Investor's Business Daily, September 28th, 2007
Homeland Security: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi worries about a border fence "splitting" communities. With news that radioactive material can easily be smuggled into the U.S., it's splitting atoms she should think about.
The House's top Democrat, attending a Hispanic conference in the Rio Grande Valley Thursday, called it a "terrible idea" to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to build fencing over roughly 370 miles of the Mexican border, plus 200 miles of vehicle barriers, by late 2008.
"These are communities where you have a border going through them," she protested. "They are not communities where you have a fence splitting them."
The speaker seems to be suggesting that Hispanics living in the U.S. near the border have more in common with those living just on the other side of the border in Mexico than they do with Americans who live away from the border.
In many respects that may be true, because in recent decades we have stopped insisting that immigrants dive into the American melting pot, by having to learn the English language, for example.
Thank liberals such as Pelosi for those anti-assimilation policies.
While she was placing pan-Americanism before American security, Pelosi took the opportunity to peddle the proposed DREAM Act to give illegal aliens financial breaks for college and let them jump to the head of the line for citizenship.
The same day she was visiting near the border, calling for its continued vulnerability, Mexican President Felipe Calderon was imploring border state governors and their Mexican counterparts, assembled in the Sonora seaside resort town of Puerto Penasco, to allow more Mexicans to work legally within the U.S.
"Immigration is a natural phenomenon that is economically and socially inevitable," Calderon told the governors.
Inevitable, as well, and confirmed by history, is the truth that a country that loses control of its borders will find itself vulnerable to its enemies. Also last Thursday, as Pelosi and Calderon were celebrating the wonders of cross-border activities, a federal agency reported holes in our border security of life-threatening scope.
We may not be the biggest fans of the accountants who run the Government Accountability Office. (Their recent report on progress in Iraq had about as much legitimacy as a French chef's analysis of gastrointestinal surgical techniques.)
But their straightforward investigation into the porosity of both our northern and southern borders is tough to refute.
Among the GAO's findings:
In three of four Canadian border locations visited, investigators successfully carried duffel bags across simulating the smuggling of radioactive materials or other contraband. In one case, Border Patrol agents alerted by a resident to these activities were unable even to locate the GAO officials.
There are sections of border with no apparent monitoring or police presence, where the Customs and Border Protection relies solely "on alert citizens or other information sources to meet its obligation to protect the border."
When investigators took night photographs of a port of entry, the Border Patrol did not even attempt to confirm the identity of the investigators, or even search their vehicle.
All this is absolutely unacceptable in an age when global terrorist organizations are sworn to kill as many Americans as they can, preferably within the U.S. homeland.
Yet the speaker of the House is up in arms about border control dividing communities. The terrorists who would cross our unsecured border want to obliterate our communities.
