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Terrorism and Illegal Immigration
In Economics tonight, we were talking about immigration. And when we go to the subject of illegal immigration, one of the students said something along the lines of "After 9/11, it's a huge security risk." And I, being a dummy, argued on their ground, instead of pointing out the obvious fact I should have know to, to undo their false linking of September 11 with illegal immigration. That's the simple fact that all of the hijackers on September 11 had completely legal and valid visas.
It's obvious when you think about it, really. See, if you're planning something big, the last thing you want to do is get hauled off and deported on immigration violations. It's really hard to hijack a plane going from New York when you're stuck in Saudi Arabia. How porous the Mexican border may or may not be doesn't really matter much for that. It may matter for other things, like smuggling in weapons or whatever, but getting actual terrorists in, not so much. Terrorists aren't going to sneak in as illegal immigrants, there'd be too much risk of being kicked out of the country for immigration violations. The same as, if they're good (competent sense, not moral sense), they're going to obey traffic laws and so on, so some little thing doesn't get them caught and screw up the whole plan. There's many things we can and should do to prevent terrorists attacks, but kicking illegal immigrants out of the country isn't one of them. There's plenty that can be argued on immigration on other grounds, trying to short-circuit the debate by calling up the specter of terrorism doesn't work in this case.
It's obvious when you think about it, really. See, if you're planning something big, the last thing you want to do is get hauled off and deported on immigration violations. It's really hard to hijack a plane going from New York when you're stuck in Saudi Arabia. How porous the Mexican border may or may not be doesn't really matter much for that. It may matter for other things, like smuggling in weapons or whatever, but getting actual terrorists in, not so much. Terrorists aren't going to sneak in as illegal immigrants, there'd be too much risk of being kicked out of the country for immigration violations. The same as, if they're good (competent sense, not moral sense), they're going to obey traffic laws and so on, so some little thing doesn't get them caught and screw up the whole plan. There's many things we can and should do to prevent terrorists attacks, but kicking illegal immigrants out of the country isn't one of them. There's plenty that can be argued on immigration on other grounds, trying to short-circuit the debate by calling up the specter of terrorism doesn't work in this case.