We often describe the specter of tens of thousands of unvetted migrants rolling into our country in terms of "losing control of the border," but a new piece by Daniel Horowitz describes what's going on at the New Mexico border near El Paso as something just a bit more literal.

In an interview with CR, Couy Griffin, the chairman of the Otero County, New Mexico, county commission, explained how our government has exposed his county, and by extension, the rest of the nation, to unprecedented criminal activity from the Mexican cartels. In his view, by taking down the two secondary Border Patrol checkpoints in his county in order to focus on more processing of illegal immigrants [sic], the federal government is missing the point.

"The cartel is winning and winning big; they are kicking our butts," complained the commissioner of this sparsely populated but large county bordering Texas, near El Paso. "We get so tied up and focused on the asylum seekers or the illegal immigrant [sic] aspect of what's going on at our southern border, but the reality of it is that it's nothing but a mere smoke screen for the cartel. They're using these large groups of migrants as nothing more than a smoke screen to smuggle their drugs across the southern border. Meanwhile, as soon as those agents are exhausted, those critical spots, they're sending boatloads of drugs across the border in unsecured areas. The shutting down of the checkpoints on the major drug smuggling corridors is a recipe for disaster. Now they have a green light to shuttle drugs through our counties and through our rural areas, with no security in place."

Otero County isn't on the border itself, but at an internal border checkpoint, same as is found near San Onofre in Southern California as trucks and cars head northward from San Diego to Los Angeles.

These highway checkpoints are being abandoned as tens of thousands of migrants pour over the border and Border Patrol agents are diverted to process them. The net result of abandoned checkpoints is that Mexico's cartels, smuggling meth and other illegal drugs, are having a field day. Nobody is there to watch for these vast professional drug-smuggling operations because the Border Patrol agents have been redeployed to babysit the crush of asylum-seekers in the country illegally and seeking a left-wing judge who will allow them to stay here and work, well ahead of immigrants (who by definition come to the USA legally).

Whether you think killer drugs should be legal or not, the side-effect here is disturbing.

The cartels are making their money through illegal operations, and at some point, it's going to be lucrative. Not only will these groups be enriched to wreak havoc on the innocent people of Mexico, but they will be in an ideal position to set up shop here. What happens when more than one cartel realizes how good the gig is? They'll start to fight, with each other. So the kind of violence Mexico has seen with cartels fighting over turf in strategically useful places is effectively about to be imported here. So long as Democrats refuse to permit any solution to the border crisis, the cartels will not only be strengthened, but be doing their fighting over here. Lucky us — get ready for some Juárez circa 2007 turf wars, because they are coming.

The curious and seemingly counterintuitive conclusion that can be drawn from this is that there really is no such thing as open borders, because someone is always going to control them. We can either have the Border Patrol doing the job or cede the matter to Mexico's cartels and let what happens happen.

Nice job, Democrats — the border crisis is about to get so much uglier.