I see in recent news that the government has decided to implement “immigration reform” by building a bigger fence and hiring more border guards to protect us from what? A bunch of hard working people who are willing to do those jobs that most americans sneer at?
We only have to look at East Germany during the cold war to see how effective fences are at preventing people from seeking a better life. They used 20 foot concrete walls, mine fields and the guards shot fence jumpers on sight. Hopefully we aren’t quite to that point, but even at that, it was a miserable failure at its intended purpose and blighted the economy of East Germany for years.
They say its purpose is protection from terrorists and drug cartels, and is a matter of national security. Well, The drug cartels will either tunnel under, fly over or bribe their way through. The terrorists will fly in on commercial flights or pay the drug cartels to use their infrastructure to get in.
Keeping weapons out? Last I heard, we were the third largest exporter of weapons to terrorists. They have no need to bring them in, just buy them here. OK, maybe a suitcase Nuke might need to be imported. You can bet anyone with one of those has plenty of resources to get it past a fence and a few border guards, or bypass the southern border entirely and bring it in along a coast or via Canada.
So we are back to the people who simply want a better job and a better life. I’m sure that most of them would be much happier staying home, if only those better jobs existed there.
You can argue that, useless as it is, at least it creates jobs. Yes, short term ones building the fence. Most of those will (I bet) go to immigrant laborers, because, being short term heavy construction in some inhospitable parts of the country, they will be shunned by most Americans. A lot of relatively high paying jobs right across the border just increases the incentive for the immigrants to come across the border to seek work.
The long term jobs will be the border guards, and the support infrastructure to support them. Thats all well and good, but there is no potential for those expenditures to expand the economy. They are simply a drain on our already stressed federal budget.
Now if we took those billions of dollars budgeted for the fence and guards and put half of it into improving useful infrastructure in the US (i.e. roads and bridges, WiFi nationwide, solar and wind power etc.) we’d create just as many long term jobs, and the result of those expenditures would contribute to the economic well being of the country for years to come, instead of a useless folly of a fence which will be riddled with holes in a few years and whose maintenance will further drain our resources.
If we then take the other half and invest it in improving the economy of those countries where those illegal immigrants come from we’ll remove the motivation for them to cross the border. Problem solved, and we don’t end up looking stupid.
