THE PROBLEM IS THE NORTHERN BORDER
This long A.P. story scrutinizes the post-9/11 security at the U.S.-Mexico border and finds that it's stopping Latin Americans who want to work, not Islamacists who want to kill Americans. Not terribly surprising, when you consider how much harder it would be for a terrorist type to blend in among Spanish-speaking peasants than among Canadian air travelers. The tighter southern border has everything to do with anti-Latino sentiment in California and elsewhere, and very little to do with stopping terrorism.
From the story:
Several Border Patrol agents along the Arizona-Mexico line said that although they have become increasingly vigilant toward the possibility of terrorists using established people-smuggling routes, they have found none.
"The people who are coming across this border are people who can only pay $1,500 to a smuggler. A terrorist can pay $30,000 or $40,000 and go to the northern border where we don't have the resources to stop them," said agent Matt Roggow.
He navigated his Humvee across ranchers' dirt roads in the hilly desert near Tucson, leaning out the window to "cut sign": search for footprints in the soft dirt that betray the paths of desperate migrants through the vast desert. He knows well how difficult the trip is.
"l'd be willing to bet that a terrorist isn't going to take the chance of coming across this border," he said.
Read the whole thing. As InstaPundit warned within hours of the 9/11 attacks, fighting terrorism provided an all-purpose justification for previously moribund--and previously unrelated--policy proposals.