QandO

June 19, 2004

The Open-Borders Brigade
Posted by Dale Franks

Michelle Malkin recounts what happens to your chances of getting published by the Wall Street Journal if you violate their "open borders" editorial position any time, anywhere.

In late August 2002, in advance of the release of my first book Invasion, I submitted an investigative op-ed to the Wall Street Journal on national security problems with the Transit Without a Visa program. I had obtained a memo outlining how the TWOV program had been exploited in Los Angeles by suspected Middle Eastern terrorists. Federal investigators nabbed two Jordanian nationals who worked at Los Angeles International Airport as contract security guards and helped run a smuggling ring out of the TWOV "lounge" for transiting passengers. Instead of guarding them, the Jordanians escorted them safely and illegally out of the airport in violation of the TWOV program--and helped approximately 1,000 of the smugglees (mostly males of Middle Eastern descent and including some individuals who later turned up on the State Department terrorist watch list) obtain fraudulent Social Security cards between 1998-2000. I warned that the TWOV program remained at risk of abuse and that security was still lax at the lounges used by TWOV passengers.

The piece proved prescient. A year later, Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge suspended the TWOV program based on national security concerns.

Unfortunately, the WSJ never ran the piece. (It ran instead in National Review Online). Although the WSJ initially accepted and scheduled my piece for publication, the piece was yanked at the last minute.

I am, as the Journal knows from its past publication of my work, a free-market kind of gal. The paper can print what it wants to print. If my writing didn't meet the editorial page's journalistic standards, fine. But did they yank the piece because of factual errors? Reporting problems? Were there questions about my sources? Or the authenticity of the memo? No, no, no, and no.

The problem, an editorial-page staffer informed me, stemmed from two columns I had written (here and here)--totally unrelated to the TWOV piece--which had challenged the WSJ's advocacy of amnesty for illegal aliens. Were there factual inaccuracies in either of those pieces? No. In fact, the only errors in those columns were the ones I pointed out had been made by the WSJ editorial page when it mischaracterized the amnesty program it was championing.

I was told by the editorial features staffer that I had antagonized the page's higher-ups. The bottom line is that my criticism of the WSJ's misleading pro-illegal alien propaganda caused me to be shut out of the esteemed editorial pages (though I still get a nice mention every now and then on the online OpinionJournal.com's Best of the Web feature...but probably not for much longer).

As Victor Davis Hanson points out in his marvelous book, Mexifornia, there is an unlikely coalition of leftist La Raza types and big business concerns that want open borders. The lefties see a chance for creating a more liberal electorate over time, and big business sees a large pool of low-cost labor. And, since the Journal--a fine paper, to be sure--has an editorial page that is not averse to being the useful mouthpiece of big business, the Journal's editorial page is part of that coalition, too.

To save time, please assume at this point that I've already mouthed the requisite pieties over the benefits of legal immigration, one of which, incidentally, is Michelle Malkin.

The Journal bases its support of open borders on the traditional free trade economic reasoning, and, on a purely theortetical basis, that economic reasoning is sound. But illegal immigration has cultural, political, and financial implications that the economic arguments simply ignore.

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