DHS Cracks Down on Latest Threat to National Security: Austrian Interns

This L.A. story comes, amusingly, by way of the New York Times. Apparently American immigration officials, who will let anyone walk across the border illegally -- be it laborers, strange Euros who crash Ferraris, or terrorists -- is using all its bureaucratic might to stop the real danger to national security: Austrian teens who want to intern at Holocaust remembrance organizations:

Officials with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust said the visa application for a prospective Austrian intern had been rejected twice since May and was on a final appeal. The museum was informed by the immigration authorities that the program was not considered a legitimate cultural exchange....

“We really feel like David versus Goliath here,” said Mark Rothman, executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. “We are trying to bring someone into the country who wants to do good and he is screened out.”...

At the Museum of Tolerance, also in Los Angeles, a recent intern’s visa process took six months, making it impossible for him to complete the yearlong program. The museum’s director, Liebe Geft, said it would continue seeking the Austrian interns.

This is the flip-side of America's failed immigration policy, the side that gets much less attention than the vast number of immigrants who enter illegally each year. It is the maddeningly difficult system we have in place for letting honest, decent, hard-working people enter the country legally. Many just give up and stay out. Many more, desperate to feed their families, enter illegally. The result is a broken system that can't meaningfully monitor entries at all, as well as an underground economy and network that give safe harbor to criminals and terrorists. We punish the innocent, encourage criminality, and make things easier for those who would do us harm.

Bottom line: We''ll never be able to rein in illegal immigration until we're willing to expand legal immigration.