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Book Review

In Mortal Danger: The Battle for Americas Border and Security

Tom Tancredo

WND Books, 2006

Congressman Tom Tancredo has earned a preeminent place among those who

oppose massive illegal immigration into the United States. He has for several years been

the leader in the U.S. House of Representatives in seeking remedial measures to stop theflood. During much of that time, continuing into the present, he has experienced the

hostility of a president of his own party and of the Republican leadership in both branches

of Congress. It seemed for a time that his voice might be joined by many others when in

December 2005 the House voted a major reform bill (which, however, did not receive theconcurrence of the Senate and never became law). But Tancredo says the groundswell in

the House has come to appear illusory: Many backers of the initiatives turned out to befair-weather supporters.

Tancredo has colleagues who admire and support him, but he has trenchant

criticisms to make of many politicians and officeholders in light of his experience withthem. It is a telling commentary on conditions within the worlds greatest democracy

when he reports that, Sometimes it has seemed to me as if far too many folks seeking

elective office do so primarily because they want to be in the office. Once they decide

which office they want, they then construct the belief system and rhetoric they believe theyneed to get it. Once elected, they spend the rest of their time figuring out what they have to

do, say, and think in order to keep it. He adds that members of both parties worktogether to advance selfish goals on behalf of special-interest groups and businesses.This relates to one of Tancredos larger points. He sees an internal decay, a loss

of identity, and a de-emphasis on the value of American citizenship. This, of course,

touches on something much broader, more pervasive, than just the issue of immigration.But that more general decay gives rise, he says, to a threat to the United States existence

by encouraging and condoning a massive invasion by those foreign to American culture.

He sees the ideology of multiculturalism that prevails among Americas elite as a

radical cult which amounts, in effect, to a malignancy that essentially opposes the ideaof a common culture. Among that ideologys devotees, the older ideal of a melting pot

that centered on assimilation into a uniquely American culture has given way to a

welcoming of ethnic diversity, with each ethnicity (other than that of Euro-Americans)cultivating its own self-conscious identity and quest for cultural and political power. The

impending result: the clear possibility of balkanization, profoundly fragmenting the

country. Since Americans are doing this to themselves through the interplay of severalfactors, Tancredo thinks it fair to place much of the responsibility upon Americans in

general: We are committing cultural suicide. (Even though he says we, he knows that

the majority of average Americans oppose the demographic invasion, and are a party to


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the suicide only by virtue of their subservience to forces that they allow to be larger than

themselves.)

In Mortal Dangerreviews many of the facts about immigration into the UnitedStates since the 1965 Immigration Act opened the door to the Third World, and it discusses

many of the shibboleths that undergird that policy, including that they are doing jobs

Americans wont do (to which he responds that Americans wont do the jobs only becausethe pay offered is so low); that the immigrants contribute more to the United States than

they cost (which leads him to discuss the costs of education, incarceration, cheap labors

impact on the job market, social services, health care, imported disease, and environmentalimpact); that were a land of immigrants (which prompts him, himself the son of Italian

immigre parents, to say, in effect, yes, we are; but a nation that heretofore has encouraged

all to blend into a shared culture); and that only ethnics can speak for ethnics (which he

considers a very dangerous attitude).But these things are discussed in a good many other books available to those

Americans who will read them. The unique value of Tancredos book lies in the

fascinating (and important) specifics he relates. Among them:

1. Tancredo tells of a recent visit he made to the Detroit area. He found that thereare at least sixty mosques and 130,000 Muslims. It appeared that little assimilation has

occurred. Dearborn had the look of a spruced-up Islamabad. While we stood on a streetcorner, we listened as the call to prayer went out over loud speakers on minarets all over

the city. Every sign on every building was written in Arabic.

2. When Tancredo went to speak to classes at East Denver High School (fromwhich, by coincidence, this reviewer and two earlier generations of his family graduated),

he walked into a maelstrom of student hatred toward the United States: The information

they had been provided up till then was politically correct nonsense that avoided any

possible complimentary reference to America These students knew why they hated thiscountry. The comments were filled with vitriol and animosity. To them, America was

beset with racism, sexism, chauvinism, and just about every other ism that has a negative

connotation. (Tancredos experience was the same as this reviewer confronted about fiveyears ago when he spoke to a group of Kansas top high school graduates in a summer

workshop at Wichita State University.)

3. As a Congressman, Tancredo represents the district south of Denver in whichColumbine High School is located. That high school, it may be recalled, was the site of the

Columbine massacre in which two intensely alienated students went on a killing

rampage. After Chechen terrorists conducted a much larger massacre at a school in Beslan,

Russia, Tancredo traveled to that city as something of a cultural ambassador to representhis constituents heartfelt empathy for the victims and their families in Beslan. (His wife

had taught Russian-language classes for 27 years, and the two of them had made almost a

dozen trips to Russia, so they werent strangers to the scene.) Tancredos description ofwhat had happened at Beslan is chilling: While security forces surrounded the school

the terrorists executed all the adult malesin front of the children Video released by the

terrorists showed the hostages herded into the gymnasium, where terrorists had strungexplosives from the basketball hoops and positioned them over the children. Continuing,

he says that the gym was only about forty feet by eighty feet. Into that small space the

terrorists stuffed more than a thousand people for fifty-eight hours. From there we were

shown where a cluster of terrorists had held out until three shells from a tank killed them.


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Then we were taken to a spot where two female terrorists blew themselves up as the

shooting began. Our guides showed us the site where townspeople had captured one of the

terrorists and beat him to death before hanging his body We next visited the cemeteryand saw six hundred newly dug graves.

4. Tancredo tells about Beslan both for its own sake and as an example of the

danger the world is in from radical Islam. But it also has a clear bearing on his discussionof immigration, which includes a deep concern about Americas security. It is readily

apparent that a de facto open border across which millions pass is, in this post-9/11 world,

a clear invitation to terrorists to enter. There are some striking specifics that Tancredo saysare not communicated to the public by the national government or the media. U.S. and

Mexican authorities are well aware of suspected training camps a few miles across the

Rio Grande. The camps are operated by the Zetas, a group of former Mexican military

special forces troops who deserted in the mid-1990s to work as highly effective enforcersfor the drug cartels. He says the training camps are frequented by a variety of ethnic

groups, including Arab and Asian nationals In March 2006, FBI director Robert Mueller

Jr. told a House appropriations subcommittee hearing that the FBI had broken up a

smuggling ring organized by the terrorist group Hezbollah that had operatives cross theMexican border to carry out possible terrorist attacks inside the United States. Tancredo

notices that the FBI did not inform the Congress or the American public aboutHezbollahs activities in Mexico at the time they were uncovered and disrupted Instead,

the news was buried in routine testimony. The second interesting facet of this statement is

that it was not considered newsworthy by the mainline news media.While it does not involve Islamists, Tancredo reveals that there have been a number

of armed incursions into the United States both by the Mexican army and by a system of

irregulars under the control of corrupt Mexican officials. A sheriff in a border county

reports that one night a rancher saw a group of approximately thirty men dressed in blackand marching in twos. The first two men and the last two carried automatic weapons while

the rest lugged large duffel bags. When nineteen of the men were apprehended, the

sheriff was stunned to learn that they had almost immediately been returned to Mexico.The larger picture indicates that in recent years, suspected Mexican paramilitary and

military units, loyal to the drug cartels, have made repeated armed incursions into the

United Statesall with the knowledge of our government. The Department of HomelandSecurity has documented 231 incursions from 1996 to 1005 involving Mexican military,

state, or municipal police units.

Many of these incursions, Tancredo says, are by Mexican army unitsper se. There

is, in addition, a system of proxies who act under orders from government officials. This isthe Madrinas system. Officials appoint men as functionaries who are an arm of the

government but not officially part of the government. As irregulars, Madrinas are not

listed on any personnel roster, draw no salary, and get no benefits, but they act as if theyare government employees. They often wear uniforms Government officials who use

Madrinas to do their dirty work have plausible deniability. The compensation to

Madrinas comes through mordida, or bribes, they collect, of which they get to keep apart.

Thus, we see thatIn Mortal Dangeradds much to the growing literature on the

immigration issue. As a member of Congress who has taken a leading role on the issue, he


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is in a position to know a great deal that most of us dont. This review has, needless to say,

cited only a sampling of the information Tancredo has to impart.

Dwight D.

Murphey

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