In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border and Security 
How could the United States have come to such a pitiful condition?
Congressman Tom Tancredo has been the only consistent voice in our government warning Americans of the dangers of failing to secure our borders and fix the nation's immigration system. Five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government still has done virtually nothing to secure America's borders. The government largely ignores the threats to our safety and sovereignty resulting from its refusal to fix a broken system.
What is happening on our borders is one story, but what is happening within America is even more disturbing. As would-be terrorists plot attacks on our country, vocal advocates of multiculturalism are sapping our strength from within. Together, they form a potent adversary that is as great a threat to our nation as anything we have faced in our history.
As a result, America is in the midst of an identity crisis. As a nation we no longer seem to know who we are or what we believe. Instead of "one nation under God," we are divided, confused, and angry. We need to understand how this has happened and the underlying causes that have us to this divided point.
Tom Tancredo lays out the case that unless the United States changes course, it is headed toward catastrophe. Like the great and mighty empires of the past—"superpowers" that onces stretched from horizon to horizon—America is heading down the road to ruin. Without strong moral leadership, without a renewed sense of purpose, without a rededication to family and community, without shunning the race hustlers and pop-culture sham artists, without protecting our borders, language, and culture, the nation that was once the "land of the free and home of the brave" and the "one last hope of mankind" will repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the past. In Mortal Danger is his prescription for beginning to repair the damage.
Reviews
Our author clearly understands the threat which Islamic enclaves pose to the future of the Nation. The experiences of Britain and France with Islamic enclaves should warn us about the danger of terrorism. And if many Muslims living in the United States on a longterm basis still consider America to be a foreign country, public policy is in need of further review. When most American politicians are in full-scale retreat from any serious effort to deal with the immigration crisis, an author who proposes a 35-point package of immigration reforms at least deserves an audience. And the author makes one point which is especially worthy of consideration--those who are allowed to immigrate to the United States should be those who want to be Americans. In practical terms, longterm loyalty to the home country, a refusal to learn English, and a total disrespect for American culture just won't work out for either the immigrant or for society.
Immigration is one of the most difficult issues facing the Nation. New and courageous thinking is badly needed. Congressman Tancredo has done some serious thinking on this issue and his arguments deserve attention. But be ready for a good bit of nonsense as well.
Yes, if we do not monitor our borders, we'll also get plenty of wanted and unwanted immigrants. But that's not even the most important issue here.
I think it is completely misleading to dismiss border control as a racist issue. Yes, some people are racists, but that in no way means that trying to control the borders of one's nation is a racist concept! It is a bipartisan issue and it is not racist. It concerns everyone.
From reading this book, I feel that Tom Tancredo is anything but a racist. He does praise those who enter this country legally, and I think many immigrants and children of immigrants feel the same way about legal immigration. And I'm not too surprised that they tend to view legal immigration as far superior to illegal immigration.
America is a strong nation in large part because we have been strengthened by our numerous immigrants, and Tancredo in no way denies this. Still, there is a big difference between letting in many immigrants and not having a border at all! And that point comes across pretty clearly in this book. Our borders are practically open right now. And we need to do better than that.
Tancredo also makes a number of other points that I think are worth considering, four of which I'll mention explicitly. First, he says that English ought to be the national language of this country. I think that it is not as big an issue as he makes it out to be, but I surely agree. Nations function much better with a single official national language. That does not stop people from speaking other languages in their homes, of course. Nor does it stop people from speaking other languages in private schools. But it does ensure that we can all communicate with each other, especially when it comes to official business.
A second point Tancredo makes is that having an open border makes us particularly susceptible to attack by terrorist groups. Members of such groups simply walk in, avoiding the messy problem of having to defeat the US army to do so. And such people can, of course, bring weapons.
A third point is that some of the people who are entering this country have no desire to assimilate and become part of our nation; rather than strengthen our nation, they intend to damage it. That means that we may need to be more choosy about whom we allow to become citizens.
A fourth point is that, in what I regard as a violation of academic standards, we're seeing a number of people in the academic world blame our nation for being gratuitously attacked. Obviously, it is atypical for people to say, as Ward Churchill did, that those who were killed in the World Trade Center were hardly innocent people who did not deserve to die. Few academics say that! But enough say things that come close. If there were facts and logic to back up such statements, I think there would be some justification to make them. But in fact, such remarks are merely anti-American propaganda. Tancredo dislikes this in large part because of their manifest anti-Americanism, but I think it is part of a larger problem of academics simply substituting propaganda for scholarship (for those of you who, like me, are against sedition, yes, I think we need to have and enforce laws against sedition as well, and I agree that some propaganda may cross the line into sedition).
I suspect that most people will read this book from a partisan viewpoint. I sure didn't. I think we should indeed allow plenty of people into our country, and I think we need to give new immigrants plenty of support, even if it is expensive. But I'm proud to be an American, and I cherish the freedoms we all have. We'll lose it all if we completely abandon border control, just as a living creature will die if its skin is removed. And that's true for all of us, liberals and conservatives alike.
I recommend this book.