When immigration hawks talk about a border wall, what they’re really arguing for—often without realizing it—is a militarized border. That is, deploying the U.S. military on American soil, all along the southern border region. It sounds outrageous, but that’s what it would take to “secure” the border. (North Korea, for example, has a secure border with South Korea.)

Before heading down to the Rio Grande Valley, I spoke with Fred Burton, a counterterrorism expert and chief intelligence officer for Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence firm in Austin. Burton told me the problems we have with illegal immigration and drugs aren’t enough to militarize the border.

“What it would take in order to see draconian measures to secure the border is a nine-eleven kind of moment—a weapon of mass destruction, an assassination of a key government official,” he says. “You would have to have some catastrophic event that’s directly tied to the border. Drugs is not going to do it. I’m convinced of that.”