With all the news coming hot and heavy, this story has sort of fallen by the wayside. It’s about those five Syrian men intent on coming to this country through Latin America, traveling on forged Greek passports:

Five Syrian men who caused international alarm when they were stopped in Central America on their way to the United States were only caught because their flight was delayed, Daily Mail Online has learned exclusively.

If the last Avianca Airlines flight from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, had not been held up on Tuesday, the men would have been free to travel on.

But it was so late they missed their connecting flight to the northern Honduras city of San Pedro Sula, just 20 miles from the border. From there they planned to cross into Guatemala and travel by land through Mexico to the United States.

If you want to get the whole story, read the whole thing. Again, the British tabloid papers seem to do a much more thorough job than in the US. I’m not sure if every single word is true, but that’s the case for the shorter and more sober US coverage, as well.

These particular men are all young, and authorities who have questioned them at some length have determined they are not terrorists, but merely illegal immigrants with some deep pockets. Whether you believe that about their relatively innocent intent, here’s what I mean about the deep pockets:

They each paid $10,000 for their trip. Family and friends had collected the money for them in Syria, officials say.

I don’t know the usual wages in Syria, but that seems extraordinarily high to me. Perhaps they came from rich families, but I’d certainly like to know the details of how they obtained this money, and why these particular men were sent. But our highly trustworthy authorities (or was it the highly trustworthy Honduran authorities?) have determined them to be ordinary refugees fleeing Syrian persecution, which certainly could be the case, and they are now asking for asylum in Honduras. They may even get it.

But if they do, I have no doubt they could easily continue with their original plan of going overland through Mexico into the United States.

What does it all mean? Whoever these guys are and whatever their ultimate goal, it proves anew how porous the entire system is, and how easy it is to obtain excellent false documents and get wherever you want to go. If ordinary refugees can do it, why not terrorists? They’ve got the motivation, and access to even deeper pockets and levels of sophistication and training.