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Does the Border Need Securing?

This is several weeks old, but Peter Beinart's column on immigration and national security made a very good point. Every single politician in Washington, pro-immigration or no, claims that we need to secure our border with Mexico so that "terrorists" don't sneak in. That's one of the stated rationales that restrictionists offer for wanting to build a wall and militarize our border, but even people like Ted Kennedy argue that our porous Mexican border "directly threatens national security."

Yet as Beinart notes, potential terrorists are really, really unlikely to make the dangerous trek across the hot desert to enter the United States through the Mexican border, especially when they can just do what they've always done and walk in through the even-more-porous Canadian border. Or they can do what the 9/11 hijackers did and simply enter the country on student visas. Whatever the solution might be—Beinart suggests national ID cards—it's not a Berlin-style wall along the southern border.

Meanwhile, if someone wanted to sneak, say, some sort of nuclear device into this country, why go through Mexico? They could always just ship it in a cargo container, seeing as how our ports are totally unsecured and the ruling party in Washington has time and time again scotched proposals to pay for more security. Normally when this topic comes up I encourage everyone to read John Mueller's essay on how the threat of terrorism is fairly overblown (at least unless we do something crazy in response—like militarize our southern border), but even those who want to obsess about it should at least note that the Mexican border ranks relatively low on the list of our security concerns.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 05/22/06 at 11:05 AM | E-mail | Print | Digg this | de.licio.us

Comments

Instead of figuring what areas will be exploited by terrorist to gain acces to the country, We should be figuring how to secure all areas.

Posted by: Dr.Q on 05/22/06 at 4:32 PM

Hillary has tried to get inspection of cargoes lo these many years. Beinart and the writer are right . I t is an elenchio elenchi - off the mark- to worry about the border with Mexico as stated.The immigration issue should be looked on a way to get new citizens and to help them here! With a desire able population downsize , we need them for us baby boomers. The conditions in Mexico need to be addressed - the corruption for sure. How can we help Mexico?

Posted by: lamberthml@comcast.net on 05/26/06 at 4:49 PM

Hillary has tried to get inspection of cargoes lo these many years. Beinart and the writer are right . I t is an elenchio elenchi - off the mark- to worry about the border with Mexico as stated.The immigration issue should be looked on as a way to get new citizens and to help them here! With a desire able population downsize , we need them for us baby boomers. The conditions in Mexico need to be addressed - the corruption for sure. How can we help Mexico?

Posted by: lamberthml@comcast.net on 05/26/06 at 4:52 PM

Regardless of your ideas about immigration or mine, there are laws on the books & instructions from the Founding Fathers for the federal government to secure the borders. If there is any benefit from immigration, let it be from legal immigration, not amnesty for illegals & their criminal employers. The cost to society in depressed wages, imported disease, bankrupt hospitals along with the resulting depressed local economies as the hospital workers now unemployed file for unemployment or move away or both. Close the border. Amnesty for illegals makes as much sense as adopting a burglar & pretending that you wanted him in your home permanently since before he ever broke in.

Posted by: Nolan on 05/27/06 at 4:42 AM

We need to secure our border with Mexico because it is our border.

Posted by: Robert Johnson on 05/27/06 at 9:19 PM

We need to secure our borders, do any of the anti-secure borders people remember that lots of drugs come across our southern borders.

Let's not forget that fact.

Posted by: Bob t on 06/02/06 at 10:31 AM

Maybe we should secure our borders, maybe the founding fathers intended that we spend all available resources to do so. However, the US and its territories have never been able to successfully do it despite continued attempts since the early 1800's. As Satayana suggests, those who are incredibly idealistic in the face of history are doomed to be run over by it.

Drugs, contraband, smuggling has been a constant struggle to control since the British tried to prevent rum running to the American colonies in the 1780's. As some rather famous rum runners (Sam Adams, JP Jones, and others) discovered, no military effort is large enough to stop it. When it became a problem for the the US government they helped to found, they began to conform to its needs and stop their profiteering. If only Enron and oil companies would recognize our common needs, perhaps we could avoid the current struggles.

So, despite the belief that it is self-evident that all borders need defending, practicality and appropriateness might suggest a more complicated scenario.

Thinking about big problems is a hard process, particularly since it often requires giving up our sacred cows, but perhaps we need to do it. Anyone interested? Or should we continue to launch ourselves under the steamroller of history?

Posted by: Richard Williams on 06/05/06 at 7:56 AM