Build The Fence

Hugh Hewitt said last week, "Build the fence first." And while the immigration protests were continuing, Congress (the Senate, actually) tried to pass a "comprehensive" immigration bill that, in the McCain-Kennedy (ptooey) version, would put illegals on an easy track to citizenship. But the Senate leadership's attempt at getting a "better" bill was stymied, as reported today by My Way News (HT: WorldNetDaily).

So we've got a House bill calling for better border enforcement. And no Senate bill either way (as far as I can tell from ambiguous news reports). And if the Senate had passed a bill, it would have been an amnesty-like bill, heavy on rewarding illegals for their illegal behavior.

What did we elect these people for?

The only silver lining in the immigration cloud is this report from (yes!) National Public Radio (NPR) yesterday (emphasis added).

Before the [14-mile] fence [near San Diego] was built, all that separated that stretch of Mexico from California was a single strand of cable that demarcated the international border.

Back then, Border Patrol agent Jim Henry says he was overwhelmed by the stream of immigrants who crossed into the United States illegally just in that sector.

"It was an area that was out of control," Henry says. "There were over 100,000 aliens crossing through this area a year."

Today, Henry is assistant chief of the Border Patrol's San Diego sector. He says apprehensions here are down 95 percent, from 100,000 a year to 5,000 a year, largely because the single strand of cable marking the border was replaced by double -- and in some places, triple -- fencing.

Fences work. But they can't work if we don't build them.

The article gives equal time to the pro-illegal side.

But Claudio Smith, an attorney and border activist, says the toll has been much higher in human lives. She says the fencing has simply forced immigrants to take more dangerous routes through the mountains and scorching-hot deserts.

It is now harder to cross the border into the United States, and also more expensive. Border crossers say they pay human smugglers, or coyotes, much more than they did a decade ago.

Smith says the fence has actually created a sort of perverse and unintended consequence: It is keeping people in the United States who used to go back to Mexico.

Smith's arguments seem odd to me. Are we supposed to feel sympathetic that people are paying more money to the coyotes, in order to break our laws? I would hope that the higher prices and the more dangerous routes are causing some people to decide to stay in their own countries.

And Smith's last argument, that our fence is keeping illegals here, is as phony as this three-dollar bill I have right here in my hand. In the pre-fence days, when the border was just a cable, it sounds as though illegals went back to Mexico for a while and then crossed the border again into the US. The illegals were here long-term then, and they're here long-term now.

We need the fence along the entire southern border, so we can keep those people legal--by keeping them in their own counry.