with its largest margin yet after a new poll showed Americans favour his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the US

“It has become abundantly clear that Trump is giving his supporters exactly what they want, even if what he says causes the GOP leadership and many Republican voters to cringe,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The poll found 41 per cent of voters backed Trump for president, up 13 percentage points since mid-October. It also found many of Trump’s supporters were voters who never attended college.

“We’re seeing populist movements everywhere, maybe they’re [voters] naive on certain issues and can be manipulated through fear,” Anne Speckhard, an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University in the School of Medicine, Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism told news.com.au.

Speckhard, also author of Talking to Terrorists said: “Trump’s an idiot”.

“I’m usually very politically correct, but he’s an idiot, and he’s dangerous.

“He’s captured a lot of the sentiment and he’s saying things people are afraid to say. We do need to be concerned about a world religion being manipulated to motivate terrorism, but it’s not the first religion used to motivate terrorism.”

Trump isn’t the only Presidential candidate fanning the flame. In a November 16 speech, presidential candidate and senator Marco Rubio said, “You can have a thousand people come in and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence. But one of them is an ISIS fighter — if that’s the case, you have a problem.”

States With the Most Syrian Refugees Since 2012 | Graphiq

Yet the reality of banning immigration fails to address the issue of landing potential terrorists on home soil; its complicated vetting process can take years to finalise, and experts suggest if the Islamic State wanted to launch an operation in the United States, it’s more than likely it would be carried out illegally.

In fact, of the 780,000 refugees that have been resettled in the US, just a dozen of those had been arrested or deported for links to terrorism, Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC News.

“We know that it’s super easy to cross back and forth into Turkey. Islamic State is the best funded terrorist group, they’ve got plenty of money so they can buy their way through the Turkish border,” said Mrs Speckhard.

“If we’re going to be scared, we should be scared of [Western] people who have been radicalised, can travel back and forth and could hop on a plane and take out New York today.

“That’s something we need to think about but the solution isn’t to ban all travellers. The solution is to help European partners talk to each other and share data to know who they’re dealing with and help Turkey have the resolve and resources to close their border.”

Briefings reviewed by NBC News showed US intelligence officials believed the risk of Islamic terrorists using the immigration system to infiltrate the US was “low” — and experts suggested a bigger threat was posed in the country.

“The way you get to that type of home grown radicalism is to make people feel unwelcome in the country of their birth,” said Mr Motomura.

“In many ways there’s a tendency in a moment like this to see the glass a half empty. If we stop that we’re going to be pitting Americans against Americans and the result of that will be more trouble down the road.

“If you’re really going to complete zero tolerance, you have a country in a permanent state of police state lock down. That’s something people will tolerate for a short period of time but as the weeks and months go by that’s going to become intolerable both economically and emotionally for people in this country.”

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