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Afghan “refugee” Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s alleged murderous rampage in Washington, DC, raises major red flags about America’s hopelessly flawed immigration system — perhaps enough to finally trigger fundamental reform.
The details of whether and how Lakanwal got vetted are (for this purpose) beside the point: The far larger issue is the insane proliferation of programs that admit foreigners, each with different standards for everything — not just for whether the authorities adequately assess the risks.
Having worked with the CIA in Afghanistan, Lakanwal seems to have entered with his family under a “special immigrant visa” program following Biden’s disastrous bugout.
But that’s just one program that focuses on asylum claims; the nation has dozens of systems large and small for legal admission, a jury-rigged patchwork because the politicians keep adding new ones rather than rethink everything.
That the system permits bad hombres like Lakanwal (let alone the various gangbangers and other menaces Biden waved in) to ever step foot on American soil is only one of many flaws: For example, it also blocks rapid entry of people most of us would love to welcome.
The system is indeed broken, but Democrats’ solution — let anyone in, then legalize them — misses the point.
The foundation of the system should be supporting immigration as it benefits America and Americans.
Instead, our decades-old base immigration law heavily favors . . . “family reunification,” which is routinely gamed into “chain migration,” using up the legal slots that could increase, say, the skills of the nation’s workforce.
Add-on programs to address that issue are kludges in their own right: Major companies (and minor grafters) exploit H1-B visas to serve their own short-term needs, with US citizens needlessly displaced by foreigners willing to work on the cheap.
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Even “humanitarian” add-ons have been corrupted: People claim asylum to enter — then make frequent trips back to the country where they supposedly fear persecution; “refugees” pass through a dozen other countries before deciding that America is their final refuge.
“Temporary Protected Status” was supposed to give foreigners a respite from returning to disaster-struck or war-torn homelands, but “temporary” has a funny way of getting drawn out.
Somalis have had continuous TPS since 1991; even convicted of a serious crime, they need only convince a judge they face “persecution” back home to be spared removal.
President Donald Trump is thundering about all manner of drastic changes in the wake of the DC attack; as usual, his instinct is well-founded — but presidential action alone can’t yield a permanent fix.
Until the nation can manage a top-to-bottom overhaul of immigration law, we’ll keep careening from one migrant mess to another.