The Iraqis Are Coming, the Iraqis Are Coming!

Fresh on the heels of the Senate's vote to cut off debate on the Bush-Kennedy comprehensive immigration bill (AMNESTY), comes word that the first batch of Iraqi refugees will soon be landing on America's shores.

Amman, Jordan - Adnan Abbas – with his poor English, four young daughters, and little money to speak of – shrugs when told that making a new life in the US will be hard.

"I know that a new country, new language, is difficult and that America isn't going to say, 'Welcome, Adnan, here's a million dollars,' " he says. "But life in Iraq? That's impossible. We're one of the luckiest families in the world."

On Tuesday, the Abbas family will take their five small suitcases, close the door on the small flat they've rented for the past year in Amman, Jordan, and start a journey that will eventually taken them to Lansing, Mich. They are in the vanguard of what's likely to become – if the history of American wars is anything to go by – the latest wave of immigrants to have an impact on the demographics of the US.

In February, the US agreed to accept 7,000 Iraqi refugees this year, a large jump over the fewer than 700 Iraqis accepted by the US in the first three years of the war but a drop in the ocean when measured against the estimated 2 million Iraqis who have fled the country since the war began. About 2,000 of those Iraqis coming this year, say refugee officials, will start their lives anew in Michigan.

These are people forced to migrate from a culture that is completely alien to America's, headed for a growing and insular colony of their co-ethnics in America's heartland. Worse, these are people from a culture whose more extreme factions have declared war on America (and the West in general) and already drawn much blood. Finally, these refugees can at least partly blame America for the fate that has befallen them. Regardless of their opinions of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, if it were not for the American invasion, they would not have lost their friends, relatives and homes and been forced to flee. It is not unreasonable to assume that at least some of them deeply resent America for what has happened and will be fairly easily radicalized - or that some are already radicalized and will seek to radicalize American Muslims as soon as they establish themselves in Michigan.

For an administration who constantly claims that the U.S. is under siege and the specter of imminent terrorist attack, accepting these immigrants is lunacy. Unless, of course, that administration doesn't really believe its own rhetoric, or simply just doesn't care. Nor does the administration seem to realize that accepting this "wave" of Iraqi refugees is an admission of the horrendous failure of the Iraq War.

The consequences of the Bush's open borders policy with regard to immigration and his disastrous war in Iraq will damage America for decades to come. But, the president, just doesn't seem to give a damn about the American people - something he demonstrated amply when villifying them for rejecting his amnesty deal.