Welcoming the Enemy.("Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores")(Book Review)

Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, by Michelle Malkin (Regnery, 332 pp., $27.95)

Even more than other areas of the law, immigration policy tends to be made by anecdote. Every Woodward-and-Bernstein wannabe is an easy mark for open-borders groups trying to get immigrant sob stories into print. Until he retired in December of last year, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times was one of the worst immigrant-anecdote peddlers in journalism. Especially after the 1996 immigration-law changes, he wrote a column practically every week on hapless immigrants ground down by the fascistic INS -- a Chinese businesswoman who was barred from entering the U.S.; a Barbadian illegal alien whose deportation, after being repeatedly postponed, was finally to be carried out; a Turk being deported for nothing more than a little drug-dealing; et al., ad nauseam.

Well, goodbye, Tony Lewis; and hello, Michelle Malkin.

Malkin's new book, Invasion, counters these anecdotes with compelling stories of the fallout from our failure to enforce the immigration law. She tells us not only about the individual terrorists, criminals, and other foreign menaces, but also about their victims. She devotes an entire chapter to the case of Angel Resendiz, the illegal-alien Railway Killer, including capsule profiles of the people he murdered -- people like Noemi Dominguez, a 26-year-old former schoolteacher in Texas, who was raped and beaten to death by Resendiz in 1999. Malkin also tells the stories of police officers murdered by aliens who should not have been out on the street -- stories such as the murder of Sgt. Ricky Timbrook of Winchester, Va., who was shot in the head by Edward Nathaniel Bell, an immigrant from Jamaica scheduled to be deported for earlier crimes.

Malkin's chapter on human-rights violators from abroad taking up residence in America includes the tale of Kelbessa Negewo, a sadistic secret policeman from Ethiopia who was granted political asylum in 1988 and U.S. citizenship seven years later. In a chapter sporting as its title the unofficial motto of immigration lawyers -- "It Ain't Over 'Til the Alien Wins" -- she includes brief descriptions of various immigrant lowlifes who have gamed the system to avoid deportation. One such is German immigrant Stephanie Short, who was convicted of encouraging her three-year-old daughter to submit to sexual assault at the hands of her stepfather -- but was not deported because she supposedly had not committed a "crime of moral turpitude"!

Malkin's use of anecdotes differs from that in much of the previous debate over immigrants' vices and virtues, in that it focuses not on immigration policy as a whole but simply on enforcement of the law. Rather than generalizing from individual stories -- some immigrants are criminals, so end all immigration or, conversely, some immigrants are geniuses, so end all border controls -- Malkin's emphasis is on profiling bad guys who would not have been able to do what they did had the existing law been applied. But the book is not simply a collection of anecdotes. Unlike most journalists writing about immigrants, Malkin, a Philadelphia-born daughter of Filipino immigrants, actually learned something about our immigration system and uses the profiles of individual immigrants to flesh out her picture.

And it's a grim picture indeed. She starts, naturally, with the 9/11 hijackers, and examines how they got here. She describes the myriad ways terrorists have penetrated our nation: lax border security; fraudulent marriages to U.S. citizens; bogus asylum claims; illegal- alien amnesties; lax standards in issuing visas for workers, students, clergymen, and wealthy investors; the visa lottery; and the Visa Waiver Program.