Senate votes to erect 370-mile fence

[Old Dude]

breaking news.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,195791,00.html?sPage=specialsections.foxnew s/immigration

[Old Dude]

Also .. first details of "path to citizenship" program revealed ...

Snow rejected claims by conservative Republicans who say a guest worker program amounts to amnesty. He said that immigrants, after meeting a number of requirements, would be put under an 11-year probationary time period.

"In that probationary period, you have to keep a job, you have to keep your nose clean, you have to learn English, you have to go through the bureaucracy, you have to pay the fees. ... So you put all that together, it's not amnesty. The people who will go through that process are going to have to go through some of the most expensive and the longest tracks toward citizenship anyone's ever faced," Snow said.

(same link)

- previous plan had a six-year probationary period IIRC.

[bendog]

I wonder if like Israel we couldn't use the fence to change our borders? In this case giving back texas and LA.

[Smiling Assassin27]

what they don't tell you is that the fence is 370 miles HIGH, not wide....

[Old Dude]

I wonder if like Israel we couldn't use the fence to change our borders? In this case giving back texas and LA.

Depends on how much Haliburton could skim off with the shortcuts.

[Old Dude]

WASHINGTON — Heeding conservative demands to shore up the southern U.S. border to prevent illegal immigrants from freely crossing into the country, the Senate voted Wednesday to build 370 miles of triple-layered fence

Senators voted 83-16 to add fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers along the southern border.

Construction of the barrier would send "a signal that open-border days are over. ... Good fences make good neighbors, fences don't make bad neighbors," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. He said border areas where barriers already exist have experienced economic improvement and reduced crime.

"What we have here has become a symbol for the right wing in American politics," countered Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. If made law, "our relationship with Mexico would come down to a barrier between our two countries."

The vote was among several amendments that senators are considering to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act. Other provisions — for instance whether to allow illegal immigrants to get on a path to citizenship — is stirring more heated debate.

All of it is occurring while thousands of demonstrators a few blocks from the Capitol amassed to insist that illegal immigrants be given wider opportunities to stay in the United States.

...

(same link)

[Rohirrim]

Let's say I steal your car. Then, if I don't commit any other crimes, pay a fine, learn another language, and fill out a bunch of paperwork, at the end of 11 years, I get to keep the car?

But that's not amnesty?

Oh, and I also get to drive it around for those 11 years.

[Bronx33]

WASHINGTON — Heeding conservative demands to shore up the southern U.S. border to prevent illegal immigrants from freely crossing into the country, the Senate voted Wednesday to build 370 miles of triple-layered fence

Senators voted 83-16 to add fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers along the southern border.

Construction of the barrier would send "a signal that open-border days are over. ... Good fences make good neighbors, fences don't make bad neighbors," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. He said border areas where barriers already exist have experienced economic improvement and reduced crime.

"What we have here has become a symbol for the right wing in American politics," countered Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. If made law, "our relationship with Mexico would come down to a barrier between our two countries."

The vote was among several amendments that senators are considering to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act. Other provisions — for instance whether to allow illegal immigrants to get on a path to citizenship — is stirring more heated debate.

All of it is occurring while thousands of demonstrators a few blocks from the Capitol amassed to insist that illegal immigrants be given wider opportunities to stay in the United States.

...

(same link)


WHAT RELATIONSHIP?

[Old Dude]

Let's say I steal your car. Then, if I don't commit any other crimes, pay a fine, learn another language, and fill out a bunch of paperwork, at the end of 11 years, I get to keep the car?

But that's not amnesty?

Oh, and I also get to drive it around for those 11 years.


Everything has its price, apparently.

It is interesting to note that the probationary period has nearly doubled, though. I wonder if the fines and fees have also been increased?

[Old Dude]

Senate also passes citizenship provisions ... but details still sketchy...



http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/17/immigration.ap/index.html


The vote was 66-33 against a proposal that would have removed provisions giving an eventual chance at citizenship to illegal immigrants who have been in the country more than two years.

[Rascal]

How long is that border? 2500 miles roughly? Yeah we did a good job there guys, you've only got 2130 miles left to go. Good job. They aren't doing a damn thing.

[Old Dude]

How long was the fence authorized by the House Bill? 700 miles, wasn't it?

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/12/16/house_oks_700_mile_mexico_fence/

The two-layered fence, about 700 miles long, would be built in parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The provisions, passed 260 to 159, put priority on construction near Laredo, Texas. The city is across the border from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where warring drug cartels have been blamed for more than 140 murders this year.


Did this eventually get amended? And is there something special about the three-layer fence authorized in the Senate vs. the two layer fence in the House? Or is this just wordplay?

[alkemical]

a fence......

[Play2win]

A Mending Wall...

[Old Dude]

And 500 miles of "vehicle barriers" ...

The 83-16 vote approved fence construction and 500 miles of vehicle barriers...

http://www.townhall.com/blogs/c-log/JeffEmanuel/story/2006/05/17/197798.html

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/washington/index.ssf?/base/politics-9/1147867766292720.xml&storylist=washington

[Old Dude]

How effective will any wall be?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002999136_meximmigration17.html
...
There is even an informal trade union of smuggling coyotes, according to Hector, a guest-house manager who didn't want his full name published. Problems, he said, tend to get handled the old-fashioned way: "The desert has no ears," he said.

...

People have been streaming into Altar — the gateway to Arizona — since authorities in Texas and California installed physical barriers and increased patrols in the 1990s.

But there are hurdles of a different kind, Garcia said. Immigrants first must get past police shakedowns on the Mexican side, then avoid bandits who operate out of Mexico but prey on crossers a few hundred yards north of the border. If immigrants get beyond those barriers, thousands of Border Patrol agents, with electronic sensors and helicopter support, await them.

Those who don't get busted risk dehydration and death.

Nearly half of the 473 immigrant deaths in 2005 occurred in the Tucson sector, which runs along 261 miles of international border from New Mexico to the Yuma County, Ariz., line. Summer temperatures can reach 130 degrees in the Sonoran Desert.

In Altar, the single public hospital does not accept injured or ailing immigrants, a task that falls to a mobile clinic run by the International Red Cross, said Gerardo Cardenas, a paramedic who works there. The unit treats 1,000 people a month on average.

Despite the risks, immigrants keep coming.

Sometimes it takes multiple attempts and detentions before people make it through. One man needed 28 tries.

[SteveTensi13]

A fence? How about something like the great wall of china?

[alkemical]

i say we give them CA, and then denoate the fault and send it bye byes

[bendog]

How long is that border? 2500 miles roughly? Yeah we did a good job there guys, you've only got 2130 miles left to go. Good job. They aren't doing a damn thing.
Yeah, it sounds like Saddam's trenches in Gulf War I. Left Hook!

[Old Dude]

I suppose that part of the idea behind the fence is symbolic. And, one would think, that if the country invests umpteen million $$ in building it, it would be less likely to adopt an explicit open border policy in the future.

How much of a deterrent will it be? Personally, i don't have any doubt that people will still be able to bypass it. I imagine that, in some areas, it might require more effort, and coyotes will certainly raise their fees.

That might act as a financial deterrent on some people. If the average coyote charges $1500 to $2000 per person now, then that's the "real" financial penalty for being deported, i.e. the cost to get back in again. Maybe if the price goes up $1,000 or $2,000 a pop, then there might some financial attrition among deportees.

The bigger issue right now, and the thing that I think most separates the Senate and the House, is the question of amnesty vs. employer crackdowns.

Advocates of the "employer crackdown strategy" obviously hope that if the market for illegal immigrants is reduced (by prosecuting the people who knowingly hire them), then a significant number of the millions of illegal immigrants/undocumented workers currently in the US will have no choice but to pack up and head home.

For all practical purposes, that is the only way to remove them, because the country simply cannot afford to carry out the detection, detention and mass deportation of 12 million or more people.

But if there is some sort of citizen pathway provision - regardless of whether it is called "amnesty" or whatever, then part and parcel of that is that the millions who take advantage of that program will get to stay and to work while they are here. In fact, that seems to be one of the primary requirements for citizenship.

It logically follows that employers who hire these probationary people cannot be prosecuted or punished. They can only be prosecuted for knowingly hiring people who have not entered the program.

Since the Bill encourages these people to work, and employers to hire them, they have absolutely no reason to pull up stakes and head back.

So isn't that really where we have the main point of disagreement between the House and the Senate? Do we embrace and reward those already here or do we try to starve out a significant portion of them?

[Bronx33]

Originally Posted by Rascal
How long is that border? 2500 miles roughly? Yeah we did a good job there guys, you've only got 2130 miles left to go. Good job. They aren't doing a damn thing.

(500 miles of vehicle barriers) I guess 1630 miles i easier to watch than 2500 miles, it's still a bandaid over sucking chest wound. It's going to take a terrorist attack getting in through there to open up some eyes. (it's our weak point)

[RMT]

Regardless of how the government spins it, their pathetic attempt for immigration reform is akin to betraying the American LEGAL taxpaying public.

[spdirty]

I wonder what would happen if 12 to 20 million American taxpayers just refused to pay taxes? Well, they couldn't arrest us all right? I wonder if we could then get amnesty...or, if you don't like the tax cheat plan, pick a crime. Friggin scumbags, and Turbin Durbin is one of the worst.

[Bronx33]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/washington/18border.html?ei=5090&en=9b2b6faca788ed61&ex=1305604800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, May 17 — The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.

The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.

"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.

"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.

More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.

"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."

[Billy Clyde Puckett]

a fence......

Any bets on the Olympic success of Mexico in the next pole vault event?

[Bronx33]

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060517/APA/605170600

EL PASO, Texas -- Beto O'Rourke has lived in El Paso most of his life and cannot remember a time when there wasn't a fence or towering flood lights and pole-mounted cameras lining the banks of the Rio Grande.

So when President Bush proposed adding a high-tech fence, cameras and other technology to urban areas along the Mexican border, O'Rourke didn't pay much attention.

"It didn't seem like a meaningful suggestion at all," said O'Rourke, a 33-year-old freshman city councilman in this border city. "But maybe that's because we already have it and it doesn't seem to be working."

El Paso's border isn't alone in having the kinds of technology Bush proposed this week. Most urban spots along the Texas-Mexico border, as well San Diego and Nogales, Ariz., have them too. But still, immigrants and drug smugglers have found their way across the riverbed in Texas and deserts of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Arizona.

In El Paso, the largest city on the southern border, flood lights line nearly 20 miles of border and two sets of barbed wire-topped chain link fences line about 14 miles. Near downtown, three fences stretch across five miles.

Bush's technology proposals were included in a plan announced Monday to stem illegal immigration, in part by deploying up to 6,000 National Guard members to help secure the 2,000-mile border. In Washington, Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar told reporters that the upgrades and Guard assistance "is going to be a tremendous enforcement support partnership."

But T.J. Bonner, the head of the union that represents nearly all U.S. Border Patrol agents, said the plan was "underwhelming."

"The whole thing is just a smoke screen," said Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

He also questioned how the technology will be implemented. The last time cameras and sensors were bought and installed - a project that started in the 1990s - millions of dollars were spent on equipment that was either never installed or improperly maintained.

A federal investigation was launched in 2005 after an audit revealed lax oversight of the program, which was designed to keep tabs on unmanned sections of the border at all times.

Another part of Bush's plan - building vehicle barriers in rural areas - could run into problems along parts of the border. In Texas, where the border is marked by the winding Rio Grande, that option may not be the most practical.

Sheriff Danny C. Dominguez of Presidio County, said building barriers - hollow six-foot-tall reinforced steel beams planted in the desert floor and filled with cement - across the 108 miles of river in his rural county would be a waste of money. The desert in his county near Texas' Big Bend region is rugged and difficult to drive in even the heaviest of vehicles.

Bonner noted numerous spots along Texas' 1,200-mile river border that are simply too deep and wide to cross in a vehicle. And the spaced-out steel pipes wouldn't do much to stop row boats and inner tubes used to ferry immigrants and drug loads across the river.

Mayor David Franz of Hidalgo, Texas, whose small city is across the river from Reynosa, Mexico, population 750,000, doesn't want barriers or a fence.

"Fences and barriers I don't think is going to be the answer," he said. "I don't want the border to appear like a military zone. We've enjoyed a very good and long-lasting relationship with our Mexican neighbors and putting up a wall or a fence sends a wrong message."

Bonner said an unmanned aerial vehicle, which Bush also proposed adding to the federal border arsenal, sounds like a good idea but is an overly expensive tool. Besides, the one UAV the Border Patrol did have crashed in the Arizona desert last month.

"We crashed the one we owned," Bonner said. "Kissed that...tax money goodbye."

[alkemical]

Any bets on the Olympic success of Mexico in the next pole vault event?


si senor - 50 pesos

[alkemical]

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060517/APA/605170600

EL PASO, Texas -- Beto O'Rourke has lived in El Paso most of his life and cannot remember a time when there wasn't a fence or towering flood lights and pole-mounted cameras lining the banks of the Rio Grande.

So when President Bush proposed adding a high-tech fence, cameras and other technology to urban areas along the Mexican border, O'Rourke didn't pay much attention.

"It didn't seem like a meaningful suggestion at all," said O'Rourke, a 33-year-old freshman city councilman in this border city. "But maybe that's because we already have it and it doesn't seem to be working."

El Paso's border isn't alone in having the kinds of technology Bush proposed this week. Most urban spots along the Texas-Mexico border, as well San Diego and Nogales, Ariz., have them too. But still, immigrants and drug smugglers have found their way across the riverbed in Texas and deserts of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Arizona.

In El Paso, the largest city on the southern border, flood lights line nearly 20 miles of border and two sets of barbed wire-topped chain link fences line about 14 miles. Near downtown, three fences stretch across five miles.

Bush's technology proposals were included in a plan announced Monday to stem illegal immigration, in part by deploying up to 6,000 National Guard members to help secure the 2,000-mile border. In Washington, Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar told reporters that the upgrades and Guard assistance "is going to be a tremendous enforcement support partnership."

But T.J. Bonner, the head of the union that represents nearly all U.S. Border Patrol agents, said the plan was "underwhelming."

"The whole thing is just a smoke screen," said Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

He also questioned how the technology will be implemented. The last time cameras and sensors were bought and installed - a project that started in the 1990s - millions of dollars were spent on equipment that was either never installed or improperly maintained.

A federal investigation was launched in 2005 after an audit revealed lax oversight of the program, which was designed to keep tabs on unmanned sections of the border at all times.

Another part of Bush's plan - building vehicle barriers in rural areas - could run into problems along parts of the border. In Texas, where the border is marked by the winding Rio Grande, that option may not be the most practical.

Sheriff Danny C. Dominguez of Presidio County, said building barriers - hollow six-foot-tall reinforced steel beams planted in the desert floor and filled with cement - across the 108 miles of river in his rural county would be a waste of money. The desert in his county near Texas' Big Bend region is rugged and difficult to drive in even the heaviest of vehicles.

Bonner noted numerous spots along Texas' 1,200-mile river border that are simply too deep and wide to cross in a vehicle. And the spaced-out steel pipes wouldn't do much to stop row boats and inner tubes used to ferry immigrants and drug loads across the river.

Mayor David Franz of Hidalgo, Texas, whose small city is across the river from Reynosa, Mexico, population 750,000, doesn't want barriers or a fence.

"Fences and barriers I don't think is going to be the answer," he said. "I don't want the border to appear like a military zone. We've enjoyed a very good and long-lasting relationship with our Mexican neighbors and putting up a wall or a fence sends a wrong message."

Bonner said an unmanned aerial vehicle, which Bush also proposed adding to the federal border arsenal, sounds like a good idea but is an overly expensive tool. Besides, the one UAV the Border Patrol did have crashed in the Arizona desert last month.

"We crashed the one we owned," Bonner said. "Kissed that...tax money goodbye."




http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/05/17/bushs-secret-weapons-for_n_21199.html

Bush's Secret Weapons For Secure Borders...
Tethered Aerostat Radar... Global Hawk...

The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

[Bronx33]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/05/17/bushs-secret-weapons-for_n_21199.html

Bush's Secret Weapons For Secure Borders...
Tethered Aerostat Radar... Global Hawk...

The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.


Ya this wind bag touched on the (virtual fence) subject (when where how)

http://www.thepoliticalpitbull.com/2006/05/kennedy_on_immigration_detache_1.php


Can we just do something that works? it's not too much to ask for is it?

[Rohirrim]

I like Kinky Friedman's idea - Take five million dollars and put it in a fund. Tell the five Mexican generals whose armies control the military districts of Mexico on the northern border that they each will receive 1 million dollars from that fund at the end of the year, but for every illegal immigrant that crosses our border, we will deduct $10,000.

I guarantee you, by the end of one year, illegal immigration will be ovah! ;D And at $5 million per year, it's a bargain.

[Bronx33]

I like Kinky Friedman's idea - Take five million dollars and put it in a fund. Tell the five Mexican generals whose armies control the military districts of Mexico on the northern border that they each will receive 1 million dollars from that fund at the end of the year, but for every illegal immigrant that crosses our border, we will deduct $10,000.

I guarantee you, by the end of one year, illegal immigration will be ovah! ;D And at $5 million per year, it's a bargain.


Sounds great! and would no doubt work, only problem is (special american interests) don't profit and they can't and won't have that.

[alkemical]

Here's more spy blimp stuff:

http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/105934/index.php

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,62646-0.html?tw=wn_story_mailer


I wonder if these are those huge black triangles that people report to seeing?

[alkemical]

Ya this wind bag touched on the (virtual fence) subject (when where how)

http://www.thepoliticalpitbull.com/2006/05/kennedy_on_immigration_detache_1.php


Can we just do something that works? it's not too much to ask for is it?



Evidently......

[Bronx33]

http://www.newsmax.com/poll/border/?PROMO_CODE=1FE8-1

[Old Dude]

The administration's fact sheet.

Today, the President sent Congress a request for $1.948 billion in emergency funding to help secure America's borders.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060518-6.html

What's kind of interesting is that only $20 million (approximately 1% of the total) is targeted for the Department of Justice, and little if any of that that seems to involve prosecuting employers. Rather, it is "to support the timely disposition of an expected increase in immigration hearings," and new funding for "enhanced law enforcement efforts by United States Attorneys along the southern border."

I realize that this part of the package mainly concerns border control, but the price of enforcement vs. employers would seem rather cheap in comparison.

[alkemical]

it's big money man

[Bronx33]

The administration's fact sheet.

Today, the President sent Congress a request for $1.948 billion in emergency funding to help secure America's borders.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060518-6.html

What's kind of interesting is that only $20 million (approximately 1% of the total) is targeted for the Department of Justice, and little if any of that that seems to involve prosecuting employers. Rather, it is "to support the timely disposition of an expected increase in immigration hearings," and new funding for "enhanced law enforcement efforts by United States Attorneys along the southern border."

I realize that this part of the package mainly concerns border control, but the price of enforcement vs. employers would seem rather cheap in comparison.


There is no money in prosecuting employers.

[Crushaholic]

What are they going to do about the underground tunnels?hmmm...

Apparently, the tunnels are how drugs are smuggled over the border...

[alkemical]

What are they going to do about the underground tunnels?hmmm...

Apparently, the tunnels are how drugs are smuggled over the border...


under the boarder :)

j/k

maybe we could get mutant groundhogs.

[Old Dude]

What are they going to do about the underground tunnels?hmmm...

Apparently, the tunnels are how drugs are smuggled over the border...


Check the video of the tunnel on the second link down on CNN's page.

http://www.cnn.com/

[BroncoInferno]

Snow rejected claims by conservative Republicans who say a guest worker program amounts to amnesty.

The "guest worker program" is nothing more than indentured servitude dressed in a cheap tuxedo.

[bendog]

Snow rejected claims by conservative Republicans who say a guest worker program amounts to amnesty.

The "guest worker program" is nothing more than indentured servitude dressed in a cheap tuxedo.
Yep. On the di vinci thread I was considering what the social revolutionary Jesus would make of us. Frankly the Jews would be akin to Nigerians, and we'd be the Romans.

[Old Dude]

Once Haliburton finds a way to build robot prosecutors, I think we'll see more money devoted to the Justice Department.

[RMT]

What are they going to do about the underground tunnels?hmmm...

Apparently, the tunnels are how drugs are smuggled over the border...

Perhaps we need to build a deep wall in the ground (10-15 ft. down) ... that's a lot of cement.

[Billy Clyde Puckett]

Perhaps we need to build a deep wall in the ground (10-15 ft. down) ... that's a lot of cement.

The Cement Lobby - At your Service

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

How long is that border? 2500 miles roughly? Yeah we did a good job there guys, you've only got 2130 miles left to go. Good job. They aren't doing a damn thing.

Exactly.

It's almost as big of a handjob as the $100 rebate for gas prices idea.

[Bronx33]

http://www.thepoliticalpitbull.com/videos/BuildingAWall101.wmv

Just ONE literate proposal.