Up Against The Wall

 --The fall of the Berlin Wall

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall 
--Mending Wall,
Robert Frost

 It is not the strongest
of the species that survives,
nor the most intelligent,
 but the one most responsive to change
--Charles Darwin

When you believe in things 
that you don't understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain't the way 
--Superstition,  
Stevie Wonder
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We approached this election as a people assaulted and insulted, both from within and without. The wall with Mexico was a campaign promise to give some succor to these bruised people.

Democratic institutions generally do not build walls, but rather, bridges. That said, border protection is a legitimate concern for any nation, and building a wall with Mexico became a campaign promise. And like all campaign promises, it provided a simplistic and easily-imaged solution.

Every president enters with some good ideas, but also some not so good. The wall may fall into the latter category. Not because a nation does need good border defense, but because there are better alternatives. Less iconic, but more effective.

This proposed wall is both a symbolic and actual gesture against the seemingly most porous point of entry, giving a sense of power to a people who have felt vulnerable and transgressed upon since the terror events of 9-11-01 (and probably before that).

But true defense in the 21st century is based upon mobility, and not static lines.

According to a Center for Migration Studies (CMS) 2017 report, illegal Visa overstays from all visitors to the United States (including those from Mexico) outnumber the "entries without inspection" (EWI) from across the Mexican border.

It is estimated that two-thirds of those who arrived in 2014 did not illegally cross a border, though the Department of Homeland Security does not release actual numbers. 

A 2017 DHS report estimated 629,000 visitors to the United States — just over 1 percent of all travelers — remained in the country at the end of 2016 after overstaying their visas as students, workers or tourists. However, Mexico is still the leading country for both overstays and EWIs, with about one-third of undocumented arrivals from Mexico in 2014 being overstays.

The problem with the wall solution is, static defenses like walls have been OBE time and again. Think of any of the great walls, now fallen: Hadrian's, China's or the Berlin Wall. Or the Maginot and Siegfried and Winter (Gustave) Lines. All linear defenses ultimately were breached.

The concept of a static line defense has become superannuated by the wars of the 20th century. No commander will do a static defense. Bataan taught that lesson.

Another challenge for a Democratic nation would be the fact previously mentioned at RAW, namely, that an obstacle is useless unless covered by fire. Are we willing to go all Berlin Wall on Mexicans?

Probably not, since even the most hardcore wall advocate must see that Mexicans are the ones building the United States these days. Heck, legals would probably be the ones building the wall.

In contrast, a mobile defense would be more realistic, for several reasons.

A mobile border defense would present a better cost/benefit ratio than would a fixed wall. The European precedents include Germany's Grenzpolizei (Bundesgrenzschutz) and France's Central Directorate of Border Police (DCPAF). 

Why not get innovative with border protection and get the citizens on board with the project? To that end, why not have a draft for service in the Border Patrol?

In the tradition of VISTA or the badly-gutted Clinton initiative, Americorps, service in the border patrol could become part of a mandatory post-secondary service modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Further, a prerequisite for future military service could be a three-year stint with the Patrol. Future officers could not be commissioned until their Border Patrol service is completed. Officer selection could take place in that initial placement with the Patrol.

This envisions Border Patrol service as a sort of quasi-military function (moreso than currently). A person need not enter the Army proper, but could spend one's entire career border patrolling. (However, the Patrol would have to maintain its quasi-military shroud, as an outright militarization of the patrol would be seen as an act of war by Mexico.)

Since defensive measures are always in-depth, what guarantees that the Mexican government will provide a depth of operations on their side to assist this proposed mobile defense? The politics would have to be groomed immaculately.

The United States would need the complicity of the Mexican government to identify the shifting areas of main threat, as the success of mobile defenses is based on that knowledge. 

"Strong point defenses" could be emplaced around major U.S. border cities, with "zones of security", and discrete mobile forces could be garrisoned there to neutralize local penetrations and to provide local area security. This denies illegal immigrants their local active and passive support (without which they cannot thrive).

Traditionally, this border function was the purview of the Texas Rangers. In the military, this is "rear area protection" -- defending the border in depth.

The Wall is a simplistic image of unassailibility, but walls are made to be breached.

A multipolar, focalized and local mobile defense is the more 21st century answer to achieving border security.

--Jim & Lisa

Sanctuary Cities

--They've co-opted their leader's invective

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head 
--Revolution,
The Beatles

 Sanctuary, it said:
but only the road has meaning there. It leads
into the world's cities like a long fuse laid
--Sanctuary,
Judith Wright 

You don't need a weather man
to know which way the wind blows
--Subterranean Homesick Blues,
Bob Dylan
_____________________

Subtitle: The Illegal illegal fight.

Mending Fences, Pt. II:

In Iraq the Coalition Forces (i.e., the United States) built walls around cities to keep insurgents out. This implied that walls would lead to victory versus violence.

Street battles, as in Fallujah, were fought to isolate cities from the insurgents (both domestic and foreign). In our current fight against ISIS, the same winning (ahem) formula applies: fight for the cities and when the vermin have been eradicated, everything will be just fine. 

Today, our 2017 Sanctuary City warriors are insurging against their President and federal authority. We (they) are insurgents when they burn images of their President in effigy, and wear shirts proclaiming, "Not My President.

Immigration has become a point of contention in the United States, and the United States' insurgents wish to keep criminal illegals inside the borders, rather than outside. It is a perverse inversion of the military fight abroad.

Alas, since gay marriage was signed into law, the last Civil Rights rampart has fallen, and Liberals are not Liberals unless they have some untermensch behind which to rally (provided they are not Jewish).

Do these sanctuary insurgents comprehend the nonsensical illegality what they are doing? If President Obama -- known as the "Deporter-in-Chief --had the authority to address immigration, then so does President Trump have that same authority. Legality transcends our personal convictions.

Mayors do not have the authority to override Constitutional imperatives. However, it is obvious they are not above sucking up to their constituents, forward-looking as they are to their next election and their meal plate.

Social workers may inhabit the "Every sperm is sacred" zone, fighting for the "rights" of illegals to remain in place. But why are the rest of us so hot to keep in people who are double criminals (i.e., illegals + run-of-the-mill criminals)?

Our country has problems enough ministering to our own citizens and blighted cities. What purpose can the whine du jour of the Democrats have other than being a convenient distraction from the problems of our indigenous?

Ah, but since the myriad of problems that beset our own citizens has proven to be intractable and obdurate, why not just look over there and drill down some illegal Muslims and Mexicans? The illegal fight to retain illegals is a clever bit of legerdemain. 

Since the U.S. has been fighting a 14 year war to protect foreign cities from external threats, what argument can be made to not do the same for our own cities?

In the counterinsurgency (COIN) environment the concept of personnel and resource control (PRC) is that every citizen or legitimate resident must have official identification issued by a legal authority. How else can a government control its territory?

If we will not control our borders then it is obvious that the PWOT © and the War on Drugs have been farcical enterprises conducted by farceurs (i.e., politicians).

Logical endpoint: a restive population maintains perpetual battle against their duly elected leader, who then must do something to restore order.

As the U.S. insurgents glumly and gleefully (a seeming oxymoron, but a Starbuck's espresso amongst the agonistas keeps it bearable and seemingly sensible) construct their insurgent safe zones against the order of law, they begin to feel more ostracized, more convinced that they are being persecuted and that they are on the side of right.

Ensconced in their "safety zones" pitted against the rule of law, they are transmuted into "The Deplorables" -- a term once reserved for the very people they are now opposing. They hunker down and draw to themselves their fellow travelers du jour (their token illegal pets).

What next for these illegals, and the people illegally harboring them?

Why does a nation have borders if they do not intend to enforce immigration law?

Sophistication

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication 
--Leonardo da Vinci
________________

A successful act of terrorism requires a certain sophistication.  A RAW reader recently challenged this contention by stating 22 million not-very sophisticated Mexicans penetrated our first level of security, which is our borders.

Besides the obvious difference in intent (most Mexicans hope to make a new home in the U.S. whereas the intent of terrorists is to gain entry to spread mayhem), the reader is correct that support -- both active and passive -- is necessary for the success of either infiltrative endeavor. In a future post Ranger will explore the analogy between how Mexican aliens and terrorists have successfully breached the U.S. borders and gained a foothold in a future post.

For now, we will point out that it is minimally essential to gain transport (driver's license), safe house (shelter), identification documents and financing.  Beyond that, terrorists must have language facility, handling, intelligence, targeting data, swept passports and avenues of escape. Staying in country and becoming operational require all of the above, not just pole-vaulting over a hurdle.

Our media rarely provides a look at the support chain behind the terrorist.  It strains credulity to believe that two men carried out OKC or 19 the WTC attack with little or no support beyond the attack team. Both events had more active and passive support personnel than we were led to believe. Ditto the current brothers suspected of setting bombs at the Boston Marathon.

As an outside-the-box guy, Ranger has never believed the official versions of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building (OKC) bombing or the attacks of 9-11-01, both of which are seminal fear-generating scenarios for the U.S.  One event was used to start wars versus stateside militias, the other to create the new concept of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), the Long War. 

The OKC bombers were depicted as malcontent losers acting alone who pulled off a spectacular terror event, but the two ideas are contradictory. The coverage of the 9-11-01 events never go beyond the hijackers themselves, save for the mention of their ties with the shadowy organization al-Qaeda and a chart of the group's top organization. The latest sound byte on the Boston brothers (from their uncle) is that they did what they are purported to have done because they were "losers".  Case closed ... or is it?

It is perhaps a comfort to imagine that this could not have been foreseen, or as former Secretary of State Rice said following the WTC attack ("Who could have imagined?" . . . despite a prior attack at the same facility less than ten years before.)  But such disingenuousness is no longer acceptable, and ignorance is not bliss when the price is one's life. 

Being rational in the U.S. vis-a-vis violence and terror in our society is the new outre topic among liberals. We dare not racially profile, and the price for the privilege of sitting at the table of democracy is to put on one's blinders. "These things will happen," and "let's get those gun rights curtailed right quick," only this is a non-sequitur: if you are willing to suck up the routine occasional bombing for fear of losing your freedoms, then why so quick off the block to limit the rights of gun owners?

All linkages between terrorism and the society in which it occurs and from whence it is generated should be made, and the beginning is to form a profile of the suspect population.

Grandma was an Illegal

--The Last of the Meheecans,
South Park (Season 15, Episode 9)

The crops are all in, the peaches are rotting
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps
They're flying us back to the Mexican border
To pay all our money just to wade back again
--Deportees, Woody Guthrie

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
--Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford

I am troubled by the demonization of immigrants,
legal or illegal, in our party.
We've got a country that was built on immigrants
and immigration, and we've kind of lost sight of that
--Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX)

Who's gonna build your wall, boys
Who's gonna mow your lawn
Who's gonna cook your Mexican food
When your Mexican maid is gone
--Who's Gonna Build Your Wall?,
Tom Russell
__________________

With politicos on the Left and Right pandering to immigrant frustration in the U.S., Ranger would like to take a personal trip down that road.

Cousin Martin, who lives somewhere in that vast thing called the Midwest, recently sent a historical book on coal mining called "Bug Dust and Black Damp; Life and Work in the Old Coal Patch" (Coode, Comart, 1986). My grandfather, father and uncles were all (and some still are) coal miners, and we lived in The Patch in another life.

Like so many others, my grandparents were immigrants who, it was assumed, arrived through Ellis Island late in the early 20th century. However, since Grandmother Kurek only had one eye (due to a childhood accident), she could not have passed the required medical entrance exam administered to all immigrants. So how did Ranger come to be the patriotic American that we all know him to be?

Cousin John Kurek recently solved the mystery. Wily Grandma gamed the system by first doglegging through Canada, a country we all know has more lax immigration restrictions, and she then illegally entered the U.S. through a porous border. Ranger has a proud pedigree of people who naturally fit into the enterprising American spirit quite well. Good for her.

However, the key is that Grandma was an illegal. She married a coal miner and they sired four offspring: Two men followed into coal mining, later transitioning to auto factories. One of them, Uncle John, produced a son who served in the United States Marine Corps and is now a retired auto worker. Aunt Helen had a child who became engineer, one who became an accountant and one who served in the Army and who now works in the Texas oil industry; his son is in the Air Force. Ranger's mother Margaret Kurek Hruska produced a soldier.

Well, so much for the story of one illegal's life, ca. 1917. Though Ranger's forebears were poor, they relied on each other and others who lived in The Patch to make it through. People got by on much less, and government assistance was not readily available to those of sound constitution. Ranger reckons America didn't lose much on the deal.

Fast forward almost 100 years and the new wave of immigrants is coming across our southern border. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, former illegal farm worker-cum-brain surgeon, was recently on National Public Radio recently to discuss the plight of immigrants and America as he sees it. He ended the segment by saying in 2034, 25% of the U.S. will be Hispanic, whether you like it or not, and preparing them for the workforce is the only sensible thing for the nation to do.

What do you think of Quiñones-Hinojosa's statement? The border patrol has been fantastically expensive and ineffective by all accounts. Are there other solutions to border patrol? Should there be?