In response to territorial losses, the Islamic State plans to send more guerrilla teams to infiltrate and attack American cities.

The Islamic State (ISIS) has been under pressure both from an Iranian-led ground offensive and from American special operations raids. In order to punish America for the latter, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief John Brennan told Congress, ISIS is using America’s lack of immigration enforcement to move teams into the country for attacks.

“ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West,” Brennan said, using another acronym for the group. He said IS probably is working to smuggle them into countries, perhaps among refugee flows or through legitimate means of travel…. “Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach,” he said. “In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”

Terrorist ‘watch lists’ turn out to be almost useless as an answer to this threat, reports the Washington Post. This is because there has been so much immigration to the West lately, police simply do not have anything like the manpower they would need to keep an eye on all the existing cases. As new refugee flows flood Western states, those watch lists will balloon still further.

The United Kingdom would need to devote sixty thousand officers to full time surveillance to keep an eye on all those on its current watch lists. That is close to half of its total police force, leaving very few officers to do anything else — traffic, investigation of crimes, anything. America, which has more than eight times as many potential terrorists on our watch lists, would need half a million police officers doing nothing else but watching them. Those resources simply do not exist.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama has just agreed to resettle an additional ten thousand Syrian refugees. He has made no provision for the police that would be needed to ensure that they were not ISIS infiltrators. Indeed, he has not been pushing for increased resources for monitoring the 25,000 potential terrorists on existing watch lists. Instead, he is increasing the burden on an already overwhelmed security apparatus here at home. He is doing so while his CIA chief warns that these very refugee flows are a likely vector for ISIS infiltration.

Estimates are that it costs ten times more to move refugees into the West instead of supporting them in neighboring countries. That is counting the cost only of supporting the refugees, not the additional police and security services needed to watch them. The move to admit more refugees in Western countries, especially the United States, cannot be justified by cost. The decision to move refugees to America is a decision to pay these vastly inflated rates. Why spend extra money to bring people into America whom our security services already cannot afford to watch? The decision is a very strange one, especially given the warnings from Obama’s own CIA director.