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Imagining myself as an adversary of the United States, I could covertly send unarmed soldiers across the open border, have them obtain weapons on the other side, and then attack.
They wouldn't be armed, and the covert nature would prevent the courts from finding that there's foreign hostility.
Now that I think about it, I'd question the competence of foreign adversaries who haven't taken advantage of the open border. They needn't even be setting up sleeper cells, just getting intelligence agents in and out without being documented.
At the scale of two million per year I think the side making the claim that there's no foreign adversaries mixed in should bear the burden of proof. There's not even one guy among the two million who have ties to the militaries of Iran, China, Russia, North Korea?
Attack what exactly? None of four countries you listed are at war with USA.
I challenge the premise is that the border is open -- if it was, it'd be a lot more than 2 million per year. Border crossings happen with cooperation of organizations closely aligned with USA ruling class, and they don't want to help those associated with four countries you listed enter USA. Americans don't need to put border fence, they just need to put heads of those organizations in prison forever.
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This argument has never passed the smell test with me. The purpose of human intelligence (HUMINT) is to have someone who can go somewhere that satellites can't. Someone who can make quiet overtures to the Colonel who runs the jet propulsion laboratory at a party, or who can have a nice cup of tea with the professor who just published a paper on a 2.35% more efficient stealth coating in a university coffee shop without anyone raising an eyebrow. You know who can do that? The Russian "cultural attache" at the embassy, or the Chinese math savant on a student visa at MIT. It makes perfect sense for them to hang around people like the Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, or the head of the Applied Robotics Laboratory at Stanford. Some random ass nobody who was smuggled across the southern border has a much higher barrier to get access to the kind of people that HUMINT is about getting access to. That someone would try to put a sleeper cell in that way makes more sense, but again, why bother? If the Chinese government decides to set up a sleeper cell in the United States, getting three husband/wife pairs green cards isn't that hard, and the old adage of "never break more than one law at a time" has to apply doubly so to spycraft. Being on green cards means the US Government is aware of their existence yes, but the drawbacks of trying to get them over the border illegally (possibility of apprehension by Border Patrol, difficulty of getting decent-paying work, possibility of deportation at the whim of the government) all outweigh the benefits.
I remember reading about a case where the soviets did send a guy in over the Canadian border. The advantage is that he's harder to track than a known foreign national. He might have been East German, but same thing.
The guy ended up falling in love with an American woman. The soviets wanted to retract him or something but he quit his spy job for love by telling his handlers he had AIDs and would be dead soon. (This worked)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Barsky
He also did a 3 and a half hour interview with Lex Fridman.
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That is a fully general argument for never letting anyone into the country, ever (also unfalsifiable, since when you don't turn up any foreign agents you can just say they're really sneaky) Far more people enter the country legally every year, and some of them are definitely spies. If Russia or China want to send an agent into the US, they can just... put them on a plane. Give them a bullshit job at the embassy (or just overstay a tourist visa). Being "undocumented" isn't a feature for a spy. It's a hindrance.
Teeth of the Tiger was not Clancy's finest work.
I mean, seriously, why? Going to stage an attack on a military base with a few dozen guys using civilian smalls arms? A terrorist attack to put yourself in the top spot on America's shitlist?
Teeth of the Tiger wasn't written by Tom Clancy, it was ghostwritten and published under his brand along with 50 other books.
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Most real terrorist attacks don't have a very reasonable motive, but they still happen. A lot of the time the perpetrators rationalize that they are trying to provoke an overreaction, but that rarely works out. Although recent events in Israel may be a partial exception.
Anger makes violence seem more pragmatic than it is, famously.
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