I hate to disagree with my beloved conservative goddess Michelle, but I’m not sold on the Big Border Fence, which is likely to become a Big White Elephant. Fences are too easy to defeat. I don’t see how building a 2000 mile long Maginot Line against immigrants will work. The Great Wall of China didn’t keep the Mongols out.

There are too many ways to go through it, over it, around it, under it. The Mongols bribed their way through. I don’t have any confidence that the government will adequately maintain a two thousand mile long fence, either. As Patton said, fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity. They are easily overcome.

The main problem with a fence is that it is a passive defense. America is better served with active measures. The American demand for cheap labor from south of the border is going to pull immigrants across the border. We need to regulate it, to capture it, and control it. We should require immigrants to all have a special guest worker ID card so that we can track and tax their labor and their contacts with social services. We can’t control what we can’t monitor and measure. Make it more attractive to work within the law than outside of it.

This program would also cull out the criminals and ne’er do wells. Immigrants who commit crimes or make themselves undesirable could have their ID pulled so that they can’t get a job, get insurance, buy a home, drive a car legally until they’re deported. If a guest worker keeps his nose clean for ten years, has a decent job, can speak English, and can pass a citizenship test, grant him/her American citizen. It’s better to get immigrants from the semi-sane countries south of the border than from the insane Middle East.

Tantor on April 5, 2007 at 8:57 PM