In its report on the Christmas Day terror attack, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee last month implicitly slammed the State Department for having fallen back on its old, pre-9/11 habit of waving in anybody who applies for a visa.

Even though State "has an independent obligation to evaluate a non-US person's suitability for entry into the US," the senators noted, it rubber-stamped a visa for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian crotch bomber.

In fact, our government is admitting "guests" from the highest terror-risk nations as if 9/11 never happened and 19 Mideast terrorists never infiltrated the United States on easily obtained visas.

Since 2002, as a result of the quiet lowering of the barriers to entry from high-risk Muslim countries, America allowed entry to:

* Almost 13,000 nationals from Yemen, the al Qaeda hot spot where Abdulmutallab trained with his mentor Anwar Awlaki, al Qaeda's top Western recruiter.

* More than 15,000 citizens from Afghanistan, birthplace of confessed New York subway bomb plotter Najibullah Zazi.

* Nearly 2,500 from Somalia, another al Qaeda hot spot.

* A whopping 450,000 from Pakistan, the Taliban's and al Qaeda's new base for training and exporting terrorists to hit America.

* More than 250,000 from Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 9/11 hijackers.

If just a tenth of 1 percent of the post-9/11 wave of visitors from these five, high-risk Muslim nations turn out to be jihadists posing as tourists, that's 735 new potential terrorists casing, plotting, "sleeping" inside our borders.

Yes, most of those visas are for visits to America, not to move here. But there's next to zero enforcement of visa-overstaying -- it's one of the most common forms of illegal immigration. And the feds don't even try to monitor the folks arriving from terror-friendly nations.

For a while after 9/11, we required foreign nationals from 24 Muslim nations -- including these five hot spots -- to be fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated by immigration officers every 30 days and annually during their stays in America. But Homeland Security killed that program in December 2003 -- after the Pakistan and Saudi embassies, along with US-based Muslim groups, howled in protest.

In 2008, FBI Director Robert Mueller pleaded with Congress to let him be more aggressive: "I believe the American public would want us to do what is necessary to try to identify persons who had traveled to Pakistan, whatever their ethnicity, to determine who has gone to Pakistan to obtain that training and may be coming back to the United States to undertake an attack."

Yet we're still playing catch-up. Only after Faisal Shahzad nearly slaughtered hundreds of innocents in Times Square did the feds round up a few Pakistani illegals in Massachusetts and Maine -- Shahzad's alleged bagmen, who'd been living in the United States for years, with the authorities plainly indifferent.

According to Homeland Security data, there are 494 "deportable aliens" from Pakistan living illegally here right now. Their removal should be an imperative -- and the government ought to be tracking down and sending home visa overstayers from Pakistan (and the other terror-hotspot nations).

We did just that after 9/11 -- booting 912 Pakistani absconders in 2002, up 121 percent from 2001's 412. But every year since then, those numbers have slid -- down to 365 in 2008 (the latest available figure).

We need to retarget Pakistani absconders. Deportation is key to getting rid of sleepers inside the United States: Round them up and kick them out. Pull up the welcome mat to Pakistan and other high-risk nations.

By inviting more visitors from extremist Muslim countries into America, we're simply inviting another attack. Unless we have a suicide wish, we'll stop churning out those visas.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration." His lat est book is "Muslim Mafia."