Appearing on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney pronounced 9/11 a "watershed event." It gave us a new way of looking at how we defend America, he said.

Yes, our government has a new way of looking at how we defend America. But all the looking seems to be at war on the other side of the world and at monitoring Americans in their daily lives, rather than looking at our borders that are still wide open to people who hate us, enter illegally, and remain illegally.

The Administration demanded and Congress passed without reading, the USA PATRIOT Act. Its principal operative section expands the power of the federal government for surveillance of Americans without proper search warrants, as required by the Fourth Amendment.

The Daschle Democrats demanded and pushed through Congress a federal takeover of airport security. There is no evidence that this increased anything except the cost.

The Administration is pushing hard to get Congress to pass the Homeland Security bill. If passed, it will mean a giant increase in Big Government without any effect on the front lines of our security, the FBI and CIA, and little effect on the INS and the visa-issuing section of the State Department, where nobody has yet been fired for gross mistakes.

There is no indication that the government is taking the steps necessary to protect us against the continued influx of terrorists and other aliens who do not intend to abide by our laws and have become skilled at exploiting every loophole and opportunity for fraud.

The State Department just announced that it is getting ready to accept entries into the Diversity Visa Lottery program, which allows 50,000 lucky foreigners from non-Western (including terrorist- sponsoring) countries to win permanent U.S. residency. One of the worst pieces of legislation ever championed by Ted Kennedy, this welcomes "underrepresented" immigrant minorities.

The change that 9/11 should have brought about (but hasn't yet) is our government's realization that national security requires us to repudiate the new religion whose gods are diversity and multiculturalism, and which decrees that profiling is a mortal sin to be punished by stoning with the rocks of scorn cast by the sanctimonious open-borders advocates.

One brave writer has catalogued the idiocies of our current immigration system in an important new book called "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores." The daughter of immigrants from the Philippines, Michelle Malkin takes the politically incorrect view that we should discriminate against aliens who hate America, violate our laws, carry diseases, and enter our country illegally.

National security and safety should rank higher on our scale of priorities than tourism dollars, ethnic voting blocs, filling graduate universities with foreigners who can do math, low-wage workers for multinationals and agriculture, and kowtowing to liberal dogmas. Entry into the United States is a privilege, not a right, and the safety of our citizens is more important than the convenience of foreigners.

While the mantra of the media is that "9/11 changed everything," Malkin documents the immigration loopholes, lapses, corruption and mismanagement that haven't changed at all since 9/11.

Malkin wants to bar all new travelers and immigrants from al Qaeda breeding grounds until we weed out the infiltrators already here. She wants to halt the fraud in issuing visas to phony Muslim clerics and fake marriages, visa-for-sale schemes, and the H-1B visa program, and deport all those who have been ordered deported.

Malkin rejects the government's whine that it can't track the arrival/travel/departure of visitors on visas. She points out that FedEx manages to keep track of the arrival and delivery of some 3 million packages every day in 200 countries at the touch of a button.

Is the new Homeland Security department going to be headed by someone who will protect homeland security, or by a Tom Ridge who declares that "the last thing we want to do is militarize the borders"? An administration that continues to send U.S. troops to guard borders in Eastern Europe but won't use troops to guard U.S. borders where invaders are shooting at our border agents and killing U.S. citizens in automobile accidents, isn't serious about homeland security.

Michelle Malkin eloquently expresses the outrage of naturalized citizens who waited in line, complied with all our laws, appreciate the opportunity to become Americans, and treasure their U.S. citizenship. One of the best parts of her book is the appendix where she lists the immigration status of all the alien terrorists of 1993, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 9/11.

Michelle Malkin's book is a good manual to help us expose and remedy the folly of open borders.