Coming out of the shadows . . .
During the 18 months that I have been blogging on WordPress I have largely avoided postings of a political bent, whether a bend to the right or a bend to the left. I have not been entirely successful, but I feel that I’ve kept my preferences fairly in control. This posting will, in one fell swoop, cancel every effort I have made to remain neutral. With this posting I am coming out of the shadows and into the bright light of day. I am going to share my feelings about the influx of foreigners across our southern border, and contribute a suggestion that will bring that influx to a halt.
By some estimates, an average of 10,000 illegal aliens—I refuse to call them immigrants—successfully penetrate our southern border each day—10,000 come in and stay in—they do not return home, and are added to the rolls for the greatest entitlements given by any government on earth. These penetrations include drug smugglers and people smugglers as well as ordinary folks seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
Do the math. That’s 3,650,000 per year, and in the coming 10 years that total will be 36,500,000 added to the estimated 20,000,000 already in the United States for a total of more than 56,000,000. I realize these are estimates, but they are in the ball park—perhaps fewer or perhaps more.
A frightening picture—how can our economy withstand such an onslaught? It can’t—this so-called illegal immigration will bankrupt the nation, an absolute given when combined with the current administration’s stimulus packages, entitlement programs and related actions. It can be stopped. Read on.
The solution is to build a wall, but not necessarily a fence or an opaque wall such as was built by East Berliners. Not that such a wall is ineffective—it was highly effective. It stood for some 28 years and in all those years a total of only 5,075 people successfully crossed to the West, an average of 181 people per year—181 successful illegal immigrants, so to speak. Among the unsuccessful attempts were 200 people that died in their efforts to immigrate illegally from East to West.
Mexico as a sovereign nation is lost. That nation is lost to the drug cartels and nothing short of intervention by the United States military could return Mexico to the people, its rightful owners. That, of course, will never happen. Eventually there will be a cartel candidate for the Mexican presidency and the Mexican citizens will handily elect that candidate, if for no reason other than fear of the consequences if that candidate is repudiated.
Mexico is out of control. Its army and its state and local police are powerless to stop the cartels, no matter how many millions of dollars the US donates to their efforts. People are dying in the streets on both sides of the border, bullets are flying across the border, people have died on both sides of the border and many more will die in the future. That situation will only escalate unless we take action to prevent it now, or at least slow its momentum.
We don’t need a wall. Illegal aliens and drug smugglers will go over, around, under or through any wall we build, regardless of its height and regardless of its composition. As a law enforcement officer with the US Customs Service over a period of 26 years I have been to every official border crossing between Brownsville, Texas and San Ysidro, California and to many points in between those border crossings, and I know that a wall will not stop the infiltration of illegals, whether immigrants or drug smugglers.
Our border with Mexico is 2000 miles in length. That’s 5 280 feet per mile. With three feet to the yard, one mile has 1,760 yards. A hopelessly obsolete 30-30 caliber rifle, the efficiency and effectiveness of which is eclipsed by modern military rifles, will kill a deer at a range of 200 yards. If we divide 1,760 yards per mile by 400 yards, we arrive at a figure of 400. If in that mile we wished to kill every deer that crossed an invisible line we would need only 44 sharpshooters, spaced 400 yards apart and armed with a rusty old 30-30 caliber hunting rifle—pretty soon the deer would get the message and avoid crossing that line between hunters.
Obviously if we wanted to kill every deer along a 2000-mile line that would require a force of some 88,000 hunters. However, if we armed hunters with .50 BMG rifles, the weapons used by military sniper units, weapons with a range of more than a half-mile, one shooter could cover one mile, a half mile in each direction, and we would then need only 2,000 hunters, one for each mile of our 2,000-mile border and an additional 4,000 officers in order to cover three 8-hour shifts per day—far fewer than, just for example, the number of border patrol officers presently on the southern border. We would also need extra officers to cover for days off, sick days, days on annual leave and training requirements, but the total would still be far fewer than the current staff.
Got it? Six thousand sharpshooters from a vantage point created by towers—heated and air conditioned with porta-potties, of course, and its occupants armed with .50 BMG rifles and furnished with infra-red night-vision goggles, binoculars, radios, MREs for sustenance, plenty of water and lots of .50 BMG ammunition, and every deer that attempted to cross that invisible line between sharpshooters would not cross it, but would instead remain on that line. It’s rational to believe that all the other deer would soon wise up to the danger and not come near one of the towers.
Mind you, I have nothing against deer, but the situation on our border with Mexico reminds me of the joke about the papa alligator eating all but one or two of the million eggs or so laid by the mama alligator. The punch line of that joke is that if it were not for the papa alligator we would be up to our posteriors in alligators, just as we will eventually up to that level with those that we erroneously refer to as undocumented immigrants, of which they are neither—they are illegal aliens, and we need to deal with them now, sooner rather than later.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
