Port Authority Bombing Puts Spotlight on Chain Migration

The New York Times reviews today’s Port Authority bombing by Bangladeshi immigrant Akayed Ullah and concludes: “Suspect in Times Square Bombing Leaves Trail of Mystery.”

I’m not sure wherein the mystery lies. It seems like a straightforward Islamic terrorist attack of the sort we have seen dozens of times over the years:

On the surface, Akayed Ullah seemed to be an ordinary member of a Bangladeshi enclave in Brooklyn. He often prayed at a mosque in an unassuming brownstone in the Kensington section of the borough, where a few thousand of his countrymen reside…

But on Monday morning, Mr. Ullah, 27, strapped a pipe bomb to his body and set out to detonate it in a Times Square subway station, the police said, not only causing chaos among crowds of commuters, but also leaving behind a trail of mystery that baffled those who knew him.

“He was a good guy,” said Mohammad Yousuf, a cabdriver who prayed with Mr. Ullah at the mosque. “I can’t believe he would do anything like this.”

Far from being a mystery, this is the story of most Islamic terrorists.

According to several law enforcement officials, Mr. Ullah said he set off the bomb in retaliation for American airstrikes in Syria and elsewhere, targeting members of the Islamic State, or ISIS. He told investigators that he had been radicalized online and had made a number of trips overseas in the past five years, visiting Bangladesh in recent months, one of the officials said.

Typical. What to do about the seemingly endless stream of such attacks? One place to start is our irrational immigration system:

Immigration officials said that Mr. Ullah arrived in the United States from Bangladesh in 2011 on a family immigrant visa and has lived in Brooklyn ever since as a legal permanent resident. According to the terms of his visa, Mr. Ullah was the nephew of an American citizen and benefited from what the officials called “extended family chain migration.”

So if we admit one person from Bangladesh, he gets to bring over his relatives, and they get to bring over their relatives, apparently ad infinitum. As you might expect, the numbers add up. Earlier today, the White House emailed:

In the last decade, the U.S. has resettled nearly 142,000 Bangladesh nationals on the basis of familial ties– that is a population larger than the population of Dayton, Ohio. A significant driver of this influx of family-based immigration is Chain Migration, the process by which foreign nationals permanently resettle within the U.S. and subsequently bring over their foreign relatives, who then have the opportunity to bring over their foreign relatives, until entire extended families are resettled within the country.

Note that the total has gone from 8,508 in 2005 to 18,051 in 2016:

As always, the question is, why are we doing this? How does it benefit the United States to import 142,000 Bangladeshis for no reason other than the fact that they are related to other Bangladeshis? This is an irrational system which the Trump administration, and many Republicans in Congress (but no Democrats, to my knowledge), are trying to end.

Liberals, as usual, are either obtuse or pretending to be obtuse. Thus, at today’s press briefing, a Democratic Party reporter challenged Sarah Sanders–America’s most long-suffering woman–to prove when and where Mr. Ullah became radicalized:

Q Sarah, I’m interested in the comment you made about the suspect in New York. Does the White House have any proof that this suspect was radicalized outside of the United States? He’s been a lawful, permanent resident living here for some time.

MS. SANDERS: I can’t get into any further details on that front at this point. But as we have them available, I’ll be happy to let you know.

Q But why would his chain migration be an issue unless you were saying that something happened outside the U.S.?

Maybe because chain migration is pointless, and out of 142,000 Bangladeshis there is a good chance that at least one of them will be a terrorist? I don’t think you necessarily have to be dumb to be a White House press correspondent, but there are times, apparently, when you have to pretend to be.

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