National security interests
National security: who can argue about this? Well, most of those disheveled assholes you see on TV screaming and waving picket signs between college credits or minivan trips to their kids' soccer practices, for example. Notwithstanding the spewage from these mouths that bite the hands that protect them, there really aren't national security interests at stake here. Not if we're talking about Mexican laborers and not terrorists.
Should we have standards for who can be allowed into the country and who should not? Of course we should. For the same reason we need better standards for which Islamofascist motherfuckers we allow in on student visas, we also need standards for which undocumented, beige-skinned individuals we allow in from south of the border.
Unless we end all traffic into and out of the United States (something not everyone may be opposed to), we'll always need standards for who constitutes a threat and who does not. Having a sufficient number of copies of form 9637.512B stamped by the right bureaucrat at the right time is not a mark of inherent safety. Most American citizens I know don't possess any paperwork proving they don't pose a threat to my safety. I trust them for two basic reasons: 1. they haven't done anything that gives me reason to mistrust them, and 2. they are citizens of a country that doesn't want to murder me. (Not in the short run, anyway.)
Since most people desiring entry into the United States pass test number one, the next question to ask is: how do they do on number two? I suggest we might want to start by asking them what continent they were born on. If mommy and daddy gave them a little pair of maracas instead of an Explodes Herself Hamideh doll, we might want to lower the minimum grade requirements on their non-terrorist asshole certification exam.
It's within the realm of possibility that anyone might become a murderer. That goes for both American citizens and non-citizens. But in the context of national security, we're not concerned with mind reading or proving the unprovable. We're concerned about the identification of potential threats and preventing them from entering the country. (Or in some cases, imprisoning or killing them.) The way to identify potential terrorist threats is to identify connections with existing terrorist networks, and to do that from an immigration perspective, we need to identify connections with known state sponsors of terrorism.
If you're concerned that identifying an individual's connection to a state sponsor of terrorism is difficult, I don't disagree. Hence, I go back to my original premise: the current state of American politics makes it impossible to resolve the current immigration problem. As long as state sponsors of terrorism are allowed to exist, as long as their death threats are perpetually ignored and rationalized, and as long as they continue unabated to expand their military capabilities to destroy us, the risk of misidentifying some miscellaneous connection between an individual and those states will persist. More state sponsors of terrorism means more state-sponsored terrorists. Before immigration, or any entry of foreign visitors, can be deemed reasonably safe, the sources of terrorism need to be removed or otherwise stifled.
The mindless prevention of any random idiot from entering the United States in the name of "national security" does nothing to end the cause and source of terrorism. It is a symptom of a mindset that fails to recognize the real enemy: Islamic fundamentalism. It's typical ballsless behavior by Republicans: picking on unarmed Mexicans in the name of national security and calling it a war on terrorism.
