Alien America: even as we fight a war on terrorism abroad, the U.S.--thanks to the UN--is importing a potential terrorist "fifth column" at home. (Cover Story: Immigration).

Like many small towns across the United States, Lewiston, Maine (population 36,000) has struggled for several years to cope with the economic downturn. The mill and factory jobs that once sustained that small community are almost entirely gone. In 2001 the local job market shrank by 2.9 percent - a decline that accelerated as the economy absorbed Black Tuesday's impact.

Part of the fallout from Black Tuesday was the loss of 60,000 jobs in Atlanta, largely in the already besieged airline industry. In early 2002, Atlanta's economic woes prompted a sudden exodus of Somali refugees from Atlanta - where the federal government had resettled them - to Maine. By year's end, some 1,200 Somali refugees had settled in Lewiston.

"Three out of four refugees typically apply to the city for welfare when they arrive, and many admit Maine's generous welfare benefits are part of what attracted them to the area," according to a September 21st ABC News account. According to the April 28, 2002 Portland Press-Herald, Lewiston officials estimated that about one-tenth of the Somali refugees were working.

For those Somalis willing to work, jobs are difficult to find - particularly for unskilled laborers without high school diplomas. Many of the Somali men have little or no working knowledge of English. The Somali women - many of whom have large families needing their care and attention - are products of a severe Muslim culture where few girls are allowed to receive an education, and thus cannot read or write in any language.

With an estimated 90 percent of the Somali newcomers claiming rental and food assistance from the already-strapped city government, Lewiston doubled its welfare budget to $200,000 - and turned to Augusta for help. The state government responded by proposing to increase state property taxes. Predictably, the over-taxed and under-compensated Maine residents didn't welcome this news. The June 30, 2002 Portland Press-Herald pointed out that Maine "ranks No.2 in the nation in tax burden and No. 37 in personal income."

This predicament prompted Lewiston Mayor Laurier T. Raymond to issue a remarkable public plea to the Somali refugees' ruling "elders." "This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative results for all," wrote Mayor Raymond in an open later last October. "The Somali community must exercise some discipline and reduce the stress on our limited finances and our generosity.... [P]lease pass the word: We have been overwhelmed and have responded valiantly. Now we need breathing room. Our city is maxed-out financially, physically, and emotionally."

The Somali elders, and their tutors in the language of "diversity" and ethnic entitlement, responded to Raymond's decorously phrased plea by accusing him of racism. "We are one people, we are one community," insisted Somali elder Mohammed Abdi, dutifully reciting the truism that the U.S. "is a country made up of immigrants." Other elders denounced the mayor as an "ill-informed leader who is bent toward bigotry."

Last January, following the standard script for racially charged controversies, representatives of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) showed up, uninvited, to denounce the transplanted Somalis. Their arrival, in turn, permitted Maine's multicultural left to seize the moral high ground: A January 11th counter-protest in defense of "tolerance" attracted 4,000 demonstrators to Lewiston, including Governor John Baldacci and Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

"We stand united as one in Maine when it comes to neighborliness, when it comes to tolerance, when it comes to opportunity," declared Governor Baldacci at the rally. "It is essential that we join in repudiating the rally of white supremacists in Lewiston," asserted Senator Snow.

Obnoxious and morally infirm as the WCOTC may be, it was neither the source nor a symptom of Lewiston's real problem: the subsidized colonization of that small community by a large, indigestible alien sub-population. From the perspective of the self-appointed guardians of "tolerance," the residents of Lewiston - and of Maine at large - simply have a moral obligation to adapt to the Somali influx and absorb the resulting economic costs while singing the praises of diversity.

UN-sponsored Invasion

Lewiston's troubles foreshadow things to come as the UN, with Washington's cooperation, resettles Somali Bantus in cities and towns across America.

"Over the next two years, nearly all of the Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya - about 12,000 people - are to be flown to the United States," reported the March 10th New York Times. "The Bantu are practicing Muslims. Women cover their hair with brightly colored scarves. Families pray five times a day. In Somalia, they were in a predominantly Muslim country often described as a breeding ground for terrorists." By the end of September, 1,500 Somali Bantus will be resettled in 50 U.S. cities and towns, including Boston, Charlotte, San Diego, and Erie.

Over the past decade, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been trying to relocate the Bantu, first in Tanzania and then in Mozambique. Although both countries initially agreed to take in the refugees, both have reneged on their promises.

Writing in The American Conservative, Roger McGrath points out that Arab slave traders took the Bantus, whose ancestral home is Tanzania, to Somalia in the 18th and 19th centuries. While they are no longer slaves in Somalia, Bantus in that country "were restricted to jobs considered demeaning, excluded from the Somali clan system, and referred to by pejorative names, generally meaning something like 'lowly slave.'"

When civil war erupted in 1991 after the fall of Soviet-sponsored Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, the Bantus -- who had neither arms nor allies in the clan system -- were dispossessed and driven across the border into UN refugee camps in Kenya.

In 1999, the UN designated the Somali Bantus as "persecuted refugees," and the Clinton administration -- acting under the terms of the 1980 Refugee Act -- agreed to resettle them in the United States.

This latest wave of Somali refugees will join a vast Somali sub-population that has already embedded itself in America. According to an April 4, 2001 report on Minnesota Public Radio, Minnesota is home to the largest settlement of Somalis outside Africa. While that midwestern state, with its Norwegian cultural history, brutally cold winters, and plentiful lakes, seems an unlikely haven for refugees from an arid country on the Horn of Africa, it offers one irresistible lure to the newcomers: extraordinarily liberal welfare policies, coupled with a pervasive multicultural dogma that makes criticism of such policies tantamount to a "hate crime."

That many, or even most, of the Somali refugees are peaceful, law-abiding people is beyond dispute. The tragedies those innocent people have endured will provoke the sympathy of decent people. But many of the Somalis have imported to this country the clan-based loyalties that led to bloody chaos in their homeland.

The November 19, 2000 Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Somali refugees in that state had sent at least $75 million back to their homeland since the resettlement began in the early 1990s. Most of that money was given in increments of $100-$600 to clan officials simply called "Collectors." "They will say, 'We are collecting money to buy ammunition and defend our people,'" explains Somali immigrant Omar Jamal. According to Somali expatriate Abdi Samatal, a professor at the University of Minnesota, "Some people are sending money to warlords ... a criminal act, in my opinion."

An unspecified amount of Somali money raised in Minnesota has been used to underwrite Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network. The October 14, 2001 Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that a Somali "charity" called Al-Itihaad Al-Islamiya was among the suspected terrorist fronts shut down by the FBI and Customs immediately after 9-11. Somali immigrant Abdisalan Hussein describes the group as "fanatics" preying on emotions of potential donors by displaying gruesome photos of Somali women who have been raped and killed. Left unexplained, of course, is how funding Islamic extremism would end such horrors.

The ongoing Somali civil war, underwritten in part by money raised in this country, is cynically invoked by Somali radicals to prevent deportation of suspected security risks among them. Last year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported 10 Somalis -- eight for offenses such as sex crimes, drug offenses, and assault, and two for immigrating illegally. St. Paul's Somali Justice Advocacy Center (SJAC), in collaboration with the left-wing Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, protested the expulsions, claiming that it violated UN human rights standards to deport people "to a country where there is no functioning government." "We do not want one person sent back at this time," declared SJAC's Omar Jamal. "Civil war is still going."

Opening the Gates

The large and growing refugee population in the U.S. presents a potential security risk, a fact made tragically clear by the 9-11 attacks. In 2000 alone, the U.S. absorbed more than 73,000 UN-designated refugees--a greater number than all other refugee-settlement countries combined. Yet, incredibly, in November 2001 President Bush authorized the admission of another 70,000 refugees in 2002.

The December 12, 2001 Christian Science Monitor reported: "This month ... even as alleged links between Osama bin Laden and Somalia continued to be investigated, the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees ... began the process of readying the Bantu Somalis for their eventual journey to the U.S." "There is a recognition by both the U.S. government and the American people that this is a humanitarian question' insisted Preeta Law, the UN's regional resettlement officer in Africa. In fact, the American people weren't consulted on this decision -- just as we weren't consulted over the first Bush administration's decision to entangle our nation in Somalia's civil war in 1992.

When 28,000 U.S. troops hit the beaches of Mogadishu, Somalia, in December 1992, their UN-mandated mission was described as one of humanitarian relief. "Our mission has a limited objective -- to open the supply routes, to get the food moving, and to prepare the way for a UN peacekeeping force to keep it moving," explained then-President George Bush (the elder). Americans were promised that our troops would be home before spring.

Three months into the mission, however, the UN pulled a bait-and-switch. Rather than simply abating a humanitarian crisis, the UN occupation force would provide muscle for a nation-building exercise. This would require creating a central police authority and disarming Somali militiamen not under the control of the UN-created central government. That mission led to several bloody confrontations between UN "peacekeepers" and members of the Habr Gidr clan, led by Mohammed Farah Aidid.

Prior to dispatching U.S. troops to Somalia, the Bush administration had been warned explicitly that the mission would become a bloody quagmire. In a 1992 report to Under Secretary of State Frank Wisner, U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Smith Hempstone warned the administration to "think once, twice and three times before you embrace the Somali tar baby."

"Somalis, as the Italians and British discovered to their discomfiture, are natural-born guerrillas," advised Hempstone, a widely respected scholar of African affairs. "They will mine the roads. They will lay ambushes.... Things will be quiet for a day or two, and then a Somali kid will roll a grenade into a cafe frequented by American troops. There will be an abduction or two. A sniper occasionally will knock off one of our sentries. If you liked Beirut, you'll love Mogadishu."

Hempstone's warnings proved prophetic as the U.S., on orders from the UN, waded ever deeper into the turbid waters of Somali clan politics. In July 1993, acting on UN orders, a dozen U.S. helicopter gunships laid siege to an apartment complex in Mogadishu identified as a "command center" for Aidid's clan. Scores of. civilians were killed; hundreds were wounded.

UN-commanded American troops followed that assault with house-to-house weapons searches treating all members of Aidid's clan -- men, women, and children -- as legitimate targets. "There are no sidelines or spectator seats," explained U.S. Army Major David Stockwell, chief spokesman for the UN's Somalia mission, following a helicopter attack that killed an estimated 200 Somali civilians. "The people on the ground are considered combatants."

The UN-instigated war between U.S. forces in Somalia and Aidid's clan culminated in the notorious October 3, 1993 "Battle of Mogadishu" depicted in the book and film Black Hawk Down. The engagement resulted from an abortive attempt to execute a UN "arrest warrant" for several of Aidid's chief aides. The mission went awry when guerrillas loyal to Aidid's clan succeeded in shooting down two supposedly invulnerable Black Hawk helicopter gunships. Army Rangers sent to snatch the targeted Somalis were cut off from relief and pinned down under withering fire. The protracted gun battle left 18

Americans and more than 1,000 Somalis dead. The indelible image of the battle's aftermath was the repellent sight of Somalis giddily dragging the dead, desecrated body of an American soldier through Mogadishu's sandy streets.

Recounts Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down (the book on which the film of the same title was based): "Aidid and his lieutenants knew that if they could bring down a chopper, the Rangers would move to protect its crew." Accordingly, Aidid's militiamen sought out expert advice "from fundamentalist Islamic soldiers, smuggled in from Sudan, who had experience fighting Russian helicopters in Afghanistan.... [They] taught [the Somalis] ... to wait until [the chopper] passed over, and to shoot up at it from behind."

These radical Islamic military advisors were operatives of Osama bin Laden and members of the embryonic al-Qaeda terrorist network. In a December 1998 study for the Cato Institute, foreign affairs analyst Ivan Eland noted that bin Laden "called the Somalia operation his group's greatest triumph."

Obviously, bin Laden and his cohorts were delighted to collaborate in the death of 18 American servicemen. But the spectacle of UN-commanded U.S. troops occupying Somalia was an al-Qaeda propaganda bonanza. In an interview to promote the film version of Black Hawk Down, Bowden pointed out that the UN-ordered American assaults on Aidid's supporters -- particularly civilians -- "had the effect of uniting the entire clan against the UN effort, and making all American forces targets."

U.S. troops, who had no business being in Somalia to begin with, were withdrawn shortly after the tragic "Battle of Mogadishu." For the U.S., the Somali excursion was a lose-lose-lose proposition: The mission claimed the lives of American military personnel, created a precedent for UN command of U.S. fighting men, and earned for our nation the undying enmity of the Somalis.

The only beneficiaries of that ill-conceived venture were the UN and Osama bin Laden. More than a decade after UN-commanded U.S. troops were withdrawn from Somalia, the UN is transplanting thousands of Somalis to the United States. As the American military engages in another UN-inspired campaign in the Persian Gulf, the Somali influx raises the specter of an al-Qaeda "fifth column" within our nation.

While our military -- including tens of thousands of state and local law enforcement personnel pressed into service as reserves -- carries out a UN-ordained mission to disarm Iraq, it's entirely possible that the UN-planted refugee population contains al-Qaeda cells prepared to bring the war to the American homeland.

Roger McGrath points out that one of the 18 American servicemen killed by al-Qaeda's Somali allies was Staff Sergeant Thomas J. Field, an Army Ranger from Lisbon, Maine -- just a few miles from Lewiston. "Local folk got the state highway that connects Lisbon and Lewiston named in his honor," writes McGrath. "In Lewiston, the highway becomes Lisbon Street, which now features Lewiston's first mosque, regularly crowded with Somalis."

It is difficult to imagine a more fitting symbol of our nation's betrayal by its amoral internationalist ruling class.