Pubdate: Tue, 11 Oct 2005
Source: St. Petersburg Times (Russia)
Copyright: 2005 The St. Petersburg Times
Contact:  http://www.times.spb.ru/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/420
Author: Dmitry Rogozin
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Note: Dmitry Rogozin is chairman of the Rodina party and a State Duma 
deputy.  He contributed this piece to The St. Petersburg Times.

THE DANGER OF POROUS BORDERS

One of the benefits of being Russian is that there is never a lack of 
constructive advice on sensitive social matters like immigration and 
ethnic and religious tolerance - not only from Russia's own liberals, 
but from friendly foreign countries and international nongovernmental 
organizations that are glad to instruct Russia on its duty to move 
toward the democratic standards of an open society.

Russia need only adopt advanced Western models, they insist, and all 
will be well.

Then again, maybe not. Recently, the European Monitoring Center on 
Racism and Xenophobia made the following statement in a report on 
anti-Jewish violence in EU countries: "France, Belgium, the 
Netherlands and the U.K. witnessed rather serious anti-Semitic 
incidents such as numerous physical attacks and insults directed 
against Jews and the vandalism of Jewish institutions - synagogues, 
shops, cemeteries." Evidently, even some of Europe's 
longest-established democracies are not immune to such ugly behavior.

It turns out that few of the responsible parties are indigenous 
French, Belgians, Dutch and Britons. The vast majority of the 
perpetrators are first-or second-generation immigrants from Muslim 
countries, many of them illegally taking advantage of lax border controls.

Rejecting assimilation of the languages, traditions and values of the 
countries that have welcomed them - and despite the fact that they 
are often supported at public expense - some of them find the allure 
of crime, even jihad, irresistible.

Although Jews often are singled out, they are not the only victims.

France has become home to Muslim ghettos where polygamy is openly 
practiced and sharia law enforced in defiance of secular law. Muslim 
girls who reject arranged marriages or the wearing of headscarves are 
denounced as whores and risk gang rape. Normal citizens and even 
police fear entering crime-ridden outer suburbs of Paris and 
Marseille, where native French are mocked as "Gaulois" - aliens in 
their own land.

Among the suspects in the July 7 bombings in the city some call 
Londonistan are a Somali, the son of an affluent Pakistani 
fish-and-chip shop owner and a Jamaican-born convert to Islam. They 
all attended the Finsbury Park mosque, inspired by the radical imam 
Abu Hamza al-Masri. Courtesy of hundreds of thousands of pounds paid 
to him by British taxpayers as an asylum-seeker, for years he 
exhorted his disciples to jihad - and, unsurprisingly, some heeded the call.

The filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was an outspoken critic of the 
treatment of women in some Muslim households, was murdered on the 
street by a Dutch-born Moroccan, and his killer left a note 
threatening more attacks in the name of radical Islam. As Michael 
Leaden of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, van Gogh's 
murder "is a textbook case of what happens when a tolerant but 
confused society takes political correctness to its illogical extreme."

Along with terror, immigrants also have imported a growing problem of 
organized crime.

In many European cities, the Albanian mafia is involved in 
trafficking sex slaves from Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus as well as 
in distributing heroin, cultivated in the poppy fields of Afghanistan 
and smuggled through former Soviet states.

If what is happening in European democracies is indeed a textbook 
case of tolerance taken to a dangerous extreme, this is one Western 
paradigm that Russia must not imitate.

The current government's laxity in enforcing Russia's laws and its 
failure to implement a national strategy of border protection amount 
to dereliction of duty.

Facilitated by a visa-free regime with most of the CIS and by sloppy 
and corrupt administration, thousands of illegal immigrants - and not 
only from the CIS but also from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and 
Vietnam -- enter Russia daily, unobstructed and unobserved. Russia is 
now home to an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants, about 2 
million of whom live in the city of Moscow and the Moscow region, 
most of them illiterate and low-skilled. We can only guess how many 
enter with criminal or terrorist intent.

In Russia, as in Europe, certain illegal immigrants constitute ideal 
recruits for jihad terrorism, and terror and crime are often linked. 
For example, just this month, members of the Hizb-ut Tahrir terrorist 
organization were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the 
distribution of heroin in the Moscow area. Without legal status, 
undocumented immigrants in Russia are often forced by criminal 
organizations into drug trafficking and prostitution. These are gross 
violations of human rights that the Russian authorities and NGOs 
prefer to ignore.

Moreover, even when working legally - in horrible conditions and for 
pay that is low even by Russian standards - they displace Russians in 
the job market, drive down wages and place a burden on the infrastructure.

There is an urgent need for laws and policies to restore Russia's 
control over its borders so it can put its house in order.

There should be a strict visa regime with neighboring CIS states to 
screen out criminals and potential terrorists. Foreign labor should 
be admitted only as long as it benefits Russia's national economy and 
international competitiveness, with priority given to 
Russian-speaking nationals of the former Soviet Union with high 
educational and vocational levels who are willing to become permanent 
residents and, eventually, loyal Russian citizens. Russia needs 
skilled foreign labor.

Cultural integration and Russian language proficiency should be made 
requirements for receiving government resettlement aid. This does not 
mean that there should be discrimination on the grounds of race, 
ethnicity or religion: Xenophobia and chauvinism are unacceptable and 
have no place in Russia. A strict immigration policy is no excuse for 
the violent racist fringe, who have proudly adopted Nazi regalia and 
slogans. No more tolerable in Moscow than anywhere else, the ideology 
they represent was delivered a fatal blow 60 years ago by the 
immortal feats of Russian arms.

"This country has lost control of its borders. And no country can 
sustain that kind of position." Those words of former U.S. President 
Ronald Reagan could easily be used to describe Russia today.

There is no possible justification for violence and hatred that could 
tear apart Russian society, whether it comes from the neo-Nazi fringe 
or from the advocates of ersatz tolerance, who would open our doors 
to the very extremism they claim to oppose.
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