Seeing more clearly.

Migrants walk in the Rio Grande along a wall of concertina wire as they try to cross into the U.S. from Mexico, Friday, Sept. 22, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Events far away can have the effect of clarifying things close to home.

Beyond the shear brutality of murdering babies and burning innocent people alive is the shock attendant to the fact that the Hamas terror attack on Israel came as a sudden, brutal and nasty surprise. That, coupled with cold savagery, is what makes terrorism so effective.

The clarity that comes from watching the horror that is taking place in real time in Israel should inform our thinking as to what is taking place concurrently in real time on our southern border.

As numbers in conversations get larger, they become harder to comprehend. Such it is with the numbers surrounding our illegal immigration problem.

Easily comprehended or not, the numbers are staggering. According to U.S. Customs & Border Protection, 260,000 people illegally crossed our southern border in September – a record. To put that in perspective, September’s illegal immigration is roughly equal to adding a city the size of Waco to the U.S. population every month.

Customs & Border Protection has had 7.5 million illegal alien encounters since January 2021 when Joe Biden took office. That’s roughly equal to having a face-to-face, adversarial encounter with every single person living in or around Houston. And that number is at least an order of magnitude greater than it was during the Trump presidency.

Of those 7.5 million, nearly 30 percent of them – or about 2.1 million – were given notices to appear before a judge at a date that is years in the future and then turned loose into the country to go and do as they choose. History has shown that few of them will show up in court at the appointed time.

But here’s the scary number. CBP estimates that since Joe Biden took office, at least 1.7 million illegal immigrants – including 20,000 just this month – have evaded capture. CBP calls them “gotaways.” Because they got away, there is no way to know who they are, where they came from or what their reasons are for coming here. What isn’t disputed is that these gotaways aren’t just from Mexico and Central America. They’re from all over the world.

1.7 million people sneaking into the country isn’t immigration, it’s an invasion. And it’s an invasion force 13 times larger than the Allied military force that invaded at Normandy on D-Day in 1944. Against the backdrop of what’s happening in Israel, numbers on that scale strongly argue the case that the Biden administration has been instrumental in bringing onto U.S. soil the malign forces that could carry out the next 9/11-scale terrorist attack.

Someone in charge should act concerned. We should all look at the horrific images coming out of Israel and remember that it took only 19 terrorists to carry out the devastating attacks of 9/11.

For if just a tiny fraction of the millions of illegal immigrants who have participated in an invasion in-all-but-name wish to do us harm, we, too, could find ourselves on the receiving end of a sudden, brutal and nasty surprise.