The latest effort to control illegal immigration into the United States is the barrier nearly 2,000 miles long between the U.S. and Mexico. It's very construction (and maintenance) is nothing but an exercise in folly, and a waste of taxpayer dollars.
If you want a practical reason why 'The Wall' is a bad idea, consider this:
It won't work.
The illegals will always be able to find gaps, or lapses in security. If one area is secure, they'll just move on to another area. Trying to completely seal a border 2,000 miles long would be difficult, even by Communist standards. Some Russian satellite countries had pretty good fences back in the 50's and 60's. They used double-fences, guard towers, machine guns, searchlights, and dogs.
Still, people managed to get across.
Some organizations, such as the Minutemen, support The Wall and spend time patrolling sections of the border. I think they have a lot of nerve calling themselves by that name. The REAL Minutemen would disavow them quicker than a Mission Impossible gone bad. You can even become a 'Cyber-Minuteman' now, by volunteering time to stare at your computer screen and watch the webcams for illegal crossings.
It's all a big waste of time.
The real answer to the immigration problem has always been a simple one, and it doesn't involve building a 2000 mile fence between the U.S. and Mexico. It is immigration reform. If the U.S. simply made it impossible to get a job, register your kids for school, rent an apartment, get a drivers' license, or obtain any number of things you need to set up housekeeping in another country, then the illegals would slow to a trickle almost overnight.
They would begin playing by the rules, since any motivation for them to come here illegally would be gone.
As far as the ones who are here now, that is partially our OWN fault, since we tacitly encouraged illegal crossings for decades to recruit Mexicans to pick our crops and take those domestic jobs. Of course, many of them have moved on from that, and have become assimilated into American society. There are more than 12 million of them among us now. Since the idea of trying to round up and deport 12 million people is certainly doomed to failure, the best we can do is to offer amnesty to those who can pass a background check, and move on with a better plan for immigration.
Take away the motivation, and you solve the problem. Many governments now do this, including Australia and some European countries. In many European countries, you can just walk over a bridge or cross to another country with little problem. Yet most of them don't have the problem we do with illegals.
The Wall is nothing more than negative reinforcement, similar to beating your kids. It works for a while, but soon has diminishing returns. One thing about The Wall that people forget: It not only tries to keep people out, but YOU in. If we put similar walls around the other three sides, we could turn America into one big prison. We've already got a good head start, since the U.S. imprisons more of its citizens per capita than any other major country.
One proposal being considered is the National I.D. card. Some folks consider this an invasion of privacy, and cry 'Big Brother'. Others say it can be countefeited, and so it would be useless. As far as the counterfeiting possibility, the technology to prevent this, or at least slow it to almost nothing is already in place. This is why credit card theives are now targeting your card numbers more these days, rather than trying to duplicate the cards themselves.
As far as the privacy question, welcome to the 21st century. Your information ALREADY resides in scores of databases all over the world.
This card could be required for any U.S. citizen or legal immigrant to get hired for a job, rent an apartment, buying or licensing a car, applying for welfare, obtaining public medical care, in fact, almost anything that only legal residents should be able to do in the United States. It really isn't much different than a passport. Except in this case, it's a passport to your rights as a citizen, similar to a drivers' license being a passport to your right to drive a car. You could call it 'domestic passport'. The U.S. would not be the first to do this, by the way. According to Wikipedia, over 100 countries now require it, or a form of it.
The fence idea is folly. This is the Information Age. We should address the problem in a 21st century manner using intelligent laws and technology, not with a medieval-era wall, guns, and troops.
