"He can fight terrorists overseas, but he leaves our borders so they can come in here and do their thing"
About this Quote
A sharp jab at executive priorities, the line contrasts a president willing to project force abroad with a leader allegedly inattentive to the homeland. The tension between fighting terrorists overseas and guarding the border at home became a powerful theme in post-9/11 politics, and Tom Tancredo made that theme central to his identity. A Republican congressman from Colorado and an early champion of hardline immigration enforcement, he built a national profile in the mid-2000s by arguing that Washington’s elites were tough in rhetoric but lax in the basic task of controlling who enters the country.
The phrasing blends urgency and colloquial disdain. Saying terrorists can “come in here and do their thing” lowers the bar for what counts as a policy failure while keeping the threat ominously vague. It implies that without a sealed border, all other counterterror efforts are performative. The claim also fuses two debates: the conduct of the War on Terror overseas and the domestic quarrel over immigration enforcement, including fences, employer verification, and interior raids.
Context matters. The Bush administration was pursuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while backing comprehensive immigration reform that included a path to legal status. Tancredo positioned himself against that approach, alongside the Minuteman movement and others who wanted a fence-first strategy. His attack line leveraged real anxieties about visa overstays and screening gaps but simplified the pathways by which terrorists have historically entered, often through legal ports with fraudulent or temporary documents rather than clandestine desert crossings.
As rhetoric, it is potent because it reframes national security as a sovereignty problem: if the border is porous, leaders are failing at the most basic duty of the state. As policy analysis, it collapses a complex set of logistical, legal, and diplomatic challenges into a moral indictment of negligence. That blend helped move border security from a niche cause into a defining plank of conservative politics in the years that followed.
The phrasing blends urgency and colloquial disdain. Saying terrorists can “come in here and do their thing” lowers the bar for what counts as a policy failure while keeping the threat ominously vague. It implies that without a sealed border, all other counterterror efforts are performative. The claim also fuses two debates: the conduct of the War on Terror overseas and the domestic quarrel over immigration enforcement, including fences, employer verification, and interior raids.
Context matters. The Bush administration was pursuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while backing comprehensive immigration reform that included a path to legal status. Tancredo positioned himself against that approach, alongside the Minuteman movement and others who wanted a fence-first strategy. His attack line leveraged real anxieties about visa overstays and screening gaps but simplified the pathways by which terrorists have historically entered, often through legal ports with fraudulent or temporary documents rather than clandestine desert crossings.
As rhetoric, it is potent because it reframes national security as a sovereignty problem: if the border is porous, leaders are failing at the most basic duty of the state. As policy analysis, it collapses a complex set of logistical, legal, and diplomatic challenges into a moral indictment of negligence. That blend helped move border security from a niche cause into a defining plank of conservative politics in the years that followed.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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