House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., announced a House Republican national security strategy that highlights border security, overhauling the nation’s immigration system, interior immigration enforcement, and improved screening of admissions. Among other things the plan calls for developing the means to track illegal aliens within the U.S., detaining and removing criminal aliens and restoring overall immigration enforcement. The plan also slams President Obama for “utterly false claims that security is improving.”
The following are excerpts from the plan:
“The surge of illegal immigrants across our borders cannot just be a wake-up call—it must be a call to action…America must secure the border once and for all by accelerating the deployment of fencing, technology, air assets, and personnel...The current administration has failed to live up to [its border security] obligation and has no realistic plan to fulfill it. In fact, the American people have been misled with utterly false claims that security is improving. Make no mistake: The borders are not secure, and the threats along them are growing more dynamic by the day.
“We also must overhaul our immigration system for national security reasons. Terrorists have used virtually every major immigration route to enter our country, including citizenship applications, tourist and student visas, and even refugee status. Each of the 9/11 hijackers came into the United States through legal means. But time and again, we have failed to eliminate serious vulnerabilities in the system. For instance, we lack the tools to verify comprehensively whether visitors actually leave the country after their visas expire.
“It is time to enforce our immigration laws and to tighten up security at all stages by conducting better screening of those seeking admission, tracking aliens in the United States, removing terrorists and criminals, and improving interior immigration enforcement. We also need to bring our system into the 21st century so that Americans have confidence it is effective.
“Additionally, we must expand the Visa Security Program to additional high-risk locations in order to focus more attention on places where terrorist groups have a presence or where extremists frequently transit....We will continue to improve the integrity of the refugee-screening process as well…(T)errorists have pledged to exploit humanitarian programs to slip into the West and attack us. Our top law-enforcement and intelligence officials have expressed grave concern about this, which is why we will adopt measures to weed out terror suspects so that legitimate refugees can be resettled safely without compromising our security.”
Read the House Republican plan or a Washington Times analysis.
