Replies

So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round

I know that border. I lived along it and I ran it more than a few times. So long as this is Xanadu no walls or towers are going to keep any one out.

Those valleys have been a passageway to the north since men hunted mammoth in the valleys with spears and rocks. The ancient porchteca, Aztec merchant princes, regularly traveled up the San Pedro to the Gila and across to California. For three hundred years Apaches and Commanches used it to raid deep into Mexico, until raiding trails were beated into smooth wide roads. Geronimo and Juh crossed at will despite the best efforts of Crook's patrols. The Clantons, and other border riffraff, used those trails to bring stolen cattle up from ranchs below the border.

420 miles of wall, manned 24 hours a day might slow but won't stop the immigrant surge. Those willing to risk the Camino del Muerte won't be stopped by a wall. If anyone starts shooting women and children on my border I would be back down there in a heartbeat. It isn't going to happen.

We have chosen to have a welfare state and this is one of the costs. We have few choices but the best are to (1) End the welfare state and (2) Have a robust guest worker policy. They will still come but at least we can make order out of the chaos and have some controls.

there is another option.

Make the Mexicans rich.

That's possible now. read the posts on water desalination.

the costs of that are coming down fast. in ten years or so the cost of desalinised water will be about the same as water along the eastern seaboard of the USA.

Much of mexico is desert beside seawater. In a generation they will start to turn the the land of mexico green everywhere that's 50 miles from the coast. In two generations the cheap water will push much farther inland.

We have chosen to have a welfare state and this is one of the costs. We have few choices but the best are to (1) End the welfare state and (2) Have a robust guest worker policy. They will still come but at least we can make order out of the chaos and have some controls.

We started having this problem when we stopped enforcing our laws and started handing out amnesties. So while I would like to change our welfare state we can still get a control of our border. Cheap labor may be good for some but it isnt good for America.