Hopefully this from Peter Beinart will make you feel better when your leadership is defeated by the corporate interests in your party.

The Wrong Place to Stop Terrorists

Immigration scaremongers like to note that more than 150,000 OTMs -- "other than Mexicans" -- were caught crossing the southern border in fiscal 2005. What they generally don't say is that the vast majority of them -- as much as 99 percent -- come from other Latin American countries. The number hailing from "countries of interest," i.e., Islamic countries that produce a lot of terrorists, is in the hundreds, if not the tens.

Does that mean it's impossible for a terrorist to enter the United States from Mexico? Of course not. But consider the odds. The United State posts more than five agents per mile across our southern border. By contrast, we post less than one agent every five miles across our northern border. What's more, as the United States has cut off urban crossing points in places such as El Paso and San Diego, it has forced many illegal immigrants to go through the Arizona desert -- a brutal journey, particularly for someone with no knowledge of the terrain. Would-be terrorists coming from Canada are not only less likely to be caught, they are less likely to die along the way.

There also happen to be many more potential jihadists in Canada. Unlike Mexico, with its negligible Arab and Muslim population, Canada in recent decades has welcomed large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East. And while the vast majority are law-abiding, Canadian authorities estimate that roughly 50 terrorist groups operate in the country. In their study, Leiken and Brooke identify three suspected terrorists who have tried to enter the United states from Canada, including Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian native arrested in December 1999 on his way to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.

On national security grounds, then, if America wants to build a wall along one of our borders, it should be our border to the north. More practically, the best way to prevent terrorists from entering the United States, according to experts such as Richard Falkenrath, a Brookings Institution scholar and former deputy homeland security adviser, would be to invest in a state-of-the-art terrorist watch list complete with biometric screening. After all, terrorists are most likely to enter the United States the same way the Sept. 11 hijackers did -- through airports.