Borderlines

Everything, everything, everything
In its right place
--Everything in Its Right Place,
Radiohead

An asylum for the sane
would be empty in America
--George Bernard Shaw

--Bloody paperwork. Huh!
--I suppose one has to expect a certain amount.
--Why? I came into this game for the action,
the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light,
get in, get out, wherever there's trouble,
a man alone.
Now they got the whole country sectioned off,
you can't make a move without a form
--Brazil (1985)
____________________

If the U.S. were serious about the immigration problem and terrorism counteraction, here a few suggestions to help kill two birds with one stone. The suggestions would require beefing up Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) and eliminating the useless bureaucratic behemoth, Homeland Security Administration (HSA). Ranger is not advocating these measures, but merely suggesting them to serious-minded people.

Using some old-fashioned horse sense, something in short supply today, both efforts should be decentralized since our system was designed to work from the bottom up, an idea we seem to have lost along the way.

There's no hiding the situation: Each of us sits on the Mexican border when we sit in a McDonald's or Burger king anywhere in America. This is the natural line of drift for illegals, and if one were setting an ambush, these would be the places.

On the State Level:

• Require documentation to buy a vehicle. This includes any motorized transport, including lawn mowers, since many illegals enter the lawn care business.

• Require documentation to buy car insurance.

• Check bus stops: No i.d., no tickets.

• Require documents to see a doctor, especially gynecologists. Deport pregnant illegals before they give drop their gift on the U.S. system.

• Require documents to purchase fast food, especially on a Sunday morning before Catholic Mass. Localize efforts to regions of Catholic churches.

• Require documents at emergency rooms, liqour stores and Walmart.

• Require documents to register for school

• Require documents to obtain a U.S.-issued credit card.

Homeland Security may be relieved of their burden by requiring documents to buy airline tickets -- if one is not legal, one does not fly (unless a Mexican, South- or Central American desires to leave the country.) This is aimed at neutralizing the terror threat.

Do not allow more than one individual from a foreign threat area per flight. Ditto persons with legal Visas from threat areas. Disallow them to congregate to complete a hijacking. If terrorism originating in the Middle East is the threat, then focus on that reality -- don't single out one-legged nuns. Don't check shoes (a "safety measure" Great Britain has recently decided to ditch.)

Reinstate profiling (which was briefly enacted.) El Al has great success with this approach. These countermeasures clearly come under the rubric "racially profiling", but that seems fair and just since it is Mexicans and Middle Eastern radical Islamists that are the threat and/or problem. Intelligence agencies can continue to focus on the new insider convert threat that would bypass the above system.

If one is searching for elephants (the real sort) in Cleveland, it is wise to restrict your searches to zoos or circuses; if you're looking to kill deer, stay in the woods. Present immigration policy is looking for elephants in the woods and trying to kill deer in the zoos.

Simply put, place your ambushes on the traveled trails, for that is where you'll make the kills. Illegal immigrants do not usually visit zoos, the Kennedy Center, the opera or Broadway, so don't look there (unless you're checking the hired hands.) If illegal Mexican and Guatemalans are the target, then legal, patriotic Mexicans and Guatemalans should gladly support our "Be alert -Not afraid" program.

Former President Bush hired Boeing et. al. to build a virtual fence at a cost of $5+ Billion. But four years on and $1 billion in, barely 50 miles of the border has been covered.The New York Times recently suggested Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano call a halt to the effort, the SBInet:

The “virtual fence” was a misbegotten idea from the start, based on the faulty premise that controlling immigration is as simple as closing the border — and that closing the border is a simple matter of more sensors, more fencing and more boots on the ground. So long as there is a demand for cheap labor, a hunger for better jobs here, and almost no legal way to get in, people will keep finding ways around any fence, virtual or not.

Border security cannot work unless it is accompanied by a real effort at comprehensive immigration reform. There is no getting back the $1 billion already wasted. We can avoid squandering billions more (Virtual Failure on the Border).

For some reason we are not technologically-advanced enough to create this system. If not a virtual fence, how about a real one, with razor wire and lights, and then activate the entire National Guard for their patrol?

Ranger's ideas could be simply employed, but there would be no wiggle-room. If the U.S. is seriously concerned about illegal immigration and just as seriously wishes to call a halt to it, the procedure for netting them and returning them is pretty straight-forward. But you can say hasta la vista to your cheap drywalling and lawn work. Are we committed in more than word to ending this State burden? The lure of cheap strawberries and household help is seductive.

If these efforts did not work, then arm the drones and shoot a few 15-year-olds on the border. While that won't stop the problem, but it will sure relieve some of our roiling angst. Ranger is bunkering up in anticipation of reactionary attacks, so hit me with your best shot.