US Homeland Security: Canadian Border A Bigger Threat Than, You Know, The Other One

Image by roberthuffstutter via Flickr

The U.S. border with Canada, even though it sees far fewer detentions and arrests every year, is a "more significant threat" to American security than the Mexican border, a senior Homeland Security official said Tuesday.

"In terms of the terrorist threat, it's commonly accepted that [it's] the more significant threat, because of... people who can enter Canada then and come across our bridges into the United States," Alan Bersin, head of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, told a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington.

Bersin was responding to questioning from Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who demanded to know why the southern U.S. border, with about 445,000 arrests and detentions annually, isn't considered far more sensitive than the northern boundary, which saw 6,000 arrests and detentions last year.

Let's do the cultural equivalence math on this one. Four hundred and forty-five thousand minus six thousand, yikes! This means 439,000 persons must have slipped through the Canadian border into the US undetected!!!

Meanwhile, south of the US border...

Police on Tuesday detained 513 undocumented migrants from Latin America and Asia who were crammed into two trucks bound for the United States, prosecutors in southeast Mexico said.

The migrants, from Latin America, Japan, China, India and Nepal, "were traveling in inhuman conditions" in the southeastern state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, the local attorney general's office said in a statement.

Yikes again!! This means there were 513 Timbit-popping Canadians who entered the US illegally and were not caught. Is the northern border porous or what?!

Message to US Border Patrol (Canadian Edition): Visit the local Dunkin' Donuts and keep an eye out for people who look vaguely uncomfortable and maybe even a little (tim)bit guilty. If you see them poppin' a Timbit from their stash, you know you got one!