Refugees, Open Borders: Dangerous Formula

By Joe Guzzardi
September 11, 2015
 
The headline grabbing news this week—on the 9/11 anniversary, no less—is that President Obama wants the U.S. to resettle about 10,000 Syrian refugees during the next fiscal year. The recommended total represents an infinitesimal fraction of the millions who would like to come, but looms as a potentially huge safety risk for America. Notwithstanding White House promises that the refugees will be thoroughly vetted, history tells us differently. See the Boston Marathon bombing Tsarnaev brothers as one of the highest profile examples of United States generosity gone wrong. 
 
Even before a huge increase in Middle Eastern refugees, peril lurks everywhere. According to a House Homeland Security Committee report, today the U.S. is in greater danger from homegrown jihadist terrorist attacks than at any time since 2011. The number of cases, most in New York and Boston, has tripled from 38 to 122 during the last four years.
 
Those who defend Obama’s welcoming of more Syrian refugees point to it as an act of compassion, and insist this won’t impede America’s security. But they can’t explain the president’s steadfast refusal to secure the border between the U.S. and Mexico, a major corridor for terrorists and, in 2006, congressionally mandated. The Secure Fence Act ordered construction on hundreds of miles of authorized double fencing and would also provide more checkpoints, cameras, vehicle barriers and lighting to deter illegal entry.
 
However, shortly after SFA became law, Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to waive double-fencing, substitute a single-layer which Popular Mechanics mocked as useless, and postponed various deadlines. Congress bowed to protests from the open border lobby that a fence would destroy its community, deny access to the Rio Grande River, and represent a symbol of U.S. nativism.  
 
But fences work. In the 1990s, a 14-mile section of double and triple-layer fence was put up between San Diego and Tijuana with positive results. Before the fence, as many as 100,000 aliens crossed that sector annually, according to Border Patrol Agent Jim Henry. But after the fence went up, attempted crossings declined by 95 percent. Henry called the fence “highly effective.”
 
Although Congress has repeatedly demanded that the fence be completed, Department of Homeland Security officials recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that 1,300 miles or 66 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border is wide open. Only 36 miles of double-layer fencing, .02 percent, has been erected, a tiny fraction of the 700 miles required by law. Additional DHS responses to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s questioning revealed that no fencing is under construction on 1,300 miles of unprotected border.
 
DHS has dozens of excuses for why the fence has been stalled for years including that the $2.5 billion allocated for the project has been spent on planning, design, construction, construction oversight, real estate acquisition, environment planning, compliance and mitigation and contract support—everything imaginable except physical fence construction.
 
Ample proof from San Diego and Israel confirm that fencing acts as a major preventive to illegal immigration, regardless of objections from the pro-immigration lobby and the political ruling class which forced the project’s virtual shutdown.
 
Israel is a prime example of how efficient good fences can be. In 2013, Israel built a 245-mile fence across the rugged Sinai Peninsula that ended the huge influx of African immigration. Israel’s fence cost $245 million or $1.8 million per mile. Assuming the U.S. could complete its fence for the same average cost per mile, the total would be less than $2 billion, significantly less than the “hundreds of billions” that the anti-fence crowd projects.
 
The U.S. cannot survive admitting thousands of refugees from nations that have sworn to destroy America and an open border which the White House refuses to secure, truths that don’t bother the White House.