America-haters, Hamas-lovers and immigration fraudsters -- which is what overstaying a visa amounts to -- aren't welcome. Stephen Yang See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google The news keeps offering stark reminders that America’s legal immigration system needs reform to align it with what Americans actually want.
Late last month, a California federal court handed abusers of our immigration system a big win, ruling that the laws under which terrorist-loving Jew-hater Mahmoud Khalil was targeted for visa revocation and deportation are unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds — meaning, Uncle Sam can’t deport you because the government dislikes your speech.
This hardly makes Khalil safe, since the essence of the case against him is that he plainly obtained his residency status under false pretenses, i.e. by lying about having worked for Hamas-aligned UNRWA.
But the decision is a stark reminder that, even as Team Trump battles illegal immigration, the rules for legal immigration stand in desperate need of reform.
Consider rapist Gurmeet Singh, in the news again last week as the Trump administration revoked his US citizenship.
Singh came to this country on a six-month visa in 1992; he overstayed that half-year by almost a decade, yet managed to get legal permanent residency status in 2000 and naturalized status in October 2011.
Except that, weeks before he filed his naturalization petition, Singh committed a heinous crime: While driving a cab, he sexually assaulted a passenger at knifepoint and threatened to kill her.
He wasn’t ID’d and arrested until three years later; tried and convicted, he’s been in prison ever since — but only now did his citizenship get revoked.
Let’s be clear: If legal immigration functioned in a rational way, people like Singh who violate the law and overstay their visas by close to a decade would be permanently barred from ever getting permanent residency status, let alone seeking naturalization.
Khalil, too, would have lost all residency rights as soon as his lies became known.
And none of this empowering-the-worst-people approach is what most voters want.
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Americans broadly support legal immigration, and welcome those who follow the rules to immigrate in search of a better life — if, that is, they embrace American values and norms instead of trying to recreate the country and culture they just fled.
America-haters, Hamas-lovers and immigration fraudsters — which is what overstaying a visa amounts to — aren’t welcome.
And the more bad actors like Singh and Khalil our laws protect, the sooner that broad support for legal immigration will vanish.
So the Trump administration’s recent effort to crack down on business- and tourist-visa fraud is a move in the right direction: Formally revoking the B-1 and B-2 visas of some 200,000 foreign nationals who entered that way, then remained while applying for asylum, sends a signal that gaming the system no longer gets a free pass.
Ideally, Congress would pass a genuine comprehensive immigration reform that cleans up the laws to clamp down on all the game-playing, including the massive abuses of asylum, that the left has engineered into place these last few decades, and gives clear preference in legal immigration to those best-suited to becoming pull-their-own-weight, loyal and productive US citizens.
But if Congress doesn’t at least create clear mechanisms for the rapid deportation of the likes of Khalil, Singh and similar fraudsters, support will keep building for the most restrictionist possible approach to immigration.
