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Monday, October 1, 2001

Associated Press
Mexicans Turned Back at Borders
About 2 million Mexicans failed to convert their border-crossing cards into new high-tech IDs by the Oct. 1 deadline, and hundreds were turned back Monday when they tried to get into the United States. -- Some said they were unaware of the cutoff date for getting the new "laser visas,'' while others said they had been expecting the U.S. government to grant an extension, as some members of Congress have requested.		 National Review - Victor Davis Hanson
What Would Churchill Say?
We are entering a surreal parenthesis, not unlike the brief but phony quiet of the "war" that characterized the French- German border between September 1939 and May 10, 1941. The destruction of the World Trade Center, the downing of four airliners, and the ravaging of the Pentagon - like the ruin of Poland in 1939 - of course will not go away. Thousands of our countrymen are dead; we accept that the world can never be quite what it was.

Lawrence Journal-World
Terrorists found way to Kansas
...The FBI has already invoked a rarely used emergency power to search student records that are generally closed under federal privacy laws. -- Officials are also rushing to fully implement a 1996 law -- passed in response to Ismoil's role in the 1993 Trade Center bombing -- that would require universities to keep tabs on foreign students and notify law-enforcement authorities if they drop out of school. -- Some officials are proposing new laws to establish counterfeit-proof identification cards...		 Free Republic / EFE
Americans want tighter border controls, poll says
Three out of four Americans said they believed the Bush administration should toughen immigration laws to reduce the likelihood of new terrorist attacks, according to a recent survey by Zogby International. According to the poll, 72 percent said better border controls and stricter enforcement of immigration laws would help to prevent future terrorist attacks, while 24 percent said these measures would have no effect.

Detroit News
Loopholes, money blunt visa laws
As America wonders, in the wake of recent terrorist attacks by illegal immigrants, why immigration law enforcement has been lax, the answers can be found among business groups, schools and universities, and members of Congress, including former Michigan hSen. Spencer Abraham, who worked together to delay systems that would improve tracking of foreign visitors. --- 16 of the 19 hijackers legally entered the United States with temporary visas, then melded into the fabric of everyday life without fear of detection.		 NewsMax.com
Where's Mexico?
It wasn't long ago that President Bush and Mexico's President Vicente Fox were pledging undying friendship between the two nations, with Bush telling Fox, "The United States has no more important relationship in the world than our relationship with Mexico." -- Fast-forward to the days following the Sept. 11 disaster and that relationship seems to have faded away, to be replaced by widespread Mexican indifference to the horrors suffered north of the border, if not outright hostility toward the United States.

Associated Press
Migrant Charged in Terror Case
A Virginia man has been charged with helping obtain false identification documents for two men accused of crashing a jetliner into the Pentagon Sept. 11, according to a criminal compliant unsealed Monday. -- Luis Martinez- Flores, 28, of Falls Church, was charged Friday with falsely certifying that Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar lived at his Falls Church address. (This helped them get valid state ID cards.)		 Laredo Morning Times
Local thousands lack new visas
Effective Monday an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people in the Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras region holding "micas," or the old border crossing card, will not be allowed into the U.S., officials said. -- The American Embassy in Mexico City recently released the figures based on the mandate that the INS will not allow foreign visitors to enter the U.S. without a valid passport or laser visa.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Disagreement about immigration policy after attack on the nation
Depending on who's talking, recommendations for changing the nation's immigration law either tread on our civil liberties or are seen as too little, too late. -- On the one side are groups such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and on the other are those such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform. -- One proposal basically would provide for indefinite detention....		 Brent Bozell - Townhall.com
No time for moral equivalence
Despite the outpouring of media patriotism these past two weeks, nobody expected that the long march through the terrorist menace would commence without some journalists sounding disturbing old notes of moral equivalence. The crews are still clearing debris in New York and Washington, yet already the Reuters wire service has declared there's no moral difference between the hijackers and the hijacked.

Does it matter that 80% of luggage screeners at Dulles are non-citizens?

Poll Results

L.A. Times
Safety Net for Jobless More Porous
Texas' unemployment insurance fund appears headed for insolvency. So does New York's. More than a dozen states have little or no money for extra welfare benefits in case of recession, and the federal program designed to back them up expired over the weekend. -- Such is the condition of America's social safety net as the economy teeters on the edge of recession -- at least in part because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and the jobless rate climbs.		 Michigan Daily
Restrictions, delays at border crossings
In the aftermath of the terror attacks, critics of U.S. immigration policy are talking about toughening scrutiny of the 350,000 immigrants and 31 million temporary visitors who enter the country each year. -- A 1996 immigration law called for a new computerized entry and exit tracking of all temporary visa holders. But lawmakers from Michigan and other states with major international entry points blocked its implementation after complaints by business and industry groups.

News
Note
 CNN - 7:35 AM
7:35 AM -- The U.S. Supreme Court released an order today barring former President Bill Clinton from practicing before that court. The disbarment affects only the U.S. Supreme Court.

Daniel Griswold - Miami Herald
It's wrong, unfair to blame immigrants
The government must strengthen its efforts to stop terrorists or potential terrorists from entering the country. But those efforts should not result in a wider effort to close our borders to immigrants. -- Obviously, any government has a right and duty to control its borders to keep out dangerous goods and people. The U.S. government should deny entry to anyone with terrorist connections, a criminal record or any other ties that would indicate a potential to commit terrorist acts.		 N.Y. Times (Free Registration)
N.Y. Extends Immigrants' Eligibility for Health Program
The Pataki administration, steering clear of a potential lawsuit, has decided to extend a new state- subsidized health insurance program for the working poor to all legal immigrants. -- The program, known as Family Health Plus and paid for with federal, state and local money, is scheduled to begin today. Until late last week, the state had been noncommittal about whether some immigrants would be eligible. [Also see the Free Republic]

Arizona Daily Star
Illegal alien captures down 25%
Apprehensions of illegal entrants along the U.S.-Mexico border are down 25 percent from a record 1.62 million last fiscal year, the first borderwide decline in detentions of illegal migrants since 1986. -- The numbers are down in each of the Border Patrol's nine sectors on the Southwest border. -- In the Tucson Sector the numbers dropped from fiscal year 2000's record 617,716 apprehensions to 450,000 this fiscal year....		 BBC
Workers on the move
Every year, thousands of Mexicans try to cross the barbed wire fence that separates their country from the US to find work. -- Workers Without Frontiers reports from the Mexico-US border, a place where millions of people are on the move. -- El Paso, in the American state of Texas, and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico are two places in the world that really show the opportunities and the threats globalisation presents to workers.

Judicial Watch / Wall St. Journal
Bush Sr. in business with bin Laden family conglomerate
Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with disbelief to The Wall Street Journal report of yesterday that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice. (Other top Republicans are also associated.....)		 Fox News
Lawmakers Mull Immigration Reform
With the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 unearthing some startling laxness and loopholes in the procedures and enforcement of U.S. immigration policy, the debate over reforming that policy is just beginning. -- On the table in Congress are a number of measures, among them re-militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, temporarily suspending the student visa program, meticulously checking the background of all visa applicants, and computerized tracking of the so-called "overstays" who account for 40 percent of the nation's illegal immigrants.

Contra Costa Times
Coming to an America rife with sacrifice, struggle
...Before terrorist attacks on the East Coast overtook the federal government's agenda, President Bush and congressional leaders had offered competing plans granting amnesty or guest worker status to illegal immigrants. -- The campaign against terrorism may have pitched those proposals into limbo in Washington, D.C., but in the East Bay and elsewhere around the country, illegal immigrants continue to squeak out perilous lives in a country that alternately needs and resents them.

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