Dear Governor Cuomo:

Instead of these kinds of bland, meaningless messages that say absolutely nothing, maybe you ought to be thinking a bit harder about the actual cause of the problem so that incidents like this don’t keep happening.

What was this terrorist doing in the United States? Were we in short supply of unskilled, uneducated Average Joes (or, for that matter, Average Mohammeds)? In an increasingly high-tech economy, with unskilled work rapidly drying up and self-driving cars coming to replace all drivers in a matter of less than ten years, did we need another would-be-Uber driver in our midst? Shouldn’t we be thinking long and hard about reforming our brain-dead and outdated immigration policy to get it in line with an economy that is in desperate need of highly qualified professionals rather that marginal ham-and-eggers who struggle to get by and then become prime targets for radicalization when their American Dream runs into 21st century reality and their economic struggles send them into the waiting arms of extremists?

Yes, I know that dealing with difficult questions like this is harder than issuing bland statements about how New Yorkers stand together, but as a concerned New Yorker, I’d really prefer to stand together with people I trust, with people who deserve to be here, not with someone who got admitted via a dumb diversity lottery that threw the lives of eight people away on a mere roll of the dice.