Better Plan: Shut Off Immigration Completely

The United States should temporarily halt immigration from certain high-risk countries — and perhaps from all over the world — a former federal prosecutor who won a conviction against the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing said Tuesday.

Speaking on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” Andrew McCarthy said the goal should be to figure out a way to allow immigration by pro-Western Muslims and block those who harbor extremist views. But that will take time and must be resolved first.

“I would pause all immigration across the board if we couldn’t make sensible choices like that,” said McCarthy, who now is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. “If people said that, you know, that’s religious discrimination, then I would say fine, end all of it until we can fix it. Immigration is a discretionary act of the country. Nobody has a right to come to the United States.”

McCarthy pointed out that Sen. Marco Rubio. R-Fla., and others routinely call immigration into the United States a “broken” system.

“I say, ‘Well, fine, fix the system and then get back to me,’” he said. “But in the meantime, why are we letting people in through a broken system? What sense does that make?”

McCarthy’s comments come in the wake of Monday’s proposal by Donald Trump to block entry to all Muslims, including tourists and U.S. citizens abroad. McCarthy said he is concerned that Trump’s proposal makes it easier for opponents to tag him — and others who share concerns about Muslim extremism — as bigoted.

“The problem is Trump is — I’m not sure how much of a grasp he has on this fire that he’s playing with,” he said.

McCarthy, who wrote a book last year laying out the case for the impeachment of President Obama for his failure to enforce immigration laws, said the politically acceptable opinion is to stop jihadis from coming to America.

“That’s not the problem,” he said. “The problem is if you let Islamic supremacists in the country, they form Shariah enclaves as they have all throughout Europe. And that is the atmosphere in which radicalization occurs.”

Concerns over applying “religious tests” to immigration are misplaced, McCarthy said.

“The big thing, Laura, is that Islam, strictly speaking, is not merely a religion,” he said. “So everybody’s who’s in an uproar on the basis of thinking this is unconstitutionally applying a religious test to Islam is assuming that Islam is a religion just like other religions that we’re familiar with in the West.”

McCarthy said the first Muslims he met were patriotic, pro-Western Muslims who helped him make the case against the so-called blind sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman in 1995. They are the Muslims America wants, he said. But he added that many Muslims do not recognize a division between spiritual and political life.

“That is basically antithetical to our Constitution,” he said. “It can’t be that we can’t figure out a way to keep the pro-Western Muslims in and on our side, and keep these Shariah supremacists out.”

Of the Republicans running for president, McCarthy said, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been the strongest on immigration, including the “insanity” of bringing in millions of immigrants to compete with Americans for jobs in an economy where wages have been stagnant.

“I also think he ought to be asked hard questions about how he moved from his former position to where he is now,” he said. “We all need to be satisfied that all of these conversions — we’re delighted to see them, but we want to make sure they’re authentic.”