Toward a secure border

Some of my conclusions after reading volumes of articles, reports, interviews and seeing hundreds of photos and hearing from those who deal with illegal crossings on a regular basis.

1.     A wall alone will not work

2.     A barbed wire fence, or no barrier at all will not work (it isn’t working now)

3.     Illegal immigration crossings have decreased, but drug smuggling has increased.

4.     Increase the effectiveness and speed of LEGAL entry, and relax the restrictions for those seeking a better life. Easier access to “green card” availability. Make it more advantageous for good people to USE THE GATE we provide for entry, rather than illegal entry.

5.     Drug usage and trafficking must be a priority of time, energy and money.

6.     Increased surveillance tactics have greatly affected illegal immigrant crossings

7.     Drugs and human smuggling as increased. Technology and electronic surveillance alone will not stop drug cartels.  Deadly force must be an option.  It is the ONLY thing the cartels will pay attention to (it is their methodology for dealing with problems)

8.     A secure border (including a barrier/wall/fence) is a humanitarian effort. It will save lives and decrease the huge percentage of women and children being physically and sexually abused in illegal crossings.

9.     A combined approach is the only answer that makes sense and has a chance of working.

NO plan or approach is fool-proof.  There will always be some illegal breaching of the national border. 

My Conclusions

The plan for a secure border must include 

·        Use of top notch surveillance and electronic equipment, including drones/unmanned, and armed aircraft

·        Detection equipment to pick up the drug cartels spying activity on the US Border Patrol and other US Government agencies

·        A secure barrier, not necessarily a literal “wall”

·        Enough manpower (military and civilian) to patrol the entire border with regularity and with varying schedules that cannot be tracked

·        DECLARE WAR ON ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING: With zero tolerance for any and all leaking of information, or giving assistance to the illegal drug and human trafficking industry.

No good answers

Statues and Monuments

         

There is much talk today about statues, monuments and military installations named after Confederate generals and other Southern dignitaries.  What is the right thing to do?  That is a can of worms that will never be fairly negotiated. There are too many inconsistencies that rise up when you start tearing down statues and monuments and renaming things. If you tear down and rename everything that is offensive to someone, or to a group of people, you will soon find there is no good place to stop. If fairness is the guiding rule, then at least three of the four faces on Mount Rushmore should be blasted off the Black Hills granite outcropping. Or, how can you have a monument carved a few miles from Mount Rushmore of Crazy Horse, who helped wipe out the U.S. 7^th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn? Washington and Jefferson were both slave owners, so they would have to go (not to mention the Washington and Jefferson Memorials in Washington D.C.). Teddy Roosevelt’s expressed opinion was that the “only good Indian was a dead Indian.”  He felt that Indians were a great impediment to settling the West.  He favored extermination.  That leaves Lincoln.  See the problem?  Leaving Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore, which is at the heart of land considered sacred to the Sioux Nation, is analogous to raising a statue of the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito at Pearl Harbor or of Adolph Hitler at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France.  My point is that there are existing monuments which are highly offensive to some of our American population, and we aren’t about to tear them down. This whole initiative quickly becomes a “how can you do this, if you don’t do that,” contest.  There is no good place for it to end.  I suppose the only thing we can reasonably do is choose to see many statues and monuments as historically significant and not as indications of honor.  Good luck selling that idea to those who are offended.