The Dangers and Frauds of Diversity

The INS didn't learn any lessons from its embarrassing approval of student visas for the two dead terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade towers on September 11. The INS fouled up again when it granted "shore leave visa waivers" in Norfolk to four Pakistani crewmen who immediately disappeared and can't be found.

INS Commissioner James Ziglar now says, "The days of looking the other way are over." But why weren't they over by sundown on 9/11?

We are not reassured by the excuse that the INS lacks a computerized visa system, or by the reassignment of several low-level bureaucrats for "mistakes." The situation must be really serious when even Dan Rather gave a top-of-the-news slot last week to Attorney General John Ashcroft saying he can't find more than 1,000 illegal aliens he is trying to question.

The General Accounting Office reported on February 15 that immigration fraud is now so great that it "threatens the integrity of the legal immigration system," and that fraud in the process is "pervasive and significant." The GAO predicted that immigration fraud "will increase as smugglers and other criminal enterprises use fraud as another means of bringing illegal aliens, including criminal aliens, into the country."

The Bush Administration has yet to clamp down on the promiscuous issuance of student visas, even from countries that sponsor terrorism. The most visible sign of "homeland security" is the harassment of old ladies who travel on planes; I've had to remove my high-heeled shoes for intensive inspection five times since 9/11.

The elite colleges and universities lobby aggressively against clamping down on student visas because the foreign students are so profitable. They swell the numbers of graduate students who then bolster the universities' applications for federal handouts for "research." For example, Boston University now has 5,240 foreign students, researchers or professors.

It's a well-kept secret how much money the elite colleges receive outright from the federal government, in addition to billions of dollars in all sorts of student financial aid. Here is a sampling of the latest available annual figures: Johns Hopkins $793 million, Stanford $391 million, Harvard $349 million, Washington University (St. Louis) $347 million, MIT $301 million, Yale $300 million, Emory $248 million, Cornell $247 million, Duke $218 million, and Northwestern $204 million.

At least 40 percent of foreign students in the United States currently receive financial aid, and major colleges recently announced that they will substantially increase aid to foreign students. Think about that when the students in your family are going into debt because of exorbitant tuition rates.

Foreign students on untracked visas fit right in with the prevailing college ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity. As enforced by the campus thought police, multiculturalism means that all cultures (except our Western Judeo-Christian civilization) are equally good, and diversity means preferring immigrants from non-Western countries.

For example, the 1990 immigration law includes the Ted Kennedy- sponsored Diversity Immigrant Lottery. This lottery brings in immigrants who are 95 per cent from non-Western countries (England is not eligible), including all the nations listed as state sponsors of international terrorism (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Sudan).

The Luntz Research Companies conducted a survey this spring of the opinions of the liberal arts and social science faculty at Ivy League colleges and universities. The results explain the ideological indoctrination rampant on campuses today and prove that the colleges' sanctimonious accolades to diversity are dishonest.

Only 3% identified themselves as Republican, while 57% admitted they are Democrats. Only 6% identified themselves as conservative, while 64% said they are liberal and 23% moderate.

Here is how they voted in the 2000 election: 61% for Al Gore, 5% for Ralph Nader, 6% for George W. Bush, and 28% either did not vote or refused to answer. To the question "who do you think has been the best President in the past 40 years?", 26% chose Bill Clinton, 17% John F. Kennedy, 15% Lyndon Johnson, 13% Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan came in a poor fifth at 4%.

David Horowitz, who commissioned the survey, calls the biased faculty "institutional leftism." He says it is unfair for institutions that receive hundreds of millions of dollars and subsidies from the taxpayers to be so partisan in their hiring practices.

Another example of how pious platitudes about diversity in academia are a fraud is the mandatory student-fee system. At most colleges, this system puts an enormous pot of money (on some campuses up to a million dollars a year) into the hands of student leftists who allocate it mostly to leftwing causes.

The only bright spot on the college front is the federal court decision last year in Fry v. Board of Regents, which held the student- fee system at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in violation of the First Amendment because "it fails to conform to the principle of viewpoint neutrality in allocating fees." The University was enjoined from compelling students to pay those portions of student fees that fund expressive activities to which they object.