Tancredo: The Price Of Accommodating Mexico

The Mexican government continues to oppose enhanced U.S. border security while Mexican cartels smuggle thousands of criminals and terrorists into the United States. The Obama administration continues to tolerate this national-security nightmare out of fear of offending the Mexican government and its allies in the National Council of La Raza.

Millions of Americans are asking, what's wrong with this picture? Why is Janet Napolitano more worried about border security for Saudi Arabia than for the citizens of Arizona?

It is important to understand the economic reasons behind Mexico's hostility to border security. Mexico's opposition to border security is rooted in the flow of money back to Mexico from the 20 to 30 million Mexican citizens working in the United States. Mexico wants that flow of dollars to continue and to increase. Mexico's addiction to those American dollars – over $25 billion in 2007 – has led the Mexican government into an unholy partnership with the drug cartels. Both the Mexican government and the cartels want open borders, and they both paint the American concern for border security as racist and "anti-Mexican."

But there is more than the flow of dollars at stake in the debate over border security. What most Americans do not understand is that the drug cartels control both the drug smuggling and the human trafficking. The "coyotes" who take people across the border are no longer freelance operators; they work for the cartels, and the cartels set the prices and make the rules.

A Mexican national or someone from Guatemala or Honduras will typically pay $1,500 to be taken across the border. But thousands of "other-than-Mexican" (OTMs) are also smuggled across the border by the same networks. Individuals from Brazil, Egypt and Nigeria pay $5,000 to $10,000 each. Thus, the large-scale smuggling of human beings brings additional billions to the drug cartels' coffers each year.

But there is a third, silent partner in this unholy alliance against border security. The terrorist organization Hezbollah is operating in Mexico and Latin America and is paying the drug cartels big bucks to get its agents into the United States. "High value" individuals from Pakistan, Yemen, Iran and Afghanistan pay from $20,000 to $50,000 to Mexican cartels to get into the United States.

In 2008, over 790,000 individuals were apprehended by agents of Customs and Border Protection trying to enter the country illegally. Over 5,500 of them were from "Special Interest" countries, nations that either have terrorist cells or openly support terrorist activity. Now, the bad news. That is the official number apprehended. According to the estimates of off-duty and retired Border Patrol agents, people not constrained to toe the company line, in any given year the number who evade the Border Patrol and enter the country successfully is three to five times the number actually apprehended.

Let's do the math. If 15,000 to 25,000 individuals from terrorist-friendly countries are coming across our borders successfully each year, that means that since Sept. 11, 2001, most likely over 200,000 such individuals from terrorist-friendly countries have crossed our southwest border and are now residing in our communities.

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(Tom Tancredo is a former five-term congressman from Colorado and 2008 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He currently serves as chairman of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and co-chairman of TeamAmericaPac. Tancredo is the author of "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border and Security.")