I by no means called you anything negative, let alone ignorant. I do think that (and was direct/terse about my thinking) a fence just isn't effective. There's not enough benefit to it unless you man it with armed guards every 1/4 mile 24/7. Otherwise you spend all your time repairing it. That picture with the ramp was hilarious. Then there's tunnels. Holes. Etc.
Besides, you could spend all your $$$$ building a fence and then they just use boats and go up the gulf or whatever. Then there's the whole Canadian boarder. It's easier for them to change routes than for us to build fences.
The Border Fence: Horrible Deal At Cost Up To $40,000 Per Illegal Immigrant Apprehended (Forbes)
Fair enough, no hard feelings.
That article amounts to an opinion piece written by two Democrats. I'm sorry, but I just find it amusing to hear politicians of any stripe dismiss a legally-mandated project on the basis that it isn't
cost-effective enough, of all things. And the reasoning is loosely as I summarized it earlier: "Oh, the immigrants will take boats instead! They'll come through Canada!"
Yeah, well, it's significantly harder to take a boat or go through Canada [having started in
Mexico] than it is to drive across an invisible border, isn't it? "Building a fence on the Rio Grande is unworkable for [insert reasoning about terrain here]!" That's a straw man: no one is so senseless as to insist that the fence
must literally touch the border at every point. If it has to traverse inland at certain points, then so be it.
And as for whether a border fence hearkens back to "East and West Berlin," the difference between a totalitarian state and what we have here (at least as of this moment) is that the totatlitarian state builds walls to keep people
in; we, by contrast, have to keep people
out if we're to have any hope of making good on our social-program costs over the long term. If Julius Caesar could build
~40 kilometers of double walled fortifications over mountainous terrain in
three weeks using 2,000-year-old technology, I just find it
really hard to accept that we couldn't attempt something similar here for less than the cost of providing for all of the people who slip through the border uncontested. It'd certainly take more counter-evidence that the largely emotional posturing in that article to sway me. YMMV.
This is not a matter of skin color, either. If we had tens of millions of undocumented Canadians living in this country, I'd certainly support stronger border security up there -- but as things stand now, we Americans may end up fleeing North.
All of that said, I do respect your opinion, and respectfully, I agree to disagree. If I've sounded dismissive or flippant in this post, it wasn't directed at Attypops; I was addressing the arguments in the Forbes' interview he linked. There certainly are other things we could do to improve the immigration situation; a fence isn't the end-all, be-all -- but until I see anyone make
a good faith effort to address the problem, all of that is rather academic.
