"We have terrorists coming into the country both through our Northern and Southern borders"
About this Quote
Tom Tancredo turns the immigration debate into a national security alarm, asserting that hostile actors are slipping through both Canada and Mexico. A Colorado Republican and early border hawk, he rose to prominence in the years after 9/11 when fears of terrorist infiltration shaped every policy conversation. By invoking the northern border as well as the southern, he widens the frame beyond familiar anxieties about Mexico and places an ostensibly overlooked frontier at the center of risk. The move references real history: Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millennium Bomber, tried to enter from Canada in 1999, a near-miss that haunted post-9/11 policy thinking.
The power of the line lies in its simplicity and its preventive logic. If terrorists could come through either border, then every gap must be closed, every officer reinforced, every database linked. It is a case for total coverage rather than incremental fixes, and for treating immigration control as counterterrorism. Rhetorically, it fuses disparate issues — asylum, labor migration, smuggling, and transnational plots — into a single, urgent threat. It also preempts charges of regional bias: by naming the northern border, Tancredo wraps a fear-based argument in a veneer of evenhandedness.
The empirical record is messier. Since 2001, most individuals who carried out or plotted attacks in the United States either entered by air on visas, overstayed, or were U.S.-born. Confirmed attempts to cross the land borders for terrorism have been rare, though officials have warned of the possibility and recorded watchlist hits that do not necessarily indicate operatives. Politics, however, prizes worst-case scenarios, and the imagined risk often drives policy more than the measured one.
What remains is a lesson in how the war on terror reframed immigration: borders became battle lines, and sweeping enforcement priorities followed. A brief, alarming claim helped redirect debates away from trade and lawful mobility and toward a security-first posture that still shapes American policy.
The power of the line lies in its simplicity and its preventive logic. If terrorists could come through either border, then every gap must be closed, every officer reinforced, every database linked. It is a case for total coverage rather than incremental fixes, and for treating immigration control as counterterrorism. Rhetorically, it fuses disparate issues — asylum, labor migration, smuggling, and transnational plots — into a single, urgent threat. It also preempts charges of regional bias: by naming the northern border, Tancredo wraps a fear-based argument in a veneer of evenhandedness.
The empirical record is messier. Since 2001, most individuals who carried out or plotted attacks in the United States either entered by air on visas, overstayed, or were U.S.-born. Confirmed attempts to cross the land borders for terrorism have been rare, though officials have warned of the possibility and recorded watchlist hits that do not necessarily indicate operatives. Politics, however, prizes worst-case scenarios, and the imagined risk often drives policy more than the measured one.
What remains is a lesson in how the war on terror reframed immigration: borders became battle lines, and sweeping enforcement priorities followed. A brief, alarming claim helped redirect debates away from trade and lawful mobility and toward a security-first posture that still shapes American policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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