The devastating truth that's not being discussed by politicians or journalists.

Failures of the immigration system have a profound impact, exacerbating nearly every challenge and threat that America and Americans confront on a day-to-day basis. However, the true significance of immigration is rarely, if ever, discussed by politicians or by journalists upon whom we depend for information.

Unbridled greed and hunger for power lead the list of factors that motivate many politicians to ignore this side of the immigration debate. Journalists may be ideologues or may be controlled by the executives of their news organizations who are impacted by greed as well.

On June 18, 2015 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “Theft By Deception: The Immigration Con Game: How politicians are robbing citizens of access to the American Dream” in which I laid out some of the ways that so many profit from the failures of border security and failure to enforce our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States.

The premise of my November 29, 2015 article for the Daily Caller, “Immigration: A Matter Of Integrity – Or A Lack Thereof,” was that the immigration system’s lack of integrity simply parallels the lack of integrity of all too many of our politicians who write our laws, provide or deny funding for programs and devise strategies to either effectively carry out various governmental missions or seek to obstruct missions – often while providing the false illusions that everything that can be done is being done.

Organizations such as the United States Chamber of Commerce seek to flood America with a virtual army of cheap foreign workers, and not only the illegal aliens who do the lowest paying jobs that require little in the way of formal education and training, but, increasingly, highly skilled foreign workers who may, in fact, have advanced degrees.

The Chamber of Commerce also seeks to greatly increase the number of foreign tourists and foreign students. My September 3, 2015 FrontPage Magazine article, “Keeping Track of Visa Violators,” exposed how the Chamber of Commerce is a major force behind the continual expansion of the dangerous and ill-logical Visa Waiver Program that should have been terminated after the attacks of 9⁄ 11 .

The 9⁄ 11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel detailed numerous examples of instances where terrorists not only made use of visa and immigration benefit fraud to enter the United States, but to also embed themselves in the United States. Page 47 of this report noted:

Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.

Page 54 contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9⁄ 11 attack.

Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9⁄ 11 . This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.

This paragraph is found on page 98 of the report, under the title “Immigration Benefits”:

“Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.”

A massive legalization program for millions of illegal aliens would not only run contrary to commonsense, but obviously run contrary to the findings and recommendations of the 9⁄ 11 Commission – even as a succession of leaders of various law enforcement and intelligence agencies have traipsed into hearing rooms on Capitol Hill to deliver warnings about how ISIS and other terror organizations are determined to carry out deadly attacks within the borders of the United States this year.

As disconcerting as this is, here is what no one has discussed: What any sort of massive program to provide lawful status to unknown millions of illegal aliens would truly mean.

For years we have been told that the number of illegal aliens in the United States has remained essentially static at 11 or perhaps 12 million, even after huge numbers of illegal aliens continue to enter the United States, including the unaccompanied minors from Latin America. News reports have noted that annually roughly 500,000 aliens who enter the United States through international airports remain in the United States beyond their authorized period of admission.

Aliens who are lawfully admitted into the United States, even those who have been granted lawful immigrant status and issued Alien Registration Receipt Cards (Green Cards), become subject to removal (deportation) when they are convicted of committing certain crimes. Undoubtedly, some of the one million immigrants that are admitted into the United States each year ultimately run afoul of the law and become subject to removal.

Yet the number of removable aliens, as reported by the media, never increases.

If you believe these lies, I have unemployment statistics to sell you. Perhaps Bernie Madoff is being kept busy in his jail cell “cooking the books” for DHS and for the Labor Department.

When the Reagan administration pushed for the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 (IRCA), which, for the very first time provided penalties for unscrupulous employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens and also provided for a massive amnesty program, it was estimated that some one million illegal aliens would “emerge from the shadows.”

By the time the bureaucratic dust settled, the actual number of illegal aliens who participated in that supposedly one time amnesty program swelled to more than 3.5 million.

There are two reasons the number grew at least three-fold. The process by which estimates were derived was flawed. Additionally, it is likely that many of the illegal aliens who were granted lawful status actually entered the United States long after the cutoff date and falsely claimed to have been present in the United States by the required date.

If this happened today, the number of illegal aliens who would participate could easily soar to well over 30 million.

Playing the “compassion card,” politicians and journalists assert that it is reasonable to permit millions of aliens who have been living in the U.S. for many years to be given lawful status.

In reality, it would be virtually impossible to determine how long an alien who entered the United States by evading the inspections process has been present in the United States. Additionally, because they are undocumented, national security would be undermined inasmuch as there would be no way to know their true identities.

The sky, would quite literally, be the limit. There would be absolutely no way to conduct any interviews or any field investigations. This program would devastate national security.

As for getting these aliens “out of the shadows,” there would be no effort or resources to seek those aliens who know that they would not qualify to participate in the program because of their criminal histories or documented ties to terror organizations.

We are only getting started, however.

Each and every legalized alien would be given the authority to immediately file applications to bring his/her spouse and minor children to the United States. Remember that citizens of Third World countries often have huge families where it is not uncommon for a family to have a half-dozen children, or even more.

What would happen if only half of all of the 30 million newly legalized aliens had their spouses and children join them in the United States? Now how many additional tens of million of immigrants might be welcomed into the United States?

What this would do to our nation’s economy, to our nation’s capability to effectively educate our children? How would this impact our already beleaguered healthcare system?

Consider how this would impact the environment, burdening critical infrastructure of cities across our nation. Public transportation systems, water supplies and the capacity to generate electricity would all face unimaginable increased burdens.

The immigration system that cannot effectively screen immigrants today would absolutely implode under this stress created by greedy and incompetent politicians. Criminals and terrorists would have a field day, easily gaming the system that is already dysfunctional and lacking integrity.

It has been said that we must “look before we leap.” Americans may not be leaping, but we are most certainly being pushed. We are being pushed off the immigration cliff.

We must push back. The future of our nation and our children hang in the balance.