With the talk over strengthening U.S. boarder safety focussed virtually solely on the unlawful motion of individuals and medicines into the southern United States from Mexico, a brand new paper by Arlington, Virginia-based suppose tank The Lexington Institute stresses {that a} robust American maritime trade and the Jones Act shouldn’t be neglected.

The paper notes that the land border of the U.S. is dwarfed by its 95,000 miles of nationwide shoreline, warning that with out the Jones Act most of America’s main cities in almost 40 states might be uncovered to international threats.

“The task of securing U.S. seaports and foreign cargoes is daunting by itself,” the paper says. “It makes no sense to add to the burden facing domestic security agencies by allowing foreign-owned ships operated by foreign crews to move freely throughout America’s inland lakes, rivers and waterways.”

The paper additionally reinforces the crucial want for the Jones Act to safe a strong shipyard industrial base and expert mariners essential to uphold our nation’s protection sealift functionality but it surely additionally asserted that the regulation’s advantages to homeland safety shouldn’t be neglected.

“The requirement that all the officers and fully 75 percent of the crews of vessels engaged in cabotage be U.S. citizens goes a long way to reducing the risk that terrorists could get onboard or execute an attack on a U.S. target. In effect, there is a system of self-policing that reduces the requirement for law enforcement and homeland security organizations to expend time and effort to ensure that these vessels and crews are safe to traverse U.S. waters. Were the Jones Act not in existence, the Department of Homeland Security would be confronted by the difficult and very costly requirement of monitoring, regulating and overseeing foreign-controlled, foreign crewed vessels in coastal and internal U.S. waters.”

The Lexington Institute’s white paper, Venerable Jones Act Provides An Important Barrier To Terrorist Infiltration Of The Homeland, might be discovered on its web site HERE.