There is a reason that the crisis at our southern border was perhaps the hottest topic in the recent presidential debate--as former President Donald Trump repeatedly noted, the border crisis touches on every other major issue, including the economy, crime, health care, the federal debt, and most especially national security. During the past three years, millions of illegal aliens have entered the United States by crossing the southern border, many with little or no vetting for national security purposes. With the United States supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, and Israel in its war against Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbellah, with our involvement in a maritime conflict with Houthi rebels in and near Yemen and the Red Sea, and as war clouds gather in the South China Sea and western Pacific, the possibility of terrorist or “fifth column” cells embedded in cities throughout the United States is very real and very dangerous.
Defending the homeland is the most important national defense responsibility of our government. NBC reports that the Department of Homeland Security identified more than 400 migrants that have been brought to the United States by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network. While some of them have been arrested, at least 50 remain at large somewhere in the United States. This caused House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green to sound an alarm about the Biden administrations’ “open border agenda.” We saw on September 11, 2001, what 19 terrorists could do to our country. Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies has been sounding the alarm about this for a few years in articles and two books: Overrun and America’s Covert Border War. Bensman has accused the Biden administration of covering-up a planned terror attack at Marine Base Quantico by two Jordanian nationals on May 3, 2024. FBI Director Christopher Wray in March testified that “We are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border.” The Heritage Foundation warned two years ago that “Biden’s open border is an open invitation to terrorist attacks.” Bensman has compared the border crisis to an invasion of the United States. With hundreds of thousands of border encounters per month, the statistics support Bensman’s assessment.
Terrorism is only part of the threat. In May, a House Homeland Security Subcomittee noted a surge of Chinese illegal immigration at the southern border. “A wide-open border presents a ripe opportunity for the CCP to undermine our national security,” said Chairman Dan Bishop. Bensman reports that since January 2021, border patrol has encountered more than 50,000 Chinese nationals. “More Chinese nationals are now crossing the Southwest border near San Diego,” writes Bensman, “than Mexican nationals.” In the event of war with China in the South China Sea/western Pacific, some of these Chinese nationals could engage in espionage, sabotage, and worse. The Washington Examiner notes that “China is infiltrating America through its open borders.” The America First Policy Institute characterized this as the “Trojan Horse at the Southern border.”
So we have identified Islamic terrorists and Chinese nationals that have joined millions from other countries that have entered the U.S. illegally in the past three years. There are echoes here with the fall of the western Roman Empire, which succumbed to barbarians that legally and illegally infiltrated the empire and helped the subsequent barbarian invasions of Rome during the 4th through the 6th centuries A.D. As the Wall Street Journal noted, by 500 A.D., “Rome had lost control of every province under its rule to uninvited immigrants.” To be sure, there were other causes for Rome’s fall, including financial mismanagement, endless foreign wars, and a corrupt elite class. But uncontrolled immigration was one of them.
Rome, like the United States, initially viewed immigration as a virtue and a strength of the Empire. But virtue eventually turned to vice. Last year, the renowned strategist Edward Luttwak in an interview with Lafayette Lee, noted parallels between the fall of Rome and the current border crisis in the United States. “[A]fter 378 years of success,” Luttwak noted, “Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed.” The barbarian invasions, Luttwak continued, “were in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks.” Some, like the Goths, Luttwak noted, were “asylum seekers” seeking shelter from the advancing Huns. The Romans, Luttwak noted, like the U.S., had remarkable institutions and a “deep and profound” concept of citizenship, but they were “overwhelmed demographically.”
Luttwak expressed the fear that in America “the very concept of citizenship is being delegitimized.” Our public schools teach a tawdry history of the United States, portraying it as “founded on genocide and slavery.” There is also an ideology at work. The Biden-Obama people believe that the U.S. “has no right to the wealth of the world,” and instead must “share it” with others. This ideology holds that “it is illegitimate to prevent foreigners from coming to the United States and sharing in the wealth.” To the globalists, Luttwak says, “any border control is illegitimate.” Those who say we cannot control our border, Luttwak contends, simply don’t want to do so.
Jeffrey Peters has pointed out that Americans might want to read or re-read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon showed how the migrant barbarians infiltrated the Empire, including its armed forces, engaged in illegal border crossings, but were unwilling to assimilate into Rome’s culture and political system--and were not made to by elite Roman authorities. Citing Gibbon, Peters writes, “an Empire cannot survive with a separate country living within it. The illegal immigrants are exactly that second nation.”
Robert Kaplan has written that the “similar destinies of the United States and Rome can at times seem eerie.” Kaplan noted that Rome’s decline started with its immersion in “small wars.” America’s decline has followed a similar path, and Kaplan places the blame on our foreign policy establishment whose ambition is to do “great things” to “create a . . . long-lasting American order.” For both Rome and the United States, Kaplan wrote, “great power wars strengthen a nation and relatively smaller expeditionary wars dissipate it.” He scolds the Biden administration and much of the foreign policy establishment for “demanding that all countries in the world become democracies.” “Issuing ideological ultimatums is a sign of decadence, that befits a country that is splitting at the seems politically and with an out-of-control national debt,” Kaplan writes. He’s not sure that America will recover from its “adventures” in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
One of the reasons the United States is “splitting at the seems” is the uncontrolled migration at our southern border. Judging by his performance in the presidential debate, it is far from clear that President Biden understands this. His cognitive impairment was evident during the presidential debate; indeed, it has been evident for some time to those willing to face uncomfortable realities. A nation that cannot or will not control its borders ceases to be a nation. The border crisis is not just about jobs and a strain on our welfare state and other resources. It is, especially in times of international conflict, a national security issue of the highest order. If we don’t begin to treat it as such, Rome’s path may be our destiny.
Francis P. Sempa writes the Best Defense column each month.
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