Our Porous Northern Border

The subject of illegal immigration and terrorism is a fascinating one. Many of those who oppose an immigration amnesty, and who push most aggressively for improved enforcement at the US-Mexican border, argue that these measures are necessary to reduce the possibility that Al Qaeda or other terrorists will take advantage of them to attack the US. And as far as I can tell, these ideas are misguided.

While there are millions of illegal crossings of the US Southern border each year, those crossings are directly due to the fact that that is where our poorer neighbors are - not because that border is undefended. It is the US's Northern border that is undefended. If the standard of living in the US was as superior to Canada's as it is to Mexico's, the border with Canada would be seen as a problem. The US-Canadian border is more than 4,000 miles long. And according to the Congressional Research Service, we have one agent for every 4.2 miles of the Northern border, compared to one for every .2 miles of the Southwestern border.

If you were Al Qaeda or another terrorist group seeking to pull off an attack inside the US, would you send your plotters through Canada or Mexico? Apart from the wide disparity in the level of border security, you might consider that Middle Easterners and Muslims stand out more in Mexico than in Canada - so your team would be less likely to attract attention in Canada. You might also consider that most of the US-Canada border is temperate and easy to cross, while the available crossing points from Mexico are largely deserts and rivers. Why would you pick Mexico? Wouldn't it be Canada that seemed the attractive option? We know that Ahmed Ressam was apprehended crossing into the US from Canada, preventing an attempt to bomb LAX at the turn of the millennium.

CNN recently reported on a smuggling ring that brought dozens of Indian and Pakistani immigrants into the US illegally. That's different from the ring that ICE broke up in February. Heck, the US-Canadian border even has its own smuggling tunnels. Considering that the US-Canadian border is so much less policed than our border with Mexico, what may be going on that we haven't discovered yet?

I'm not in any way saying that our southern border is not vulnerable to crossings by Al Qaeda. We have evidence that Al Qaeda has considered bringing nuclear weapons into the US through the border with Mexico. Crossings of the Mexican border by "OTMs" (other than Mexicans) have increased significantly in the last few years. CNN reports that there were about 100,000 in the first 9 months of 2005. Most of these are certainly Guatemalan and others from Central America, but there's at least anecdotal evidence that we are apprehending more from other parts of the world. The threat needs to be taken seriously.

But if you were AQ, why would you send operatives to a country where they stand out, to cross an unforgiving desert that is regularly patrolled, when you could send them to a place where they fit in, and have them cross an unguarded border where you can practically pick from city, suburb, rural area, or forest as a crossing point?