Leadership Quote by Duncan Hunter

Even in the boom-and-bust genre of border talk, this line is doing a lot of work with very little evidence. Hunter isn’t just advocating a fence; he’s laundering a long-running immigration argument through the scariest available noun: “terrorists.” The phrasing matters. “Should they decide” smuggles in a hypothetical as if it’s a looming plan, while “come across a land border” paints the border as an open door to catastrophe. The destination tag - “and to California” - is a political bullseye, not a logistical detail: it nods to a home-state audience and to a broader conservative storyline about vulnerable, liberal coastal states.

The specific intent is to reframe the fence as national-security infrastructure rather than migration control, because “terrorism” carries a moral clarity that debates about labor, asylum, or demographics don’t. A fence becomes less a controversial symbol and more a commonsense obstacle: it would be a “hindrance,” modestly phrased, which makes the policy sound practical rather than punitive. That understatement is strategic; it avoids promising a perfect fix while still implying prevention.

Subtext: the border is where disorder originates, and physical barriers are proof of seriousness. Contextually, this fits the post-9/11 security imagination, where worst-case scenarios justify sweeping measures, and where politicians gain leverage by collapsing distinct issues - undocumented migration, drug trafficking, and terrorism - into one single threat stream. The quote’s power isn’t in its accuracy; it’s in its ability to make a fence feel like a vote against fear.