October 15, 2014, 10:40 pm
By David McCabe
The Hill

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) linked the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to America’s border security during Wednesday's Senate debate with independent challenger Greg Orman.

He’s not the first GOP candidate to do so, either, as the party looks for any edge it can to regain the Senate majority in November.

Asked about this summer’s unprecedented influx of unaccompanied children at the Southern border, Roberts looked to tie immigration to global crises.

“We have ISIS, we have Ebola — we have to secure the border,” Roberts said. He made a similar link on Tuesday while calling for a temporary ban on flights from West Africa to the United States.

He brought the border up again, when asked how the government should respond to Ebola possibly spreading in the United States.

“This all goes back to ISIS, and Ebola, and the other problems we see on the border," he explained.

He’s not the first Republican to make the connection, despite the fact that none of the documented cases of the Ebola virus in the United States were linked to the Southern border.

“Yet we have a border that’s so porous that anyone can walk across it. I think it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here who have those types of diseases and/or other types of intent, criminal or terrorist,” New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown said on Tuesday.

In Arkansas, Republican candidate Tom Cotton similarly suggested that members of ISIS could easily cross America’s borders.

“Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism,” Cotton said.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/...order-security