Immigration muckraker.(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 Publishing, 256 pages, $27.95

In Invasion, Michelle Malkin contends that America's porous immigration system allows terrorists into the country. Blaming "ethnicity lobbyists, corporations, the travel industry, and open-borders activists" for pressuring lawmakers to facilitate entry into the country, she believes tighter immigration laws, and better enforcement of existing ones, could help prevent terrorism.

As Malkin points out, both legal and illegal immigrants have brought terror to American soil. If the guardians of America's golden door can separate honest, hardworking applicants from troublemakers, the U.S. would be a better place to live. Unfortunately, the process is not always easy.

Invasion highlights several obvious problems with the current immigration system, including lax security at airports, seaports, and border crossings, marriage fraud, asylum fraud, and lax visa standards. Malkin provides detailed examples of individuals who exploited the system and immigration officials who could not or would not do their jobs correctly. Her illustrations, fleshed out in harrowing detail, read like episodes of "60 Minutes" or "Hard Copy."

But her anecdotal style, which makes the book so eminently readable, sometimes fails to establish a full context for these stories. Take her discussion of Angel Resendiz. Resendiz, the "Railway Killer," entered the country illegally and racked up an extensive criminal record, including a dozen brutal murders. Although caught and deported multiple times, Resendiz continued to re-enter the country because he was not properly entered into the criminal database system. Malkin is certainly correct that INS agents cost lives this way. But her 20-page account of his brutal crimes lacks statistics on what percentage of convicted violent criminals in recent years were illegal aliens. She does report ...