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)
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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.

Astigmatism

now that the war is through with me
I'm waking up, I cannot see
that there's not much left of me
--One, Metallica

Whenever I take up a newspaper,
I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines.
There must be Ghosts all the country over,
as thick as the sand of the sea....
We are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light
--Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen

We say the world has moved on;
maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up
--The Dark Tower, Stephen King

We’re Americans. To be critical in time of war?
Even the democrats are smart enough
to keep their mouth shut on this
--Boston Legal, Witches of Mass Destruction
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Where does hope begin and pessimism disappear? It's a fine line, but for Ranger, pessimism is the order of the day.

Where are we as a nation, and is it even appropriate to call our polyglot population a society? What is our national identity?

Historically, multi-cultural national entities dissolved, breaking into smaller, ethnically-identified groups. The Roman, Holy Roman Empire, French, Napoleonic, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Austro-Hungarian, Czarist Russian, Soviet Union are examples. The nations of Europe are currently struggling with the concepts of human rights and dignity, while eschewing immigrant populations.

How will Europe and the U.S. absorb immigrants while maintaining a national identity? Germany's Chancellor Merkel spoke for many recently:

"Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democratic Union party, Merkel said the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily 'side by side' did not work.

"She said the onus was on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society."

"This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed" (Germany's multiculturalism has "Utterly failed").

Immigrants are and should be welcome, but there is also an expectation that that they integrate and elevate themselves to the values of Western society. It is reasonable that host societies dictate the terms by which these people are accepted as citizens.

The expectation has always been that the language and customs of the host nation be assimilated by the new citizens. In addition to rising to the best levels of the new society, the immigrant can and should add their own positive value to their adopted homes.

The strife host nations like the U.S. feel arises from the fact that so many of our jobs are being exported and lost. Globalization is killing our industry and negatively impacting our trade balance. While it is not they who outsourced our jobs, that combined with a high unemployment rate for our citizens make hard for many to see the good in integrating 20 million + illegals.

Democracy cannot thrive when we have so many unemployed and so many more losing their tenuous grip on a middle class existence as the dire economic situation grinds on. Assets and resources trump philosophy at such times. As in the Gunslinger series, the world has moved on, yet we remain the same, losing ground daily to those powers fast on our tail.

So we distract ourselves with something we can do well -- firing weapons that go "boom", and preening our machismo. But how can the U.S. successfully fight wars to impose a de-centered concept of democracy? Coming from a crisis mode, the U.S. foolishly (cavalierly?) tries to deliver the democracy slipping through our fingers into the clenched fists of reluctant and unwilling societies.

Here's the pessimism: How can we believe that globalization is an absolute good for us when the facts indicate otherwise? Our high and recalcitrant unemployment rate is the result of removing trade barriers -- the U.S cannot compete with Chinese or Third World peasant-captive workers.

Housing, banking and the economy more than shaky, Our infrastructure is crumbling, yet the wars are the one thing pressing on, unwaveringly. Our national identity is out of focus, yet the ship of state founders on, seemingly rudderless.

Are we becoming a ghost ship?

Population and Resource Control

I've been kicked by the wind,
robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in,
but I'm still on my feet and I'm still... willin'
--Willin', Little Feat

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose
--Pancho and Lefty,
Townes Van Zandt

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
Command the people of Israel, and say to them,
When you come into the land of Canaan;
this is the land that shall fall to you for an inheritance,
the land of Canaan with its borders
--Numbers 34:1-2
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Two elements are key in all of the recent ersatz U.S. Counterinsurgency wars: Border control, and population and resource control. These elements are parts of a broader scheme called IDAD [Internal Defense and Development.]

Border control and PRC never worked in our useless OCONUS adventures, but they could be applied successfully and judiciously here in The Homeland vis-a-vis our concerns with illegal immigration. The question is, how sincere and consistent are our views on protecting the U.S. borders?

PRC and IDAD need not be solely a military application but can work with civilians when used in a controlled and sensitive manner. PRC implies that everyone who is legally here in the U.S. carry biometeric and/or legal state or Federal identification, preferably State, abiding by INS guidelines.

No i.d. means no services or bank accounts, no vehicle purchases, no money orders or out-of-country wire fund transfers. Nobody works without a Social Security number and/or work documents. If you work, you pay taxes and Social Security. This the basis of PRC. The government has the right and responsibility to control the borders and the population within those borders.

Border control fails without PRC. This is the disconnect in our Federal policy. We impose these programs in meaningless wars, but fail to apply them at home. If it works in Iraq and Afghanistan (as the Department of Defense tells us), then it has to work here, also. If it works in Baghdad, then why not in Tucson, Arizona?

If the U.S. were serious about its immigration problem, it would apply these policies; the problem will not disappear without action, and whatever action is taken, both the Right and the Left will complain.

Contrary to political rhetoric, there are no easy choices. We either guard the borders and control our territory, or we should forget the charade of half-measures and throw open the borders.

Yes, most of us are of immigrant stock; yes, much of our territory is ill-gotten. But there is legal immigration, and then there is illegal. When do we stop atonement, and when do we own our country, making the difficult choices with surety?

Whatever route we take, there is no rational middle ground.