Useful to the Master

Illegal immigration is not just about poor workers seeking a better life.

It’s now also about Iran-backed terrorists organizing in Latin America to penetrate the U.S.-Mexico border and generate drug profits to finance and carry out terrorist attacks against the U.S.

This week, Mexico announced it had arrested Jameel Nasr, the reputed Hezbollah leader in Latin America, at his home in Tijuana, a stone’s throw from the border separating that Mexican city and San Diego, Calif.

It looks like the much maligned Rep. Sue Myrick (R.-N.C.) was right.

Myrick warned that Iranian agents and Hezbollah members were showing up in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela to learn Spanish and better fit in with the waves of illegals crossing the border. Jameel Nasr recently spent a month in Venezuela.

In her letter, Myrick cited Hamas and Hezbollah’s expertise in tunnel building in Lebanon and Gaza as a further threat to the U.S.-Mexico border. In recent years, more than a dozen tunnels, some built with mining-grade technology and equipped with electric lights, air conditioning, and railroad tracks have been discovered under the otherwise effective triple fence along the Tijuana-San Diego border.

A 2008 report from the House Homeland Security Committee documented that Hezbollah agents had already been caught trying to illegally enter the U.S. from Mexico. The report specifically noted the case of Mahmoud Toussef Kourani, the brother of a Hezbollah chief, who pled guilty in a U.S. court in 2005 to providing material support to Hezbollah after he was smuggled into the U.S. and settled in Dearborn, Mich.

With gang members showing up in U.S. prisons with tattoos in Farsi (the national language of Iran), with Mexican law enforcement telling American counterparts that Hezbollah agents are teaching the Mexican drug cartels the art of the car bomb, and with the OTM (Other Than Mexican) illegal alien population being caught by the Border Patrol on the rise, how many clues do the Obama Sherlocks need ?

With these (nearly) unreported facts as background, what to make of Obama’s statement to Sen. Jon Kyl (R.-Ariz.) that if the border were secure, the Republicans would not support “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”  It seems to me that the national security of the U.S. is being held hostage to the President’s objective to pass an amnesty bill.

Ugly events are likely to overshadow both the debate over the Obama lawsuit against the Arizona immigration law, as well as the politics of an Obama push for amnesty.

Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu stated last week that he had “lost control” over wide swaths of his county—areas now under the effective control of the paramilitary troops of the drug cartels. This week, Babeu admitted to a reporter’s question that he had received a death threat from a Mexican cartel.

Assassinations of Mexican law enforcement officers by the cartels are commonplace in Mexico. That violence now threatens U.S. officers. The cartels are emboldened by their continued success against the Mexican Army and, maybe, by the increasing influence and support from worldwide terrorist organizations.

Our open border with Mexico is not just a source of cheap labor and not just millions of “Undocumented Democrats” waiting for amnesty. The border is now a conduit for Iran to strike at the heart of America.