Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [68]
Still, the bottom line remains that noncitizens comprise a disproportionately small percentage of U.S. inmates overall. According to the Justice Department’s latest figures, noncitizens are 7 percent of the U.S. population but only 6.4 percent of the prisoners.
“The problem of crime in the United States is not ‘caused’ or even aggravated by immigrants, regardless of their legal status,” write Rumbaut and Ewing. “But the misperception that the opposite is true persists among policymakers, the media, and the general public, thereby undermining the development of reasoned public responses to both crime and immigration.” The reality is that Americans have more reason to fear the native-born Joshua Komisarjevskys and Steven Hayeses than they do illegal aliens like Jose Carranza. Much more reason, in fact. We’re not “importing crime.” Our crime problems are homegrown, and it’s hard to see how smearing immigrants will change that.
CONFLATING LATINO IMMIGRATION AND TERRORISM
But what of the notion that immigrants from Latin America pose an undue terror threat? Conflating terrorism and illegal immigration has become popular in the wake of 9/11, though the logic isn’t easy to follow. After all, we were attacked via jetliners by Islamists from the Middle East, all of whom entered the country legally. How would a wall across our southern border aimed at deterring Christian Latinos make us safer?
If anything, a fortification spanning our northern border with Canada would be in order. The U.S.-Canadian border is more than twice as long as its Mexican counterpart but has far fewer patrols. And Canada’s asylum policies are much more forgiving than Mexico’s, which has led to a far more extensive Muslim presence than can be found in Mexico. Muslim extremists in Canada have an infrastructure and logistics at the ready, which isn’t the case in Mexico. Islamists could always make use of the vast smuggling networks in Latin America, one supposes, but that’s something that’s out of their control and exposes them to capture.
So far, no terrorist attack has been perpetrated by someone who sneaked into the United States through Mexico, let alone by a Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran, or any other foreign national from Latin America. That doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t ever happen, but it does help explain why building fences and other barricades along the Rio Grande isn’t at the top of the list for people who spend a lot of time thinking about homeland security.
“There are too many easier ways to get into the U.S., and the Mexican border isn’t a particularly attractive one,” says Jeremy Shapiro, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution. “The Mexican border is a very controlled border, relatively speaking. It’s more patrolled than any of our other borders. That doesn’t mean that a lot of people don’t get in. It means that a relatively large number of people who try to get in get caught.” In 2005, border patrol agents apprehended about 1.2 million foreigners, 90 percent of whom were Mexicans caught just inside the border. When you get caught, you’re detained for a period and fingerprinted, the last thing you want if you’re on a terrorist watch list. And if you’re not in the system, well, then there’s no reason to sneak in at all.
A drug dealer operating out of Central America may send a hundred mules north every month and expect, say, 75 percent to make it. But terrorist activities are too small to deal in those sorts of loss rates. Given the time and investment that goes into large-scale attacks, a 25 percent chance of getting caught is unacceptable. “It’s not that you can’t come through the Mexican border,” says Shapiro. “It’s just that it always makes more sense to come in through some other way. And a wall and 10,000 more border patrol agents isn’t going to change that.”
Obviously, homeland security for a nation our size requires prioritization. The United States has 216 airports and 143