On a trip to D.C. this past week, I came up against American inconsistency — some harsher critics might call it stupidity — in all its glory.

When I entered the Air and Space Museum, the security guards checked my backpack and coat for dangerous and nefarious objects. When I participated in a march up Constitution Avenue, I found that the government had blocked off the two lanes closest to the Capitol Building to discourage terrorists and bombings. When my daughter leaves for Rome in two weeks, she will need to arrive at the airport three hours early for her inspection. Our military forces have temporarily pacified Afghanistan and are currently preparing to invade Iraq.

Everywhere in our cities and in our embassies around the world we have increased security, frisking Granny and monitoring Billy Bob, yet even while we spend billions of dollars upgrading security systems and trillions more dollars invading Iraq, we continue to allow hundreds of thousands of people a year to walk across our borders without blinking an eye.

We are like a man who protects his house by checking strangers at the bedroom door. Meanwhile, the kitchen door is open wide with a welcome sign on it.

As this went to press, President Bush was preparing to give his State of the Union address. Will he talk about the collapse of our borders? Will the Congress enact legislation to clean up the immigration mess in this country? Not a chance. Neither major political party even seems to care that we are in a mess. Republicans, especially neoconservatives, favor open borders for the same reasons that they favor “free trade”: to keep labor and goods cheap. Democrats favor open borders because they want more votes.

To call into question the immigration policy of this nation or the disastrous state of our porous borders is to risk being labeled a racist. This fear of speaking the truth surely explains, for example, why so few environmentalists openly oppose illegal immigration, even though they prate on about a population explosion in this country. This same fear of being called racist must also explain why our government turns a blind eye to the policies of the government of Mexico, a government whose aim is to extend a sphere of influence into California and the American Southwest, and to the machinations of organizations like La Raza or the Anglo-hating, Jew-baiting Aztlan (www.aztlan.net), which openly call for a Mexican takeover of that same region.

Only a few brave souls have dared raise their voices in opposition to the present illegal immigration into the United States. Among them is columnist Michelle Malkin, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, who has frequently called for an investigation into the deplorable state of our borders. Now she has written a best-selling book on this disaster titled Invasion: How American Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, And Other Foreign Menaces To Our Shores.

Invasion offers powerful and specific evidence of federal abuses of the immigration system and the various institutions of the United States that play into these abuses. Among those who have encouraged illegal immigration are the universities (Malkin calls these abusers “the university pimps”) who, in order to receive more funding, ask few questions of their entering students regarding their nationality; city governments (Malkin tells us that less than two months after 9/11 New York City mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg assured Hispanics and other immigrants that “people who are undocumented do not have to worry about city government going to the federal government .... My job as mayor is to make sure we deliver the city services. It is the federal government’s job to make sure we get control of our borders and have an appropriate immigration policy.”); state agencies; banks; and various independent open borders groups.

But it is the federal government, and the Immigration And Naturalization Service in particular, that must bear the brunt of responsibility for our current immigration woes. Invasion documents numerous cases where various state or federal officials have turned over an illegal alien to the INS, only to discover that that agency then ordered the alien’s immediate release. In the last 10 years, various immigration officials in this country have also engaged in such activities as smuggling illegal aliens; peddling fraudulent documents; arranging fake marriages; selling citizenships; and trading visas and green cards for sex and money.

Such chicanery, combined with the failures at our borders, has allowed many of the terrorists who have made the news in this country to operate at will. Malkin dedicates several chapters and an appendix to these cases, giving facts and figures that should leave readers sick at heart over the corruption and cowardliness that have made us so vulnerable.

Immigration both legal and illegal is not just a concern for states like New York and California. North Carolina, Malkin tells us, is one of the worst state offenders in protecting and aiding illegal aliens. Our state, for instance, has issued nearly 400,000 licenses to drivers to with no valid Social Security number, with many of the licenses going to illegal aliens.

Certainly the western part of our state has seen a great influx of immigrants. In 1990, for instance, the Census Bureau reported that there were 240 persons of Hispanic origin living in Haywood County. By 2000, this number had tripled to 763 persons claiming Hispanic origin. Such a leap took place in many counties across North Carolina.

These statistics do not include all of the illegal aliens in the mountains. Although getting public officials to talk about the impact of those who are here outside the law is difficult, several examples may indicate the depth of the problem.

° Last winter a Hispanic man walked into a bank in Asheville wishing to open an account. The bank officer who examined his Social Security card informed the man that it belonged to a dead person in Chicago and could not be used. The next day the man returned with 12 Social Security cards, placed them on the bank officer’s desk, and motioned for her to pick one that worked. When the bank officer called the man’s employer and asked him whether he knew that he had illegal aliens working in his plant, the plant manager denied all knowledge of those workers.

° A federal employee who will remain nameless was recently asked how many illegal aliens from the mountains the INS office in Charlotte ever picked up. Except for those committing illegal acts, the employee stated, no illegal aliens were investigated.

° Schools, government agencies, libraries, and health care facilities have all added programs in Spanish to their budgets. These programs exist for the most part because of illegal aliens.

° Western North Carolinians have already paid more than their share to the failed ideas of the last 20 years in regard to immigration and globalization. Remember NAFTA, the treaty that would help Mexicans find work in Mexico by closing our plants here and moving them south? Many of those same plants have since moved to Asia in the quest for cheap labor. In the meantime, tens of thousands of factory jobs with decent wages have moved out of these mountains.

Although Malkin only touches on these broader issues — her primary concern is with terrorism — she offers many ideas to make our immigration policies fairer, more controlled, and less taxing on our system. She recommends restructuring our visa system, restricting immigration, and reforming the INS by aggressively persecuting fraud and by rewarding truth-tellers within the agency.

Malkin also issues a call to militarize the borders. Here she stresses that our borders are virtually nonexistent. Our government has effectively abandoned our northern border, leaving vast stretches of it completely unguarded. In terms of security, our southern border with Mexico is a joke, with many federal officials simply flinging up their hands and claiming that nothing can be done. In Arizona’s Organ Pipe National Monument alone, for example, as many as 1,000 illegal aliens a day tramp across the park, ruining the environment and endangering lives (last year a drug smuggler gunned down U.S. Park Ranger Kris Eggle in the park). As Malkin says, “we don’t have borders. We have the world’s longest backdoor welcome mats.”

Until we can stop thousands of illegal aliens from daily walking over the border into this country, our highly vaunted airport security system is little more than a bad joke. Until we can stop the invasion here at home, it seems senseless to start an invasion of Iraq.

(Jeff Minick can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)