An estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. They include hosts of workers in the construction, manufacturing and hospitality sectors. They may well also include terrorists.

If the U.S. government can’t stop 12 million migrant workers from entering the country illegally, neither can it stop terrorists. It has been unable, for example, to stop the Zetas, a violent gang of mercenaries working for drug traffickers, entering the U.S. from Mexico.

One potential terrorist-enabling problem is corruption among border agents. Last year, four agents at a West Texas checkpoint switched sides.

Per presidential mandate, the Border Patrol Academy must graduate 6,000 new agents in the next couple of years, and traffickers are hoping this will enable them to plant more agents: According tofbi agent Jay Abott, “Some of these drug organizations which are very sophisticated are actually placing people into the border patrol or into ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] in order to assist their efforts.”

If drug traffickers are looking to plant sympathizers on border patrol, surely the idea is not lost on terrorists. In addition, border agents who are more interested in bribes than in law could easily enable a terrorist to enter the U.S.

But let’s forget about the porous southern border for a moment. There is a high probability terrorists could get into the U.S. through established checkpoints with papers that wouldn’t even raise an immigration officer’s eyebrow.

Stratfor’s Fred Burton wrote on December 12 that there is “plenty of opportunity for illegal immigrants and more sinister types of criminals to transit Venezuela—and obtain Venezuelan identity documents there—without any government assistance whatsoever.” This sort of alien smuggling is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Stratfor points out: “Hotels in places such as Caracas and Guatemala City are often filled with Chinese, Indian, Pakistani or Afghan immigrants making their way illicitly to the United States.”

Historically, this well-known route to the U.S.—which doesn’t require people to sneak across the border—might only have attracted the more traditional illegal alien looking for a new life or, less optimistically, the criminal seeking someplace to live where his face is not on the post office wall. But now, with an ever-advancing threat of terrorism against the U.S., it seems more likely that a terrorist would enter the country upright with convincing legal documentation through this sort of route rather than doing a GI-crawl across the southern border as an illegal.

The problem with alien smuggling in Venezuela predates the regime of Hugo Chavez, and Stratfor suggests Venezuela’s president “would incur unnecessary risk to his position and his country if he were to knowingly assist jihadists planning a strike on U.S. soil. More to the point, the jihadists would gain nothing from fostering such a relationship either.” But Chavez—the man who recently branded George W. Bush a “devil” before the general assembly of the United Nations—isn’t doing anything to stop the problem either. He surely knows that a terrorist seeking to enter the U.S. could do so with relative ease through his country, and he probably doesn’t lose any sleep at night over it.

Nor is the problem confined to Venezuela. Michael Cutler, a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, alerts readers to a region of Brazil called the “Three Border Region,” where Hezbollah has training camps and could easily form an alliance with smugglers to place operatives for attacks in the U.S. He warned that alien smugglers are ruthless criminals, are willing to use children as bargaining chips, and view the humans they transport simply as cargo. Case in point: On December 1, a woman in Florida grabbed a 1-month-old baby, telling the mother, “I have killed before. I will kill again.” The assailant was delivering a message from smugglers that they wanted their money for delivering the parents from Brazil.

Perhaps most alarming is Cutler’s warning that, “Alien smugglers would not have any compunction against moving terrorists into the United States nor would they hesitate to move weapons.”

There also exists the very real danger of terrorists coming across the northern border from Canada, where hosts of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers are known to have set up camp. A U.S. State Department paper from earlier this year said, “Terrorists have capitalized on liberal Canadian immigration and asylum policies to enjoy safe haven, raise funds, arrange logistical support, and plan terrorist attacks.” On several occasions, people with designs on attacking America have taken advantage of Canada’s lax border policies in order to find a point of entry into the U.S.

And, if all else fails, a terrorist could simply resort to crossing the southern border illegally as millions of Mexicans have.

Leviticus 26:16-17 warn about terror in the end time, specifically in those nations that are descendants of ancient Israel and that disobey God’s laws. Other prophecies foretell mass violence in the cities of these nations that could well be caused by terrorist attacks. For more information on the identities of these nations, please read our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

While Americans can be thankful that the five years since 9/11 have been free of more terrorist violence on U.S. soil, the evidence, backed by biblical prophecy, suggests the inevitability of the next round of attacks.