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seaports, where nearly 9 million containers are off-loaded every year. There are an additional 115 land facilities that serve as official ports of entry, handling car and truck traffic. The country has 500,000 bridges, 500 skyscrapers, nearly 200,000 miles of natural gas pipelines, and 2,900 power plants—more than 100 of which are nuclear. Then there are subways and shopping malls and countless other critical infrastructure, not to mention the human traffic. Some 30 million foreign nationals enter the United States annually, more than 95 percent of whom are tourists or business travelers. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in 2006 there were 750,000 foreign student and exchange visitors in the United States.

Given limited resources, protecting everything in equal proportion is not a viable option. Nor is putting an ankle bracelet on each visitor. Fortunately, however, every vulnerability is not a serious threat. It’s possible that Al Qaeda is eyeing an edifice in suburban Santa Fe, but it’s not plausible. Robert Leiken, a homeland security scholar at the Nixon Institute, noted that post-9/11, sealing the Mexican border has “quite properly” not been a major focus of the Bush administration’s antiterror strategy. “Latin America in general and Mexico in particular are inhospitable to Muslim extremists in ways Canada and our sea and air borders are not,” says Leiken. “There are at most a handful of Islamic terrorist cells in Latin America, most notably Hezbollah smuggling and money laundering operations in the lawless Ciudad del Este on the ‘triple frontier’ where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet.”

Michael O’Hanlon, another national security ace at Brookings, thinks that as a general rule, it makes sense to have not only secure borders but good databases on who you’re watching out for. And he supports, at a minimum, a standardized, biometrically based national driver’s license. But he adds, “The only thing dangerous here is that the border itself is insecure, not that a lot of Latinos are coming across it. I know of no evidence that there’s been a terrorist threat from a Latino virtually ever. There are Latino criminals—the narco threat—but they aren’t terrorists.”

SHRINKING THE HAYSTACK

Prior to 9/11, border security was divided among six Cabinet departments—State, Treasury, Justice, Transportation, Agriculture, and Defense. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), established in 2002, brought together twenty-two previously separate agencies within those departments. It now includes the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. DHS has more than 200,000 employees, and its 2006 budget was $40 billion.

Reactionary populists of the Michelle Malkin variety want to do little more than throw additional resources at border patrol. Like liberals and failing public schools, they’re convinced that more money is the answer. There’s no place for sober cost-benefit analyses in the policy prescriptions of Malkin, Buchanan, Tancredo, and Dobbs, only indignation and ignorance. Like the Minutemen kooks she champions by name, Malkin wants illegal aliens detained at military bases, soldiers patrolling the Rio Grande, and a complete moratorium on visas for people from certain Muslim countries. She wants entering America to be “a fiercely guarded privilege.” Literally.

But DHS officials say that the wiser course of action is a more comprehensive approach. Border barriers, human or otherwise, get you only so far. Only about half of the foreigners in the United States illegally evaded border controls. More than 40 percent entered legally but stayed too long or otherwise violated their visa. Just like the 9/11 terrorists. In other words, had the Army’s Second Infantry Division been patrolling the border prior to 9/11, it still wouldn’t have thwarted the attacks. Militarizing the border to stop the next Mohamed Atta is like taking a laxative to treat psoriasis.

We’re better off reducing pressure on the border by giving economic migrants more legal ways to come.