In the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack, Republican politicians didn’t cover themselves in glory:
Remember the story about the drunk who loses his car keys in the forest but looks for them under a lamp post because that’s where the light is? Conservative calls to fight terrorism in the wake of the Boston attack by ditching immigration reform make just as much sense.
The difference is that the drunk’s efforts were merely futile. Conservative efforts are also dangerous because they ignore the security threat that Big Government poses.
No sooner was it revealed that the two bombers were Russian emigres of Chechen heritage than Iowa’s Sen. Charles Grassley declared that the attacks show that America needs to “beef up security checks,” not let more newcomers in. Rep. Steven King, also a committed restrictionist from Iowa, demanded we pause and look at “the big picture” on immigration, as if seven years since the last failed effort at reform is not enough.
Most disappointing was Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky’s switcheroo. Last month, he distanced himself from his party’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric. This week he counseled that we rethink visas for foreign students, never mind that neither of the Brothers Tsarnaev ever obtained one.
None of this, however, would have prevented the attack given that the Tsarnaev brothers obtained asylum around 2002 at the ages of 8 and 15 along with their parents, fleeing persecution in Russia. Reportedly, the older brother Tamerlan, a boxing champion, became radicalized only eight years later, after his mother, not seriously religious then, reminded him of his Islamic faith’s strictures to wean him off alcohol and drugs. When he met his wife, Katherine Russell, at a nightclub, he was a nominally pious, somewhat confused young adult with few signs that he’d become a raving zealot.
