http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/edi ... 35727.html

Feb. 4, 2006, 1:28AM

FOR A FENCE
Wake up and seal the border
Immigration ideals must allow for citizen security
By OLIVIA ALBRECHT


It's time we woke up: The entangled crises of homeland security and illegal immigration are real. The United States is vulnerable on every front of this national security emergency, and the bad guys know it. Yet, as Americans, we fight ourselves into political paralysis attempting to uphold our historically pro-immigrant ideals while striving to protect our citizens' lives.

Recent news from our southern border underscores the mounting assault against our nation.

As Mexican President Vincente Fox chastises the proposed U.S. 700-mile fence, reports have surfaced that armed men in uniforms suspected of being Mexican soldiers protecting drugs that cross the border into Arizona have been "trained to escape, evade, and counter-ambush" if discovered by U.S. authorities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say that such suspected military engagement is frequent and represents a real threat to border agents.

These suspected Mexican military personnel are not messing around. In the last two years, reports indicate that the attacks have escalated into serious conflicts along the borders, many of them fatal.

It is clear: A fence along the southern border is necessary protection for not only U.S. border patrol agents but also for U.S. citizens, who bear the brunt of the socio-economic consequences of illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Regretfully, Mexican drug-traffickers are not the only group mounting assaults on our borders. Terrorists also have exploited tirelessly — and, tragically, all too successfully — our overwhelmed immigration system.

The problems resulting from our historically amenable and porous borders have metastasized beyond socio-economic concerns of ruinous welfare and health care burdens and unemployment to armed incursions along our borders. The U.S. immigration crisis is no longer an exclusively border state problem; it has been elevated to an issue of national security that demands the attention of every state.

In the war on terror, immigration concerns too often have taken a back seat to military action, freezing of terrorist finances, innovative diplomatic developments and intelligence reform. Such security measures have improved our capacity to thwart enemy plots against our country. But the threat posed by illegal and fraudulent immigration remains under-attended by Washington.

The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., recently determined that 7.9 million new immigrants, both legal and illegal, settled in the United States between 2000 and 2005, making this the highest five-year period of immigration in U.S. history. CIS estimates that nearly half of the post-2000 immigrant arrivals — 3.7 million — are illegal.

The number of resident immigrants as of March 2005 is the highest in U.S. history — 35.2 million, or 12.1 percent of the total U.S. population. We must apply common sense and realize that voluminous immigration and the resulting loophole-susceptible system facilitates terrorist operatives in the United States.

Not only are the drug-traffickers along the Mexican border exploiting our generous, welcoming arms as an immigrant nation — and our political ambivalence about shoring up our borders — but so are the terrorists.

Such infiltration was enumerated by Janice Kephart, counsel to the Sept. 11 commission, who investigated terrorists operating in the United States from the early 1990s through 2004, including six of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The results of her investigation were disheartening. Fifty-five of the 94 terrorists in her study committed immigration fraud before or in conjunction with terrorist activities. Of those, 79 were immigration violations. Once in the United States, 23 terrorists became legal permanent residents. And 21 foreign terrorists became naturalized U.S. citizens.

Kephart concluded that "these gaps (in our immigration system) will remain exploited until the system becomes designed to catch terrorists better," until the United States can provide resources to pay for reforms and there is the political will to enforce the law.

Recent congressional action, presidential attention and the continued exposes in newspapers on border security suggest that this year may witness the political will to manage this outrageous problem.

This is our wake-up call. If the United States is attuned to the national security perspective of the immigration crisis in America, we must agree to reform our immigration system in the name of protecting American lives.

Albrecht is the John Tower National Security Fellow at the Center for Security Policy.