illegal immigration: the road to pat buchanan

after arizona and our own gov. richardson (who might i add...is an enormous disappointment and i hope his obvious attempt to gain airtime for his inevitable run at the white house ends in the destruction of his political career) declared states of emergency over the illegal immigration problem the department of homeland security was forced to put their efforts at snuffing out poor mexicans looking to better their lives. don't get me wrong...the fact that it is so easy to simply walk across the border and enter the country is a problem in this day and age...and inevitably some "evil doers" will cross this way and cause some damage, so i guess something needs to be done...and i am all about utilizing the legal methods to enter this country, if for no other reason just to be fair to those that wait...but some of this stuff is starting to sound like good old pat buchanan.

apparently we will be adding thousands of new "beds" to detain undocumented immigrants, god knows how many more patrols, and (my personal favorite) lots of fencing along the border. thank god some fencing will be there...we all know that noone will ever figure out to walk around it or bring some wire cutters. the next step is obviously the brilliant plan proposed by pat buchanan in 1996...build the equivalent of the great wall of china on our southern border. and if we managed to time it right, we could trap all the endangered species on the southern side so that we wouldnt have to worry about them when developing the southwest.

on top of all this we are adding more lawyers, for the government of course, and judges to work on deportation proceedings. this inevitably means that non-profit organizations will fall even farther behind in helping these folks to get fair hearings in a court system that does not speak their language when they are being kicked out of the country. good news for anyone interested in immigration law.

now, if you sit in any federal courtroom in new mexico for an afternoon you will realize that some very nasty folks cross that border illegally...but you will also quickly realize that it is probably a lower proportion of nasty folks than we already have here. you will also hear a lot of sad stories about families just trying to make it and give their kids the promise of a future that america offers them. these folks aren't the problem.

this leads me to actually give kudos to GW on something...migrant worker visas...actually seems like a good idea...although i am sure it will get royally fucked up along the way.