Sometimes Washington is beyond clueless.\u00a0 Immigration reform is a case in point.<\/p>\n
Central to the immigration reform is border security, stopping people from illegally slipping across the Mexican border into the United States.\u00a0 Millions have done so in recent years, though far fewer since the recession began.\u00a0 Many were seeking jobs. Some may have been looking to take advantage of our social services safety net. But, though you wouldn\u2019t know it from any of the media coverage, a few \u2013 a lethal few \u2013 have come to do us no good.\u00a0 The most threatening consequence of not dealing with border security has been the failure to keep this last group out.<\/p>\n
For years it has been widely believe that Iran and Venezuela have been using our porous borders to their advantage.\u00a0 There has been ongoing speculation about Iran directly or indirectly planting terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S.\u00a0 There have been reports of alliances between Iran and the drug lords who have turned northern Mexico into a field of savage battle.<\/p>\n
We rarely hear talk of terror lumped together with talk of human trafficking and drugs.\u00a0 But human trafficking experts tell us that the traffickers use established routes to move their (let\u2019s use the word) slaves from Mexico and farther south across the border and then to their ultimate destinations.\u00a0 These routes come complete with drop points, safe houses and conductors on this sinister updating of the Underground Railroad of 200 years ago.\u00a0 The experts tell us that the same networks that transport people also transport drugs.\u00a0 Why not terrorists and their weapons, too?<\/p>\n
What I have described is a long smoldering fear in national security circles.\u00a0 It broke into the open in the past week in the pages of\u00a0The Wall Street Journal.
\n<\/i>
\nLast Saturday, in her regular column, Peggy Noonan expressed her fears that \u201cAmerica\u2019s Power is under siege.\u201d\u00a0 She was writing not about our global military or economic power but about last April\u2019s recently revealed rifle team attack that disabled a Pacific Gas & Electric substation near San Jose, California.\u00a0 Police have determined that the shooters (who have not been apprehended) had scouted the site in advance, determined sight lines and marked firing positions. Before launching their barrage, they had cut phone lines to and from the station.\u00a0 A silent flashlight signal started the barrage.\u00a0 Another ended it. \u00a0AK-47-type casings clean of fingerprints were found around the marksmen\u2019s posts the next morning.\u00a0 One federal official termed the episode \u201cthe most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noonan reported speculation that the incident was a dress rehearsal for a much larger and more lethal attack on the grid.\u00a0 She said she has long worried about hostile forces using widely spread and well-coordinated teams of snipers to crash the nation\u2019s electrical system.<\/p>\n
Then Wednesday, another widely respected\u00a0Journal<\/i>\u00a0columnist, Holman Jenkins responded, in effect saying, as Scarlett O\u2019Hara would say, \u201cfiddley dee.\u201d\u00a0 This sort of thing happens all the time, Jenkins reported. No big deal.<\/p>\n
Jenkin\u2019s list of incidents similar to the San Jose one was alarmingly long and occasionally comic. In 1990, in tiny Broken Bow, Oklahoma, in the state\u2019s southeastern Little Dixie region, three men opened fire on an electrical substation and knocked it out.\u00a0 The police chief called it \u201ca terrorist type thing,\u201d except the shooters turned out to be not hostile agents but three drunks.<\/p>\n
Jenkins is surely right about the history and that by and large a particular kind of thrill seeker is behind most of such incidents.\u00a0 Still, whether Noonan is right or wrong about the April 2013 attack, the fact underpinning her fear remains \u2013 that our loosely guarded southern border is an invitation to Iran and others to insert agents into our midst to do bad things.<\/p>\n
Which brings me back to immigration reform.\u00a0 A central obstacle to reform has been what to do about our southern border.\u00a0 Republicans feel burned by the failure of the executive branch under both parties to enforce the border security provisions of the 1986 immigration reform act.\u00a0 They want the government to get control \u2013 verifiable control \u2014 of cross border traffic before proceeding with other aspects of reform.\u00a0 Democrats have responded with a firm \u201cno\u201d to this reasonable demand, fueling speculation that, in their minds, more illegal immigration equals more votes in their column in the years ahead.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Iran and its allies continue doing whatever they have been doing, raising a question, at least in my mind.\u00a0 Even if Noonan was wrong about the San Jose shootings, how long will it be before we have an incident \u2013 not necessarily aimed at the grid but big and unmistakable \u2013 in which she is right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes Washington is beyond clueless.\u00a0 Immigration reform is a case in point. Central to the immigration reform is border security, stopping people from illegally slipping across the Mexican border into the United States.\u00a0 Millions have done so in recent years, though far fewer since the recession began.\u00a0 Many were seeking jobs. Some may have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[45,12,66,203,184,44,146],"class_list":["post-1714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-democrats","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-immigration","tag-immigration-reform","tag-national-security","tag-republicans","tag-terrorism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1715,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions\/1715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}