Originally Posted by BeAChooser
For example, the bill called for 300 miles of double fencing. You want to know the total number of miles of double fence that was actually built? Just 34 miles
That sounds like a total scam- someone should get a refund.
Yes, the American taxpayer.
However, it misses my main argument, which is: whether we build 30 miles, or 700 miles, or 3000 miles of double, triple or quintuple fence, this is a poor method of enforcement compared to alternatives.
You can repeat that as many times as you want, but you haven't proven any of it. I, on the other hand, can cite numerous examples where physical barriers … systems of fences and walls … have proven very effective at keeping people from crossing them. And I can tell you the logic why a fence/wall system is much better than any alternatives that have been suggested.
For example,
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA493726
The Secure Fence Act: The Expected Impact on Illegal Immigration and Counterterrorism
December 2008
... snip ... The study suggests that fences can prove effective in curbing illegal immigration
This video has a lot on fence effectiveness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdvnWmgySrE
It shows that where the fencing is properly done, it clearly works. Two fences in the same sector, one properly done (double layered, no breaks, etc) and one improperly done (we'll call it Obama/democrat fencing) shows that crossings plummet at the properly designed fence and hardly decrease at the Obama fencing. And keep in mind that the goal is to significantly reduce (not totally eliminate) illegal immigration ... just reduce it to manageable levels. Walls and fences have worked in that context in Israel and elsewhere ... San Diego, as mentioned. Another example is the fence wall system separating Morocco from the Spanish city of Melilla (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla_border_fence ). There, as indicated, "the new fence has succeeded in deterring new massive intrusions and the subsaharian camp sites in the buffer zone have mostly disbanded."
And it's pretty clear that building a double fence/wall across the entire border would be much less costly over time than the tens of thousands of border guards, soldiers and law enforcement personnel, and all the equipment they will need, and all the detention and hearing facilities that will be required, plus the detention facility staff, lawyers, judges, public relations officers, interpreters, bus drivers, etc etc etc that ANY alternative requires. And I didn't even mention the $15 million per mile cost of the virtual fence promoted by the no real fence crowd. So even a high-side estimate of $5 million a mile (the Israeli's built their 25 foot high concrete wall for well under that) would allow us to block our 2000 mile border for about $10 billion ... peanuts compared to the long term cost of ANY alternatives.
Now think about it. How can any of the alternatives to a physical barrier be more reliable? How often do we hear about people in the government being bribed or being found incompetent? A fence can't be bribed. And can be fixed if found inadequate. Look how unsuccessful the government has been in fixing programs depending primarily on people, be it the school system or the social service system.
And the border is 2000 miles long. What are you going to do ... line border guards up shoulder to shoulder that entire stretch? The fact is smugglers will study border guard patterns and outsmart them ... study electronic fences and outsmart them. Without a major
physical barrier, it will take only minutes to disappear into the crowd or the wilds. What then?
Would any of the alternatives you folks suggest (and I notice you haven't suggested any so far) be more easily tested? No. A barrier you can build anywhere and test anytime. You can easily put your best, brightest, leanest, tallest, smallest and meanest against it and see what they do. Testing humans against humans or electronics is always much more complex, as we have discovered time and again. You can improve a barrier. Improving human guards is not all that easy … especially if government unions are involved. And improving electronics can be extremely expensive, difficult or just plain impossible.
And would any of your alternatives have less impact on those in the border areas? I doubt it. Since you are not going to stop illegals at the border, you must be going to try and catch them after they may have traveled tens, scores or even hundreds of miles inside the border. How can putting tens of thousands of armed personnel who will have to operate in America's backyards, on America's highways, in America's border cities, in America's wildlands, many miles inward from the border or in the middle of big cities that are near the border ever be less impactful than simply stopping 99% of the flood between two or three fences built right at the border? With an unfenced/unwalled or even virtually fenced border, your only alternatives are to literally militarize the southwest if you hope to catch an equivalent fraction of those who would be stopped by a fence/wall system. Or are you suggesting we just do what the Obama adminstration has done in Arizona and erect a couple signs here and there warning American citizens not to go within a hundred miles of the border because it's become too dangerous?
Will your alternatives be more humane to the illegals? No. You are going to allow illegals to go on risking their lives in the millions because they will think they can beat your armed border guards at their own game. Because they can't see a virtual fence. And even if they can see it, not knowing it's capabilities, they may still think they can beat it. Many will die in American deserts, just as they do now. Many will be killed by smugglers who will take their money and lead them to nowhere, as they do now. Many will be raped and held hostage by the coyotes or drug cartels demanding more money from relatives. Some may be killed by border agents trying to intercept them if the illegals resist. Some may pray on each other, even after they get to a neighborhood near you.
Is it humane to allow pregnant women and small children to face the dangers they do now? What if a woman crosses the border, makes it to a hospital and has a baby? That happens all the time now. A pregnant woman would have a problem scaling a properly designed fence/wall. So would a child. But a few additional guards and some electronic sensors aren't going to stop them in your alternatives. So what will our government do then under your unnamed alterative ... since the child birthed by the woman automatically becomes a citizen and an anchor baby? Since it may seem unkind to deport small children. The humane thing is not to allow these people the hope of beating the system by putting a larger barrier in their path ... one not easily crossed. One that will deter folks from giving thousands of dollars to smugglers but instead spend that money on improving their lot in their own country.
Will your alternatives be less subject to the whims of the border patrol agents and current administration? No. Agents are already being corrupted, but now it's easy for them to get away with that corruption because they do so in circumstances far less controlled than a fence/wall system would be. There already is a governor and mayors in California who are not enforcing immigration laws ... who are openly hostile to the notion of stopping the flow. California political leaders are even boycotting a state that is trying to stem the flow. And that governor isn't even Hispanic or a democRAT (at least on paper). Wait till that governor is both.
What if the illegals make it to a church? Many are offering illegals sanctuary. Are you proposing we go in and get them? What about those leftist controlled cities that declare themselves sanctuaries? How will you get the authorities of those cities to comply? They already are defying the law.
Look at the whims of the Bush administration ... a republican administration. They promised us 10000 new guards in 2004's budget and gave us 210. Look at Obama. A bill was passed and signed into law requiring the constuction of hundreds of miles of double fence. When he became President he immediately stopped all construction of double fences and his head of DHS lies to our face claiming they have been constructed. His administration is now suing a state simply because it tried to enforce the Federal laws his administration has chosen not to enforce. We've watched the INS and border patrol catch over 1000 illegals a day ... and then promptly release 80 percent of them into our society. THAT is what I think we can expect under your alternatives. A fence, on the other hand, will be much harder for politicians and everyone else to negate the effectiveness of on a whim.
Would your alternative cause less harm to our relationship to Mexico? No. A fence will actually reduce contacts that may lead to confrontation. A fence will make it less likely that Mexico will see America as a dumping ground for its poor. A fence will return the focus to legal immigration between the two countries. A fence will force Mexico to look to its own devices for solutions to its economic and social problems. A fence will even weaken Mexico's drug cartels which are wrecking that country and now starting to wreck ours.
No, I say build the fence, border to border, now.
Without the manpower to patrol and repair the fence, these fences will fall into a serious state of disrepair in a matter of days.
What a silly assumption. No one is suggesting the fence system will be unmanned or unpatrolled. Part of the purpose of multi-layer fencing is to trap illegals in between them, so that guards can catch them in a more controlled environment. So there will be guards available to do that, and people available to fix any damage done to the system. The guards will have the fence/wall system to help them trap illegals, rather than watching, as we've seen in countless videos, as illegals just scatter to the four winds when border patrol agents pull up and try to detain them.
Also, I think you way underestimate the difficulty of getting over or through a properly designed fence system. Getting over the first obstacle may take equipment that they can't even carry to the second or third layer. And all the while the clock is ticking. Like I said, when they built a multi-layer system in San Diego, they caught almost everyone who tried to get past it. And that was relatively ancient fence technology.
And again, that doesn't mean a fence system will get everyone. The purpose isn't to stop everyone. If it only stopped 90 percent, it will still be a huge improvement. My suspicion is that it would deter 90 percent from even trying, and stop all but 5-10 percent of the rest, at minimum. In other words, it will dramatically reduce the problem from what we now have.
Perhaps illegals won't breach the wall in a single night, but given the course of days, weeks, months, years... I have no doubt that holes will appear in the weakest links.
Holes that will simply be fixed. And then we'll react by improving the fence so whatever created the holes no longer works. Sorry, but you still haven't come up with a valid argument against a fence system. You are grasping at straws here.
If we cannot find funding for the full fence, as already proscribed by law, where exactly do we get the money to fix the fence, and more importantly, hire people to patrol it?
Well, first of all, they did have the funding to build those 300+ miles of double fencing in the legislation that was passed. It just wasn't spent on fences as promised. It was spent on alternatives that turned out not to work and which turned out to be far more expensive than had been predicted by the anti-fence proponents.
I think if you tell the American public that you're going to build a REAL fence system … and they actually see you going through with that promise … then you'll have no trouble getting the backing of American public and all the funding you need. Afterall, economic studies show that illegals are costing the country,
every year, more than the total cost of building such a system. After all, the alternative that isn't working is already costing, every year, at least as much as the fence will cost to build.
Right now the US Border Patrol has over 20,000 agents deployed in the border regions (of which less than 2000 are assigned to the northern border) at a cost of over $4 billion
a year. ICE employs another 20,000 people, many of whom deal with illegal immigrants who have made it past the Border Patrol. All told, the Department of Homeland Security has almost $16 billion dollars
a year allocated to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.
And for all that, DHS said (
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54514 ) the Border Patrol’s goal for fiscal 2009 was to have 815 miles of border under “effective control.” And the Border Patrol’s goal for fiscal 2010 was to again have 815 miles of border under “effective control.” “Effective control,” as defined by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, means that when the Border Patrol detects an illegal border crosser in a particular area of the border the agency can be expected to succeed in apprehending that person. Of that total, only about 700 miles are along the Mexican border. How can you even begin to believe that's any more cost effective than building a fence system for a one time cost of say $10 billion (or even $20 billion) and funding the agents needed to defend that fence?
Now I don't suggest that building a fence will do away with all those agents, but it would negate the need for a lot of them with a consequent savings. I do suggest that many will be employeed in a different fashion. First I imagine there would be roving patrols along the fence system, day and night. But instead of agents having to cover the border to a depth of a hundred miles as they now do to round up even a fraction of the illegals (an impossible task) they'd just have to cover the fence system itself. I would imagine there would be manned outposts every 4 or 5 miles along the fence, with quick reaction forces to support the agents that constitute roving patrols and the sensor (intrusion alert) system that will be part of the fence system, and platforms to physically watch the fences in that area. That would mean about 500 such outposts. Even if you manned each of them with 5 agents at a time, in 3 eight hour shifts, you would still only need 7500 agents. Throw in another 2500 for roving patrols and vacation/down time for the agents. That would allow you to put at least 10, well-armed, well-rested agents in any given spot, day or night, along the fence in just minutes. Well within the timeframe needed to prevent a breach of the system. Under those assumptions, we could pay for building the fence system with the savings in border patrol agents in just a five year period. But we don't even have to reduce Border Patrol agent numbers to do that.
Consider the cost of INS and all the other people in the system (jailers, judges, attorneys, etc.) currently employed behind the scenes to deal with the illegals who get past the current *alternative* approach? Just look at the jailers. At the end of 2003, over a quarter million illegal aliens were being held in US jails and prisons. According to Steven Camorata, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, in 2004 "roughly 17 percent of the prison population at the federal level" were illegal aliens. Now according to the government the average cost of housing a prisoner is $25,000 a year, so just incarcerating those people costs nearly $7 billion
every single year. If we can reduce that number by even 15% with a fence, we could pay for building the fence in 10 years.
Consider all the other costs that illegals impose on our nation that would be alleviated by an effective fence?
For example, have you considered that ICE stated (
http://www.northjersey.com/news/nat...eing_deported__immigration_officials_say.html ) that 195,000 of the 392,862 people it deported in 2010 were criminals. Half! In 2009, 35% percent of the deportations were criminals. And the Washington Times reported in 2009 (
http://mcauleysworld.wordpress.com/...become-repeat-criminals-the-washington-times/ ) that "criminal aliens set free on the streets of America — instead of being deported after serving their time — are being rearrested as many as six more times by U.S. authorities, according to a government audit released yesterday." The GAO released a report in 2005 (
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05646r.pdf ) that studied 55,000 illegals who were incarcerated in US facilities in 2003 and found that they represented nearly half a million arrests. Consider the cost of all the crimes those criminals are engaging in?
For example, Deborah Schurman-Kauflin estimated (
http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html#Illegals ) that between 1999 and 2006, a quarter million illegal immigrant sex offenders had an average of four victims each in the US. Heather McDonald of the Center for Immigration Studies, in testimony before Congress in 2005, said that about 95% of the outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles targeted illegals. According to a DOJ funded study (
http://www.cis.org/ImmigrantGangsAnnounce ) in Los Angeles about 60-90% of the notorious MS-13 gang are illegals. And that gang is not just in LA. MS-13 is active in 48 states and according to the same source, in one jurisdiction that was studied, Northern Virginia, some 30 to 40 percent of the gang task force case load involved illegal aliens." And these gangs are one of the largest contributors to the murder rate in this country. Representative King took two GAO reports (
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05337r.pdf and
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05646r.pdf ) on the number of incarcerated illegal aliens and the total number of incarcerated prisoners, and applied the resulting percentages to the FBI's reported number of crimes in different categories. Based on that, he concluded that illegal aliens would be responsible for about 31% of the murders … that's 12 a day.
Just think how much money, heartache and sadness would be saved if we could just decrease the number of people causing those problems by even a fraction … much less 90%, like a fence might very well do?
What's an American citizen's life worth? $5-10 million dollars? Save just 100-200 lives a year, a fraction of those now killed every year by illegals, and you could *pay* for the fence in one decade.
Or look at sexual assaults.
http://www.svfreenyc.org/media/factsheets/fsht_9.pdf estimated the cost of sexual assualts in the US overall (back in 1996) at a minimum of $127 billion dollars annually. So how many of those billions can be laid on the door step of illegals? Surely more than just a few billion a year. Even if the rate of sex crimes by illegals is the same as the populace at large (and some contend it is higher), that would be 6% of that cost … more than $7 billion A YEAR. Reduce that by 15% and you could effectively pay for the fence in a single decade.
And think the cost of millions of poor, essentially uneducated, non-english speaking people on our education, health, welfare and transport systems?
The logic is obvious. Take the transportation system, for instance. Significantly increasing numbers of illegals in an area can cause overcrowding of the transportation network in that area. So you need more highways to carry the people efficiently from one place to another. Or if you don't build those highways/freeways, more time will be wasted by people trying to get from place to place … and that has a significant economic and quality of life cost. Consider Los Angeles. Average rush hour speeds decreased from 26 mph in 1980 to about half that today. According to
http://www.newgeography.com/content...tion-and-improving-travel-options-los-angeles , "considering the value of wasted time and fuel, TTI estimates the annual cost of traffic congestion in greater Los Angeles at close to $10 billion." Some significant percentage of those billions can be directly attributed to illegal immigration since between 1980 and 2000, the LA population increased by about 500,000, many of whom were clearly illegal. The cost to the country to meet demands on transportation systems caused by illegals is surely in the billions of dollars every single year, nation-wide. And building a fence would reduce further increases in those demands, at least in the future.
And how about the added public utilities infrastructure (sewage, electricity and gas) needed to accomodate all the extra illegals? Illegals are creating congestion not only on our roads, but in our schools, our hospitals, our prisons, our national and state parks, our beaches and other entertainment venues. Surely you would agree that illegals are and will be responsible for many, many more billions every year and that if the numbers coming in could be controlled the savings from that alone would pay for even a $10 billion dollar fence in almost no time.
And don't forget the long term costs of caring for illegals in the future when it turns out they have neither the language or other skills necessary to succeed at more than menial jobs in the US. And when we give them amnesty on top of that. As is, we are just beginning to understand how big and unsustainable those costs will be for our own citizens. Imagine also having to take care of millions of what were illegals who decided not to learn much English because we allowed them not to learn, and who as a result have basically remain unskilled their entire lives without much in the way of savings. Here's an article on a study done by the Heritage Foundation that concluded each illegal would result in a $100,000 net annual cost to taxpayers:
http://www.10news.com/news/9620142/detail.html . You don't have to reduce the flow of illegals more than 10% over a decade to pay for any conceivable fence with these savings alone.
So I'm sorry, zaphod2016, the argument of cost cannot be rationally used against the building of a fence/wall system along the southern border.
Fences work IF you have enough manpower to patrol. Combined, I am sure the fence/patrol method is very effective
So now you are agreeing that fences can work after startiing off your post with a claim they won't work? Make up your mind.
Here are some of my own ciriticisms on that episode:
* at one point, a person interviewed from a Libertarian think tank says that all opposition to immigration is inherently racists.
Your point being?
* they ignore the fact that employers are exploiting the system to hire cheap labor, and thus putting downward pressure on all wages. [insert title from show here]
* they ignore the fact that Mexico has more natural resources than America, but has been so poorly managed over the past Century that its people are now willing to wade through toxic sludge to work in America [insert title from show here]
Neither of those seems to be an argument against building a fence. Rather, an argument for building one.
And this brings me to my final argument against the wall (forgive a source from 2000 but I believe the point stands):
Illegals are willing to swim through toxic waste to get here.
If a person is willing to swim through toxic waste, surely they are willing to dig under fences, bribe border patrolmen, and use whatever other methods they have at their disposal to get here.
You are still just waving hands. Willingness doesn't translate into ability and opportunity to actually breach a fence system.
Tunnels are expensive and time consuming to build. Run of the mill illegals are not going to be using them to breach a fence/wall system. Most of the ones today are built by drug smugglers and being used to bring only drugs across the border. Not illegal immigrants by the hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, sensors can detect digging and the existance of tunnels. Agents can be trained to look for signs of their existance. Plus, only so many people could get through one even if human smugglers did manage to build one before it would be detected and closed. Again, you need to remember that the purpose of the wall isn't to stop every single illegal but reduce the numbers considerably. Tunnels would not impact that goal.
Bribing border patrol agents is a problem that the alternatives to a fence do and will have to even a greater extent. So it's not an argument against a fence but for a fence, because a fence system will make it harder for agents to look the other way when agents come in contact with illegals. With the outpost and patrol system I decribed, there may be a dozen or so agents monitoring every since spot along a fence system. Any breach is going to involve numerous agents. There will only be a limited number of gates and those will be even more closely monitored, with agents watching each other all the time. I think you are just hand waving here, looking for any excuse to oppose a fence.
And what does "and use whatever other methods they have at their disposal to get here" really mean? That just sounds like more handwaving. You are going to have to be more specific if you want this to be taken seriously.
1. When a police officer finds an illegal in violation of the law, either deportation or imprisonment is in order. No more "looking the other way" should be tolerated.
As I noted above, the INS is already deporting over 300,000 a year. That's not exactly "looking the other way". But I do agree that Federal and various state authorities are not enforcing existing laws as they should or could. They are even suing police officers and states who want to take illegals into custody. And the reason the authorities can get away with that policy is because there's no physical barrier they have to monitor. A physical barrier would make the entire argument about enforcement that is going on in Arizona and elsewhere today a completely moot issue. Then police officers wouldn't have to be relied on to make the system work to the extent it needs to work to effectively regain control of immigration.
2. Use the "fence fund" to raid the employers. For every illegal found, force the employer to pay FICA taxes, and a fine equal to the difference between wages paid, and the minimum wage. In other words, remove the financial incentive for hiring illegals, and we can make them unemployable. We don't even need to waste prison space on this- hit them in the pocketbook. Let the employer pay the costs associated with deportation.
This is just more smoke and mirrors. There is NOTHING to suggest that you will be any more effective in getting this to happen than all those who demanded it in the past. Work regulations already prohibit employers from hiring illegals. But illegals can get access to false documents and evade those regulations (and then democrats will use those illegals to influence an election by accusing the employers of having known they were illegals all the time
). Penalties already exist for employers who hire illegal immigrants. But they aren't always enforced. Some conservatives "look the other way" for the cheap labor. Liberals will "look the other way" for the cheap labor AND the votes they think they will eventually get from illegals, once they receive yet another politically motivated amnesty courtesy of liberals and foolish conservatives. It's a losing strategy. A pipedream. Has been for several decades.
Furthermore, to make that begin the work requires more people than currently available to enforce it. More investigators. More lawyers. More judges. More accountants. And more government intrusion on the privacy and lives of Americans (as if there isn't already enough of that). By the time you come even close to making that alternative to a fence work, you'll have the government looking over our shoulders at literally everything we do. And we'll be spending more to impliment that alternative than simply building a fence and manning it night and day. And by the way, if you think Border Patrol agents can be bribed, you don't know investigators, lawyers, judges and accountants.
3. Re-entry to America following deportation should become a capital crime
A capital crime? You mean one deserving of the death penalty? Seriously, how far do you think that proposal will fly?
4. This is a no-brainier to me- non-citizens should NOT be given citizen benefits, such as welfare, food stamps, WIC, public education, public housing, emergency room care, etc.
Again, you are talking about something that is a matter of political will, rather than just physics. And thus, far more difficult to actually impliment and maintain. You might convince democrats to build a fence border to border using the arguments I noted above, but you will NEVER convince enough democrats (or many of the more socially compassionate republicans) to impliment the above. And should you do so, the very next administration would likely undo whatever you thought you'd prohibited. It's simply too late to even attempt this given the control liberals now have over churches, education, entertainment, the news media and the legal system.
Sorry, but a fence is the only workable solution I see at this point.
