Canadian mass immigration program is now a U.S. national security threat requiring a muscular diplomatic offensive
By Todd Bensman on October 1, 2024
By now, many Americans are aware of the elevated national security risk of terrorist infiltrations over the U.S. southwest border, a byproduct of Biden-Harris administration policies that brought about the worst mass migration crisis in U.S. history starting in 2021 and largely neutralized longstanding border counterterrorism programs.
Publicity and Republican campaigning have centered on, for instance, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions of the record-smashing 400 southern border-jumpers who flagged on the FBI terrorism watch list through July 2024, 99 more accidentally released, the round-up of eight Tajikistani crossers in an FBI counterterrorism sting, a manhunt for 400 released migrants brought in by an ISIS smuggling network, and too many other troubling incidents to recount here.
But an alarming new terrorism prosecution in New York State now demands that American attention and diplomatic pressure be turned on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented mass legal immigration policies and the resulting spike in illegal crossings southward across the U.S. border, as my colleague Art Arthur has recently detailed. (See “Northern Border Migration Surges, as DHS Struggles to Keep Up”.)
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen legally issued a Canadian student visa in June 2023, now stands accused in U.S. federal court of plotting an illegal-smuggler-assisted northern border crossing to carry out a mass shooting of Jews in New York City to celebrate with blood the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Khan hoped it would go down in history as “the largest U.S. attack since 9/11”.
“We are going to nyc (sic) to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint. “Even if we don’t attack an event, we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”
His was among the record-breaking 400,000 foreign student visas Canada issued in 2023 — the third record-breaking year of those — and also an additional 1.5 million foreign workers the Trudeau government brought into Canada as a new labor force since 2021 from dozens of nations.
In a joint undercover sting operation with the FBI, Canadian authorities on September 4 arrested Khan just 12 miles from the U.S. border on his way by car to meet the (real) smuggler with a pocketful of cash for payment (pictured above) and a plan to attack Jewish “Chabad” centers in Brooklyn. An extradition proceeding is planned to bring Khan from detention in Quebec to stand trial in New York on a U.S. terrorism indictment.
A Blaring Wake-Up Siren
Although U.S. media coverage of it has been thin, the Khan case is a blaring wake-up siren for far more than just the highly salient revelation that a hard-core jihadist legally emigrated on a Canadian student visa in June 2023 and soon began planning to employ the terrorist travel tactic of an illegal northern border crossing into the United States.
Although there have been some notable terrorist crossings from Canada, these occurred in the security-lax pre-9/11 attacks era of the 1990s. Terrorist crossings from Canada have become virtually unknown in the decades since 9/11, especially compared to their southern border crossings, because of the much-tougher post-9-11 counterterrorism security environment between the two countries.
And Canada’s geography.
Starkly unlike Mexico, illegal land entry approaches from the rest of the world into Canada simply do not exist, and so foreign jihadists wishing to get into Canada for a U.S. border crossing would have to do so by defrauding legal visa systems, defeating their much-improved new counterterrorism vetting systems to enter by commercial air or maybe by ship.
The dynamic changed dramatically in very recent years, however, when Canada’s progressive government in 2021 embarked on a purposeful program to import a new foreign national workforce in the hundreds of thousands per year from all over the world. This clearly strained our northern neighbor’s post-9/11 ability to thoroughly vet those entering for terrorism ties or predilection for violent extremism.
The degradation of security vetting due to such high numbers coincided with a new phenomenon that held obvious national interest implications for the United States that few have spoken of.
Thousands have clearly used the Canadian labor-importation program as a lily pad on their way to cross the U.S. border and claim asylum using a family reunification loophole I have written about at some length. (See “Canadian Health Care System Staggering Under Trudeau Mass Immigration Plan” and “The Canadian Policy Behind the Surge of Illegals – and Mexican Cartel Operatives – at the Northern Border”.) It goes like this:
After 9/11, the two countries signed a loophole-riddled Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) not to accept each other’s asylum rejects or new claims from those who’d first landed in the other country. But the loophole in play now allows the U.S. to entertain asylum claims of those crossing from Canada if they can prove to have a family member in the United States.
They get to stay and pursue the claim if so, suggesting a scam is underway where fresh Canadian immigrants coming in under the Trudeau program can exploit the STCA family reunification get-to-stay-in-U.S. asylum loophole.
The numbers of those from dozens of countries caught making Illegal northern border crossings into the U.S. — no doubt coming for the STCA family-ties loophole — coincides with the massive Canadian program’s huge numbers.
So far this year, U.S. Border Patrol’s apprehensions of a multinational crowd of foreign nationals have doubled from 2023 to more than 20,000 in 2024. That is still a tiny fraction of southern border crossings, but enough of an increase that U.S. Border Patrol has had to redeploy forces up there.
Khan’s fortuitous arrest — and other recent terror events in Canada involving the new arrivals — should serve as a wake-up call that Prime Minister Trudeau’s mass legal immigration program endangers Americans to an extent that has not been seen in the post-9/11 era and must be vigorously addressed.
No U.S. Response
Rarely, if ever, have either the Biden-Harris administration or U.S. media outlets linked the rise in illegal border-crossing entries from Canada to the Trudeau government’s hugely increased legal immigration program. But that grace period has gone on too long and must end.
The Biden-Harris government is not on record publicly complaining about the rise in illegal crossings resulting from the Trudeau program, let alone the national security implications of the new-ish phenomenon.
Khan’s ability to slip through Canada’s post-9/11 security vetting protocols, despite that he apparently was already bent on conducting violent jihad, is not why this is now a clear-cut American matter. It is only the latest in a series of six Canadian terror plots police have foiled just since October 7, 2023, some of which involved recent immigrants the Trudeau government brought in and some from vetting failures.
Even though they happened in Canada, they still place the United States in harm’s way and justify a new and robust U.S. diplomatic pressure campaign to force change on both sides.
One typically egregious example occurred in July when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested 62-year-old Egyptian Mostafa Eldidi and his 26-year-old son, also named Mostafa Eldidi, for an alleged advanced-stage plot to carry out a “violent, serious attack” in Toronto. The elder Eldidi arrived in Canada in 2018 and received citizenship in May 2024 under lenient Trudeau government policies. That was only one month before authorities discovered his terror plot, despite flagging for security indicators and evidence that he allegedly assaulted a prisoner for ISIS in a third country during 2015, an incident ISIS filmed and posted on its social media accounts. Those facts were readily available for Canadian security screeners to find, if they were looking.
The younger Eldidi apparently studied for a time at Iowa Wesleyan University in the United States on a student visa after Canada denied his student visa application in 2019. A year later he crossed the Canadian land border and asked for asylum, which was approved under the lenient Trudeau policies.
Domestically, the Trudeau government is already facing a powerful backlash for the vetting failures that we know about. But the government’s reaction has been tepid; in the wake of the U.S. border-crossing plot involving an immigrant student, the Trudeau government says it will reduce those visas from 400,000 to a still-record-breaking 360,000 next year.
In the U.S., all of this has been slow to catch on, but it does seem to be catching on a little.
In May, the Trudeau government announcement that it would increase the number of Gazans allowed into Canada. This prompted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and five other Republican senators to send a letter of objection requesting “heightened scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry”.
American Democrats should join them on this most bipartisan of matters after the November election, no matter who wins.
The first order of business should be the use of economic leverage to force Canada to reduce the numbers very substantially and still enhance its security screening, not either/or, so that terrorists can’t be there to sneak over.
The second order of business is that the U.S. must insist on renegotiating the STCA, closing the family reunification loophole and also the one that allows illegal crossers going north out of the United States by land to still apply for Canadian asylum — and win.
The responsibility for fixing the Trudeau problem should not be left only to Canadian conservatives. The next U.S. administration, whoever wins on November 5, will have to seriously focus on this before the next border-crossing Khan succeeds in his deadly plans.
Topics: National Security
Link to Article Here:
https://cis.org/Bensman/Meanwhile-Northern-Border-Jihadist-Attack-New-York-Thwarted
