http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/25753.php

Published: 09.11.2006
FIVE YEARS AFTER SEPT. 11, 2001
Border security: Line blurs on terrorism
Kolbe: Worry more about northern border
CLAUDINE LoMONACO
Tucson Citizen
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 cast a new and threatening shadow on the porous Arizona-Mexico border: If millions of illegal immigrants cross so easily, what's to stop terrorists?

While no evidence exists that terrorists have entered the United States through Mexico, the concern, fueled largely by anti-immigration forces, has brought more money and manpower to the border.

Some security experts say the threat is overblown. It has diverted limited resources, they say, and left the United States vulnerable to more realistic and dangerous threats while doing little to curb illegal immigration.

"Our intelligence agents will tell you that there has been no evidence of any serious attempt of terrorists to come into the United States through the southern border," said U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona. "We should be much more worried about the northern border, where there's 4,000 miles of completely unprotected and basically unmanned crossing points."

A study by the conservative Nixon Center, a Washington, D.C.-based foreign policy think tank, found that of 373 suspected or convicted terrorists with links to al-Qaida who resided or crossed borders in Western Europe or North America since 1993, none had entered North America from Mexico. In contrast, the center found that 26 had used Canada as a host country.

"The nightmare of Department of Homeland Security officials with whom I speak," wrote Robert S. Leiken, who wrote the study, "Europe's Mujahideen," "is not the Mexican border or the Middle East. They lose sleep over Muslim immigrants from enlightened Western Europe."

The terrorist threat along the southern border has largely been stoked by illegal immigration opponents, such as Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, who has spearheaded the "enforcement-only" approach to the border and opposes any guest worker or legalization program.

Tancredo can often be heard on TV, speaking of prayer rugs and Qurans found in the desert.

"It's not just people from Mexico coming across the Mexican border," he said on "The CBS Morning News" on Oct. 27, 2005.

Tancredo and others point to the large number of "OTMs," or illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico, caught along the southern border as cause for concern.

In fiscal 2005, OTMs accounted for around 11 percent, or around 48,000, of the 438,932 apprehensions made in the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector, according to Border Patrol public information officer Sean King.
But only a minuscule number of those OTMs - 21 in all of 2005, according to King - involved so-called "special interest aliens," or illegal immigrants from one of 35 countries with links to terrorism such as Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

None of the 21 was found to have links to terrorism, King said.
Since the start of fiscal 2006 in October 2005, the Border Patrol in the Tucson sector has caught 15 special-interest aliens.

The vast majority - 99.5 percent - of people crossing the southern border illegally come from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Lt. Col. Margaret Stock, a professor of national security and immigration law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said anti-immigration forces emphasize the threat of terrorists entering from Mexico because it bolsters their cause to build up the border to keep out illegal immigrants.

"Post-9/11, everybody is saying everything has to do with national security because those are the magical words that get you the resources," Stock said. "If you say, hey, my primary mission is to kick out the guys washing floors at Wal-Mart, it's not going to get you a lot of federal funding, and it doesn't create the fear necessary to generate the resources."

Crossing the southern border doesn't fit al-Qaida's history, she said.

"Read al-Qaida's training manual," she said. "Their modus operandi has been to use the existing systems, to come in legally so people won't notice you."

Stock argues that the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America must be resolved on its own terms, and not on the back of a pumped-up terrorist threat.

"I see all these resources that could be used on true security threats being wasted on people that are not security threats," Stock said, "and that means we're more likely to miss the bad guys."

Both Stock and Kolbe said illegal immigration must not be approached as simply a law enforcement issue.

"We have to recognize that it's an economic problem, and you have deal with it in a comprehensive problem," Kolbe said.

Both support comprehensive immigration reform along with added enforcement measures. The key is to open channels of legal immigration, including a temporary guest worker program, to get otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants out of the desert, they said.

Since 9/11, the Border Patrol has made terrorism prevention its top priority.

That's as it should be, said T.J. Bonner, a Border Patrol agent and president of the National Border Patrol Council.

Just because terrorists have not entered through the southern border doesn't mean they won't, he said.

But agents are blocked from looking for potential terrorists because they spend 99.9 percent of their time chasing illegal immigrants from Mexico, he said.

"If you pose the question to a Border Patrol agent - Would you rather catch 10,000 people looking for work or one terrorist? - they'll tell you, 'I'll take the one terrorist,' " he said, "because they're Americans, too. It's their families, their loved ones who are going to be hurt by the next terrorist attack."

Bonner believes the government should crack down on employers to end the magnet luring illegal immigrants.

John Keeley of the Center for Immigration Studies based in Washington D.C., which seeks to reduce the amount of legal and illegal immigration to the country, said it's delusional to think the Mexican border, "controlled largely by drug cartels and alien smugglers, not the Mexican government, not the American government," is safe from terrorists.

"It seems to me you have to be closing your eyes and crossing your fingers with a 2,000-mile border, knowing that terrorist cells are well-established in Canada and well-established in the United States, and to think that somehow our back door is perfectly safe," he said.

Such thinking is based more on politics and less on reality, said Stock.

And it's dangerous, she said.

"The problem with all this stuff post-9/11," she said, "is that nobody has been looking at the big picture and saying let's figure out where we should prioritize our efforts so we can stop the most terrorists. There's an attitude of there's an unlimited amount of money we can spend on everything all at once, and we don't."