Welcome back! Let’s continue. (Find Part I in the Jan. 28 edition.)
From a national security perspective, international airports are part of our “border.” Many undocumented workers and bad actors initially enter this way, legally, and overstay their tourist, business and student visas’ expiration date or abuse their visa type.
Examples? California authorities last December arrested an illegal for shipping weapons to North Korea; he entered on a one-year student visa in 2012. Some 9/11 hijackers overstayed legal visas. It is widely reported that Elon Musk was on a student visa when he first worked in the U.S.; he was “out of status.” (Look up more recent news reports documenting his use of illegals to build Tesla and SpaceX.)
Some criminals and terrorists fly into our nation, and are in legal status when they strike: the German who killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont in January; modern South American transnational theft groups; some 9/11 hijackers; and Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Egyptian “Blind Sheikh” behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (Note: Nonimmigrant visa applicants are not tested for contagion; claims that illegals introduce disease at higher rates are unsupported by data.)
What about “The Wall?” People cut through, tunnel under, walk around and go over (climb, fly ultralights, use vehicular ramps) walls worldwide, including on our southern border, even segments built during Trump 1.0. Walls slow crossing rates, but historical examples of their failure to prevent entry are many — Hadrian’s, Gorgon’s, China’s, the Maginot Line.
Moreover, some illegals exploit our 95K-mile coastline (including territories) to arrive by sea — Chinese smuggled in cargo containers on ships, for instance. Still others — less than 1 %, according to U.S. government data — trickle south from Canada, like the Jordanian terrorist suspect arrested last November after crossing into Washington state. Two months prior, Ontario authorities detained a Pakistani planning an illegal crossing to attack Jews in New York. An Indian family froze to death walking to Minnesota in January 2022.
If history is any guide, an effective physical border barrier would be financially crippling (encircling the country) and morally questionable (resembling the highly effective Berlin Wall designed to keep people in — armed patrols and dogs between double ramparts, watchtowers with machine guns, shoot-on-sight protocols, klieg lights, concertina wire).
Why not enter legally? The number allowed is limited by country, wait times can be measured in decades, it’s too expensive for many, and others cannot qualify for nonsecurity reasons.
Most cannot afford professional fixers, like the lawyer who secured for First Lady Melania Trump a rare “extraordinary skill” immigrant visa. Also, it’s a fickle system and, sometimes, painful process.
My Hong Kong in-laws — educated, skilled, financially secure — saw their legal immigration process in the late ’70s stall for five disruptive years when quota-bound Uncle Sam suddenly prioritized the intake of Vietnamese refugees. How many legal immigrants currently in process are in limbo due to recent presidential executive orders?
As for mass deportations, a December 2024 Centre for Economic Policy Research study documents the negative impact on local economies and communities when this was tried under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. A Texas comptroller study in 2005 — confirmed by the Baker Institute (2020) and Center for Public Policy Priorities (2017) — concluded that deporting the state’s 1.4 million illegals would erode $17.7 billion in gross domestic product. (Relatedly, Douglas City, Ariz., last month declared a state of emergency in response to White House border edicts, citing potential loss of revenue for local business and government.)
Mind you, illegals have constitutional protections. (Undocumented meat packers in Texas won a $1 million lawsuit for Fourth and Fifth Amendment violations during a workplace raid under Trump 1.0.) Think, too, of the societal strain when split-status families (one legal, one illegal parent) are separated, creating overnight a new community of single-parent households with reduced income.
Consider the effect on your life when construction workers, fruit pickers, toll booth operators, nannies and fast food servers disappear and we lose community contributors — T-ball coaches, artists, etc. (I know an illegal, a U.S. military officer, who served admirably in a Defense Attache Office abroad. Now retired, will he be deported?)
Further complicating matters are Russian intelligence “active measures.” Research the origins of the video that surfaced online last October purporting to show Haitian illegals voting in Georgia (a classic dezinformatsiya operation exploiting a hot button issue to agitate targeted demographics of our society). Read about Moscow’s weaponization of immigration against European nations. Are they doing something similar in, say, Arizona?
(What about reverse illicit flows? Mexican cartels and criminals in Canada depend on guns that are bought legally in the U.S. and smuggled in.)
“Yikes! This is more complex than I thought.” Yep.
J.P. Atwell is a former senior CIA operations officer. His two-decade career began as an intelligence analyst and took him to every continent, save Antarctica. He now calls Hawaii Island home. He welcomes your comments at island.intelligencer@gmail.com.
