Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has been fighting to keep the Southwest border under control to prevent terrorism from immigrating up through Mexico.
After nearly a decade without any memorable incidents, we tend to forget these issues are part of the immigration debate –– at least until a disturbing revelation shakes us from our sleep.
On Thursday, Fox News reported that U.S. Border Patrol in Arizona had discovered a book, "In Memory of Our Martyrs," which celebrates suicide bombers. The book features biographies of Islamic suicide bombers and militants.
It was found just north of the U.S.-Mexico border near an established route for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.
Perhaps even more startling is that this is not the first terrorism-related artifact to turn up near the border.
According to a May 2010 WorldNetDaily article, a jacket with an Arabic military badge was found in Jim Hogg County, Texas. Among its other patches: an airplane flying into a tower and an Arab insignia for "martyr.”
I want to know who the owners of these items are, certainly. But more importantly, these discoveries revive a long-standing fear about U.S. national security: people are coming into the country illegally who are not from Mexico and who are not just looking for jobs.
The WorldNetDaily reported that tens of thousands of illegal immigrants other than Mexicans, OTMs, are detained and deported every year.
The same WorldNetDaily article referenced one calculation, documented in a 2009 study by the Society for Risk Analysis, which predicted a 97.3 percent probability of an OTM terrorist crossing into the United States.
Obviously, immigration and terrorism have always been necessarily linked. But should tighter border access and stricter enforcement for immigrants be the punishment?
As was said in a 2001 New York Times editorial, “Sept. 11 must not become a tombstone to the nation's proud tradition of openness to foreign visitors.
“The fact that most of the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attack, if not all, entered the country legally should not blind Congress to the need to block illegal entries by increasing security along its porous borders with Mexico and Canada,” the editorial read. “Keeping people from overstaying their visas will do little for homeland security so long as hundreds of thousands enter the country illegally every year.”
So is tighter security our best and safest answer? This question cannot be answered easily, if at all.
But I do know this: drugs are not the worst things we need to be concerned with in relation to border security. Perhaps if the immigration process were restructured for easier and more efficient legal access, our law enforcement and Border Patrol resources would not be stretched so thin. Subsequently, a higher level of attention could be focused on more important threats than your average wage-laborer.
Seems like a small sacrifice if the pay-off is a future secured from terrorism.
Contact Danny at djoconn1@asu.edu
