There’s nothing like a terrorist attack on US soil committed by a legal resident alien and his naturalized American citizen brother to point out the weaknesses in our immigration system, our FBI and our collaboration with other nations. Before you all start screaming, I am not blaming President Obama for this. We’ve had homegrown terrorism before. Anybody remember Timothy McVeigh? This is a systemic long term issue that needs to be discussed.
Of course it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. But we shouldn’t willy-nilly accept anybody into our country just because they want asylum from their own country. We should ask questions first. Are they asking for asylum because they’re genuinely oppressed, or because they are legitimate criminals wanting to escape the law?
So we have the Tsarnaevs, a family of four, who came to this country after bouncing around the Balkan provinces. The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, made money giving facial massages during which she parroted the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like the whopper that 9/11 was a Zionist inside job. After a while, she and her husband ditch the country and leave the kids behind. And we all know what happened then. Turns out Mom can’t return to the US to pick up her older son’s corpse because she’s skipped the country while facing charges for felony shoplifting. While she rants about how America stole her sons, she forgets that in a jihadist country her hand would have been cut off for theft. The poor dad can only shake his head. For all the talk of submissive women in Islamic culture, the dad sure seems pussy-whipped. I feel sorry for the uncle from Maryland, who seems like a stand-up guy who believes in his adopted country. He was right about his nephews. They were “losers” who maintained their extremist views while adopting the worst parts of American culture, living the “bling” lifestyle while mooching off the taxpayers and getting stoned while tweeting misogynistic drivel.
I’m not an immigrant basher. My parents were immigrants who came to America in the aftermath of World War II seeking a better life. They never forgot their roots, but once they came here they assimilated into American culture rather than bend that culture to fit their roots.
Here we are with Republicans ranting about Mexicans who only come here and do the lousy jobs no natural born citizen will do, when the real problem comes from another place altogether. Things need to change.
Look at what happened in 1980 during the Cuban boatlift. Hordes of Cubans came to our shores, and we unquestioningly granted them asylum status because we hated Fidel Castro. Turned out, many were criminals that Castro was happy to be rid of, and now we were stuck with them. But this was in an earlier era when getting information on foreign nationals was a lot more difficult.
We live in the era of information. There needs to be more international cooperation when it comes to sharing criminal records. Yeah, I know the paranoiacs Birchers and tea partiers are going to cry “New World Order!” They can suck it up. Mitt Romney made a big hullabaloo during last year’s election when he said the Russians were our greatest adversary. (Actually, he slipped and called them “Soviets” which shows what a time warp his mind is in.) But if we’d listened to the Russians about Tamerlain Tsasnaev we might have stopped this plot.
Oh, and just to prove I’m not some “Ugly American” here are my two cents on the burial controversy. I am glad that Tamerlain Tsarnaev has finally been properly buried and I have no issue with it being on US soil. This business of forcing his corpse on some other country or dropping him in the ocean like Osama Bin Laden is complete baloney. Our country has properly buried the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald, Andrew Cunanan, and Adam Lanza. If we can bury them, we can bury the latest nutjob.
As for Russia, I think Putin should grant Chechnya independence, evacuate all the Russians there, then declare war and bomb the crap out of them.
