The Long Island Immigrant Alliance, which counts one million members in Queens, Brooklyn, and Suffolk and Nassau Counties, denounced the federal government’s most recent resolution to detain immigrants from 26 mainly Muslim countries, who are in the United States on temporary visas and have requested political asylum. The special registration program was launched solely upon immigrants from those countries, and according to the Alliance, this constitutes discrimination as well as repression on the sole basis of ethnic origins and religious beliefs.

The Department of Homeland Security responds that the program’s objective is to monitor the activity of suspects at a time when the nation is in a state of high alarm against terrorism. However, Patrick Young, a lawyer with the Immigrant Alliance, replies that the idea of taking aim at someone solely on the basis of ethnic origin and religious practice provokes resentment and hostility among the very communities whose help the authorities need most in order to identify potential adversaries.

The Department of Homeland Security did not offer any details. Then it became known that, for the most part, those who violate the regulations for temporary visas while applying for political asylum without really putting all their cards on the table, came from Iraq. It was as if clever Tom Ridge had sniffed out a possible “fifth column” belonging to Saddam Hussein in the United States. The exception that proves the rule came with the inclusion of North Korea among the countries of “chosen” origins.

In large part, the immigrants affected reside in the metropolitan area of New York, and there are also large pockets in northern New Jersey. The director of the Islamic Center of Passaic County in New Jersey, Nabil Abbassi, commented yesterday, “It is extremely sad and open to criticism that our country has provoked this preemptive war against Iraq.” And in saying “our country,” he was speaking as an American.

Recognizing how much the vast majority of Muslims recoil from terrorism, Frank Pepe, an Italian-American and the Superintendent of the Arlington schools, said, “As far as I know, we are not at all at war with other Americans, whatever their ethnic origins might be.” For that matter, what is happening today to Muslims and Arabs also happened long ago to Italian-Americans. And, whether in times of war or of peace, it has also happened to other immigrant groups. Our collective conscience has been permanently engraved with the memory of the sacrifice of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, who were treacherously and unjustly put to death because of the fear for the terrorism of their time, the so-called “Red Scare.”