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"It's hard to separate the effect of the economy and increased
enforcement," Passel said. "It's a lot harder physically to get
across the border, but it's also more expensive a more dangerous, and you're faced with the prospect of having no job when you get here." Spillover into the U.S. of Mexican drug violence is also difficult to measure. In terms of violent crime, El Paso, Texas, ranks among the safest cities in the U.S.
-- even though it's across from violence-torn Ciudad Juarez. Drug crime aside, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who heads a Homeland Security subcommittee, said he's worried about cartels teaming with international terrorists. "It's not secure," McCaul said of the border, "and anybody that lives down there, I think, will tell you that." U.S. intelligence officials counter that they know of no case in which a terrorist has sneaked across the border to plot actively against the U.S. Carpenter, who has written extensively on the increasing brutality of Mexican drug cartels, called the presidential candidates' pledges to secure the border "mainly defensive." "If you don't take a strong position on border security, you leave yourself open to allegations that you're soft on immigration or drugs," he said. Michael Lytle, a former consultant on border security and counterterrorism, said it's hard to even conceptualize a fully secure border since the Arizona desert presents different challenges than the millions of commercial trucks rumbling north into Laredo, Texas, or than pedestrians streaming from Tijuana to San Diego. Tracking would-be terrorists also has little to do with stopping migrant workers sneaking into the U.S., or coping with well-armed drug smugglers. "You can't look at it as 'the whole border,'" he said. Lytle, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said a deployment of 15,000 National Guard troops could make an impact
-- but it would be a hard sell for a Defense Department facing budget cuts. "A troop surge there, would that seal the border? Probably not," Lytle said. "And even if it did, how long could you sustain that?"
[Associated
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