Illegal immigration and terrorism
It has gotten harder and more tedious to get into the United States by airplane since 2001 whether you are a terrorist, a grandmother returning from a trip to Paris or a reporter returning from a computer conference in Trinidad. But it is obviously still easy to slip across the border and enter the United States illegally. I see evidence of this every day.
I live in a part of Florida where the dominant Hispanic minority is Mexican immigrants, not Cuban refugees. Both fast-food and sit-down restaurants here routinely translate orders into Spanish so kitchen workers can understand them. Construction companies, landscape crews, hotels and motels, and the area’s many farms and agriculture-related businesses are all dependent on Mexican workers who have, for the most part, entered the U.S. illegally.
Hard-working Mexicans and Guatemalans aren’t terrorists
Don’t get me wrong: I am not accusing our Mexican neighbors (or the few-but-proud Guatemalans mixed in with them) of being terrorists. Almost all of them are good people who work hard and send money home to their families. Some of the snobbier locals look down on “the Spanish” because they like to sit in their yards and drink beer at dusk — and often long into the night on payday. I have no problem with this. I have been known to sit in the yard myself with a drink in my hand, and I speak enough Spanish to share a pleasant greeting with my fellow after-work drinkers. Heck, at one point I considered moving to Mexico…
But that’s not the point. The problem is that if thousands of Mexicans and people from other Latin American countries can get into the U.S. every week, so can terrorists from wherever.
Said terrorists are going to have a lot more money to spend on their illegal entry than the average Mexican coming here to work as a busboy. If they want to bring rifles, mortars, ground-to-air missles, and even nuclear material into the U.S. I’m sure they will have no trouble doing it even if every piece of baggage that goes on every incoming airplane is X-rayed to the point where you don’t dare pack film in your suitcase.
As long as our border is porous, our country is not secure
If we want to keep bringing workers in from Mexico, let’s set up something similar to the old Bracero program, but with more oversight. And at the same time, let’s actually police our borders in a meaningful way.
Without control of our borders, we are wide-open to attacks by foreign terrorists no matter how many speeches we hear from politicians about how our actions in the Middle East (or anywhere else) are supposed to make us feel safe.