The author writes that the United States needs to take a more active role in tightening borders and increasing security measures. This is a little under one hour. Cspan michelle malkin, author of invasion, you say in your book that the immigration and Naturalization Service has a core culture of corruption. Guest absolutely. And in many cases, that isnt even my words. There are many former and current ins officials who acknowledge that there is a culture of corruption. A climate of abuse is the phrase that doris meissner, who was ins chief under clintongore administration, has used. And she even pointed out, as several former highlevel ins officials have, that this climate of abuse is unique among government agencies. And theres a problem there that is not nearly as rampant as any other Law Enforcement agency. You have an agency thats supposed to be enforcing immigration laws, but in so many instances, from top to bottom, rather than enforce those laws, people either ignore them or are breaking them for their own personal profit or gain. Cspan give us an example. Guest sure. I talk about a clintongore administration official, bob bratt, who was a Longtime Justice Department veteran, who, ironically enough, was appointed by janet reno to clean up the citizenship usa scandal under clintongore. And that has been well documented over the years. In 1996, before the november 96 election, there was a huge push to naturalize new american citizens. And many procedural safeguards were trampled over in the rush to do that. In fact, at least 6,300 criminal aliens, convicted of felonies, were granted this precious birthright of american citizenship in that rush to essentially beef up the Democrat Voter rolls. Well, after that scandal, after a huge internal investigation, the Justice Department and reno appointed this guy, bob bratt, to clean up. But he was busy doing other things, and one of the things he was doing was traveling over to moscow, as this highlevel official, and hooking up with a russian matchmaker, who found him two nice young women, one of whom he engaged in a sexual relationship, and then later tried to get visas to bring them over to this country. Cspan how do you know this . Guest this is all documented. There was an internal investigation of this, as well, by the Inspector Generals Office under the Justice Department. The Washington Post did extensive reporting on it, as well, and one of the brave whistleblowers, martin anderson, who helped expose this, you know, pretty much well documented a lot of the facts of the case. The Inspector Generals report is available on the internet, and i have the internet address in the footnotes of my book, so anybody can look it up, look at the narrative and look at what they concluded. And what they concluded was that by engaging in this relationship with these women and trying to fake visa applications to bring the women over, bob bratt and an underling who helped him try to, you know, engage in this scheme, essentially undermined our National Security because they were meeting the women in hotels. He was essentially divulging sensitive information, putting himself at risk for blackmail in moscow. And then the punch line, of course, is nothing ever happened to bob bratt, who, again, had been appointed to clean up corruption but then engaged in this scheme that, again, the Inspector General concluded undermined National Security. He was allowed to retire. So was his underling. And we are paying their taxpayersubsidized government pensions today. This is an extraordinary case, but it is all too typical of that culture of corruption at ins. Cspan why did you write your book . Guest why did i write my book . Well, september 11 was obviously a galvanizing event for me, seeing the lapses in our immigration system that allowed the september 11 hijackers to come in, exploit our weak enforcement, work underground and live here comfortably. And that is a theme that ive been talking a lot about over my career in journalism, for more than a decade. I started out in los angeles, and its hard to ignore the negative consequences of lax Immigration Enforcement when youre in the middle of it in los angeles. So over the years, you know, ive written a number of stories about so many aspects of the immigration system from top to bottom the front door, the back door, the side door. And then theres a personal aspect of it, too. I often talk about how i myself am the child of legal immigrants who came here from the philippines. And one of the themes that ive always talked about is something that theyve reminded me of almost every day since i was old enough to understand it, which is that entry into this country and residence in this country, and ultimately, citizenship in this country is an absolute privilege, and it ought not to be treated as some sort of natural right or entitlement. But over the years, our immigration system has abandoned that principle. And thats how we find ourselves with so many problems that were dealing today. Thats how al qaeda operatives over the past decade, nearly 50 of them and i document it in my book have been able to, you know, entrench themselves in the american mainstream, come here as temporary tourists and then overstay without consequences, come across the borders, not get caught, and even if they do get caught, oftentimes are let free, despite the ins and the state department knowing that there are suspected or known terrorists living among us and doing god knows what kind of business cspan a couple of weeks ago, when washington was going through the sniper incident, you pointed out something early in the discussion, before they were caught, that nobody else did and i saw your name constantly in all the columns about this young malvo kid, 17yearold who was the accomplice in this thing, or at least accused to be. When did you first get an instinct that this may not be a white male that was doing all this . Guest that was it was october 11 that i came out with a column disputing the angry white male theory which had been propounded at length and ad nauseam in the media. And if you just look at even at the past couple of weeks, when that first broke, there were a number of stories that suggested that perhaps it was a nonwhite and that perhaps it was a muslim extremist because there were many stories about black muslim extremist converts in this country who were engaged in target practice and gathering weapons and also lebanese nationals. One guy, statiyeh if im pronouncing that correctly in oregon, who was connected to a suspected al qaeda cell, also guilty of some immigration violations there, by the way, which is, you know, more along the lines of the book but you know, i just put it out there as a countertheory, and you know, people kind of looked at i mean, i got so many emails calling me a racist, when all i was saying was we ought to be open to the possibility and of course, that possibility was seen to be correct, so. Cspan but also, the fact that he was from jamaica you wrote about early. Guest yes. Thats right. And it turns out and i broke a little story about it recently that lee malvo was an illegal alien from jamaica. And according to ins documents that i obtained, he came here from jamaica through haiti and then on to some sort of cargo ship with his mother, who was also an illegal alien, and offloaded in miami somewhere, some authorized port. This underscores a great theme of the book, which is our continued vulnerability at our borders. I mean, we have thousands of miles of unguarded coastline, let alone land borders, where nobody has any control over whos coming into this country. At a time, in a postseptember 11 environment, when more than ever, we need to know and screen whos coming into this country, lee malvo and his mother were able to jump off a ship. The first thing that we did, embrace them with warm welcome arms. The mother got a job at a local restaurant in fort myers, florida, and lee malvo was able to enroll in the local Public School system. Cspan let me read you a sentence you wrote. For intransigent university pimps, Homeland Defense remains a nuisance, not a duty. For intransigent cant even say that university pimps who are you talking about . Guest im talking about the Higher Education lobby, which for decades has been at the forefront of undermining a comprehensive tracking data base for foreign student visa holders. And our government has known for many, many years that this is a huge problem, that we allow hundreds of thousands of foreign students to come into this country, and we have absolutely no way of tracking, first of all, whether or not theyre actually enrolling in the schools they say theyre enrolling in, that theyre studying what they are supposed to be studying, and that theyre leaving when theyre supposed to leave. And the alarm bells about this go back to 1979, during the iranian hostage crisis. Some bright bureaucrat in government said, oh, gosh, you know, weve got this huge situation in iran. Maybe we should find out what all the foreign students weve admitted from iran are doing in our country now. And during the entire 444day crisis that year, we couldnt find them. And to this day, we cannot do that nineteen ninetythree comes along, the World Trade Center the first World Trade Center conspiracy, and we find out we discover that eyad ismoil, one of the conspirators, was a foreign student visa holder who simply dropped out of the school that, you know, sponsored him to come into this country. And congress says, we really ought to get a handle on this problem. So by 1996, there had been a law passed to get the system in place. And theres a bunch of acronyms, and i have them all in the book if people are interested in knowing what they stand for. But the system at the time was called cipris. Again, it was just, like, a basic tracking mechanism. And it was passed into law. So we were supposed to have this in place, you know, within a matter of a couple of years. But those university pimps that i talk about, the Higher Education lobby, worked very hard with some willing members of congress, both republican and democrat, to sabotage that system. They complained about the administrative burden. They brought all of these foreign students to talk about what an invasion of privacy it was to put this simple information about, you know, where they are and how many years they were here and when they graduated. So it was iced. September 11, 2001, comes along, and we find out that hani hanjour is a student visa holder who should have enrolled in an english Language School in oakland. Cspan who was he . Guest hani hanjour is one of the september key september 11 hijackers, got his visa in saudi arabia. But again, like eyad ismoil, like so many unknown possible terrorists who are out there who came in here on student visas, we had no idea he who he was until he, you know, flew that plane into a building on september 11, 2001. So again, theres this resurgence in congressman. Oh, we really, really should get that tracking system in place. This time, those university pimps go along with it, say they understand that this is a we live in a different time. They set a deadline of january, 2003, to have the system in place. Well, just a few months ago, we hear from the ins and the Inspector Generals Office of the Justice Department that that deadline will still not be met. Cspan why . Guest again, all of these same reasons that weve got huge lobbies that put profits over National Security, despite the death toll of people who have died as a what i think is a direct result of lax Immigration Enforcement on the part of our federal government. And theres just a huge paralysis to get these things moving. Its not a matter of a lack of technology, certainly. You know, we live in the most technologically advanced country in the world, and i point out, for example, that our federal government is able to efficiently run a huge data base on american citizens, in terms of gun registration. So certainly, its not a technological problem. It is a political problem. And the bureaucracy inertia and these lobbies that are incredibly powerful have continued to endanger the american public. There is no reason why that tracking system shouldnt be up and working and comprehensive and mandatory by the deadline that they set. Cspan you say a couple figures i want to ask you about one, that there are 600,000 foreign students but a million foreign student visas that have been issued to people who are still here . Guest yes. Correct. Cspan whats the difference in that figure . What happened to the 400,000 . Guest oh, we dont know where they are. Cspan we have no idea where they are. Guest no. And that is again, that just that shows you that the urgent need to get this thing this tracking system up in running and in place. Cspan you also point out that the University Business gets 12 billion out of the foreign student do the foreign students pay their own way, or do they get scholarship money over here . Guest thats possible. I didnt really look into that specifically. But in a lot of cases, foreign governments kick in a little bit. But i mean, we are talking about a number or most of them are wealthy students who can pay their own way. And that is why it is such a huge cash cow. The other part of it, of course, is that a lot of these foreign students offer cheap teaching labor for the universities, and they are reluctant to give that source of cheap labor up. Cspan how many illegal aliens do we have in the United States . Guest theres always a number of estimates flying around, and i use the range of 9 million to 11 million, and i footnote it in the book to give sources of where those various estimates come from. But again, i mean, we really dont know, and its possible that even the high figure that i quote is a lowball figure. Cspan how many kinds of visas can someone get . Guest there is a heinz 57 variety of visa programs that i talk about. And whats important here is that a number of these visa and green card programs are incredibly vulnerable to exploitation by terrorists, al qaeda terrorists. And one of the visa programs i talk about, which is very relevant these days, is the diversity visa lottery. This is administered by the state department, and it is exactly what it sounds like, a random giveaway of green cards to people from around the world. And the whole idea of this program, which was the brainchild of teddy kennedy, was to give people who were coming from countries that are lowimmigrationrate countries a leg up, essentially an affirmative Action Program for lowimmigrating nations. And his specific interest, kennedys specific interest, was to help illegal irish immigrants because illegal aliens, not just people who are applying legally, are eligible for the program. So kennedy pushed it through, and president bush the first signed it into law. And over the years, first of all, irish immigrants are often not eligible for it because they come out with this, you know, convoluted calculation every year about whos eligible. But its morphed into this Diversity Program for many people who come from terroristsponsoring nations. And i talk about some of the people who have benefited from it, like heshem hadayet, who was the Los Angeles International airport gunman who killed two people on july 4, 2002. Should have never been in this country. He had overstayed a temporary tourist visa. Again, thats that typical problem of overstaying a visa and having no consequences and no tracking system to alert immigration officials when people do. He had applied for asylum and had been rejected. And after the book came out, the New York Times later reported that his asylum application was actually considered, even though the ins knew of alleged terrorist ties that he had had in his homeland in egypt. So theres another huge loophole, the asylum loophole, which i talk about in my book. But to get to the diversity visa lottery, his wife applied, you know, put in her application, and just like at the 7eleven, her number came up on the lotto and so not only did she win a green card, but her husband got one and all of her kids got green cards. And he was actually on his way to american citizenship when the murders at lax occurred. Cspan how does the visa work where you invest a certain amount of money in this country and you get a quick visa . Guest right. These investor visa programs i think are just totally mindboggling to me, that again, that we would put something so precious as entry into this country up for sale. And i talk about many investor visa programs e programs they fall under the e visa category that allow, for example, wealthy middle easterners, businessmen, to put up a down payment, you know, on a business in this country and then buy their way over here. And oftentimes, they can take their employees, their immediate relatives, bring the whole family and business over here. And theyre incredibly fraudridden, and its a really underscrutinized problem because, you know, theres supposed to be some National Interest in these programs. American businesses are supposed to benefit somehow, with seed money from these foreign investors. But a lot of cases that are huge scams because there are middlemen, many of them often former ins officials involved in skimming money from the schemes, lowering the amount thats actually paid down to get into this country. And i think that, again, this is a National Security risk because, you know, we know of a lot of deeppocketed osama bin ladenconnected operatives who could take advantage of it. I mean, its a little convoluted in the application form, but again, you know, my argument of the book is, i mean, why make it as easy as possible for these foreign menaces to get into the country . And i think what we really need to do is systematically scrutinize each and every one of these visa pro