Shutting off the job magnet is absolutely essential, but there is more involved when you realize that our border with Mexico is the longest one in the world between a Third World country and a developed one. There is enormous pressure for people to get out of a corrupt Third World cesspool and go to the US regardless of the risk and hardship. And we now have enough immigrants in this country, 40 million legal and illegal, that can harbor and support illegals.
The two main threats to our national security posed by immigration relate to terrorism and drugs. First, tens of thousands of persons from countries that support international terrorism have come across our southern border undetected since 9/11.
Testifying before Congress in March 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that his agency busted a smuggling ring organized by the terrorist group Hezbollah that had operatives cross the Mexican border to carry out possible terrorist attacks inside the U.S. “This was an occasion in which Hezbollah operatives were assisting others with some association with Hezbollah in coming to the United States,” Mueller told a House Appropriations subcommittee during a hearing on the FBI's budget. Hezbollah was responsible for the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 243 U.S. troops. A total of 20 foreign-born terrorists were involved in 9/11, 19 of whom took part in the attack that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths. The terrorists had entered the country on tourist or student visas. Four of them, however, had overstayed their visas and become illegal aliens and the others should not have been granted visas for various immigration control reasons.
Second, Michael Hayden, the outgoing head of the CIA stated in January 2009 that the threat of a narco state in Mexico is one of the gravest dangers to American security, on a par with a nuclear-armed Iran. An assessment by the United States Joint Forces Command, published in February 2009, concluded that the two countries most at risk of becoming failed states were Pakistan and Mexico.
The descent of Mexico into a failed narco state, marked by increased violence and brutality, which has already spilled over into the U.S., has enormous implications for immigration, legal and illegal. With over 11 million Mexican-born residents in the U.S. plus their U.S.-born relatives, there are strong familial ties to Mexico, which would attract Mexicans fleeing a disintegrating state seeking asylum and safety in the U.S. And the pressure on our porous, unsecured southern border would increase dramatically. Currently, the Border Patrol apprehends more than half a million people annually trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico and hundreds of thousands more illegal aliens are successful in gaining entry. There is no way the U.S. could stop a tidal wave of Mexicans seeking asylum in this country and it would be even more difficult to remove them.
There has been a confluence of interests between drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism. The systems for moving terrorists illegally across the border have become increasingly sophisticated, with Mexican drug kingpins now playing a major facilitating role using the same routes and methods to bring in illegal aliens and drugs. In view of the carnage that the 19 terrorists created on 9/11, the virtual certainty that our government has allowed substantial numbers of terrorists and their supporters to enter our country illegally is an outrage.
I agree it is about sovereignty and security.
This invasion is turning us into a third world criminal cesspool. The USA has been going downhill since the first amnesty. Mexico has good food but it never innovated much except for the siesta and it has always been corrupt.