A Growing Border Crisis Is Opportunity For Terrorists

The beleaguered Border Patrol estimates that several million illegal immigrants cross over the 2,000-mile long southern border every year. Obviously, they're not all staying. The interdiction effort is so overextended that huge numbers are able to cross back and forth on a regular basis. And the traffic in undocumented workers, ruinous as that has been for schools, hospitals and law enforcement throughout the Southwest, is the least of it. The Mexican drug cartels smuggle thousands of tons of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine across the border every year, the majority of it through Arizona. They use private and commercial vehicles, human "mules," tunnels and light planes to penetrate U.S. territory. The drugs are distributed to around 20,000 street gangs in 2,500 cities across the United States, representing a million gangbangers, who grip their neighborhoods in a reign of terror. Billions of illicit dollars flow back across the border to the cartels, which are growing in power. If millions of pounds of illegal drugs flowing in from Mexico annually doesn't alarm you, what if it were tons of anthrax or high explosives? Don't think for a moment that terrorists somehow have missed the fact that the U.S.-Mexico border is an imaginary line in more ways than one. The time is coming, and doubtless is not far off, when they strike on our soil again. No one should be surprised on that dark day when we learn that the instrument of terror entered the United States across our southern border...more