An 11 foot ladder for a 10 foot fence

So the Federal Government is going to violate the law in order to build their "Tortilla Curtain" on the U.S/Mexico border.

The sad thing is that it's all for naught except as a PR exercise. As the governor of Arizona put it, "build a 10 foot fence, and people will build 11 foot ladders." People in Mexico are starving to death right now -- literally starving to death, people. First we drove all the corn farmers in Mexico out of business by dumping cheap corn on them under NAFTA. Then we drove the price of corn sky-high with the ethanol fuel boondoggle so that the remaining Mexicans can't afford to buy corn anymore. And starving people will do whatever it takes to go where there's food and jobs. Whatever it takes. Regardless of what barriers are in the way.

Folks, we can't stop Haitians and Cubans from crossing a hundred miles of shark-infested ocean to wade ashore. We expect a ten foot fence on a 1969-mile long border to stop desperate people? Get real. People who are desperate, who are starving, will come regardless of how tall a fence we build The only way to stop them -- the *only* way -- is to station sufficient soldiers on the border to kill them before they can cross. Figuring that the average soldier is accurate to about 100 yards, there are 1969 miles of border, there is 1760 yards per miles thus 3465440 yards of border, divide by 100, that means we need 34655 soldiers on the border. But wait! We need four shifts of them. That's 138620 soldiers. And not just any soldiers. Soldiers capable of shooting an unarmed man holding a baby in his arms. Soldiers capable of shooting an unarmed woman leading her daughter by the arm. Soldiers capable of shooting an unarmed eight year old girl walking towards the border. Maybe we can find these soldiers in the crips and bloods and nortenos and surenos but we sure aren't going to find them in any place that decent moral people live.

And even if we do find 140,000 psychopaths willing to murder unarmed women and children, it won't stop them from coming. People who are dying don't care whether they die from starvation or die from bullets. They will come, anyhow. And sometimes there will be so many of them rushing a particular place in the border that the solder guarding that stretch of border gets overwhelmed and some get through. Then they're in America, and they disappear into the vast Hispanic population of America, and they're "illegals", with no rights and no recourse if asked to work under unsafe working conditions, such as, say, sandblasting without a respirator (which causes silicosis -- an especially horrible way to die, because your lungs basically turn into concrete). So employers in dangerous trades, such as the construction trades, prefer to hire them because, well, they have no legal rights. So Americans get displaced in these trades because Americans can drop the dime to OSHA and get employers fined, while illegals... (shrug). They're slaves. And free men can't compete with slaves.

So what to do? Well, obviously there's two parts here:

1. Eliminate the conditions that lead to the Mexicans wanting to come here in the first place. Let's face it, the Mexicans wouldn't come here if Mexico was a great place to work and live. Fuck Iraq. Iraq doesn't affect anything about America or Americans. Mexico... we share a fucking 2000 mile border with these folks, man. We have interests there, interests beyond the fact that they're our biggest oil supplier. Thus far our rulers haven't cared that their rulers are taking all that oil wealth and siphoning it off to numbered accounts in the Caymans. But that's had dire consequences for the Mexican people -- and they're gonna do whatever it takes to survive. Even if it takes storming the Tortilla Curtain and dying by the thousands so that other thousands can live. As for the notion that we shouldn't muck around in Mexican politics and economy... crap, we can't not muck around. In fact, we do muck around, usually to their detriment -- NAFTA, anybody? We might as well muck around in a way that keeps the Mexicans in Mexico, rather than storming our own borders.

2. Scrap the whole notion of "illegals" when it comes to Mexican citizens. If they're a citizen of Mexico, they have an automatic work permit and civil rights, including the right to sue employers who don't pay minimum wage or who force them to work unsafe conditions. My bet is that American employers would rather hire Americans than Mexicans if both are competing on an equal basis -- Americans speak the language, and despite the propaganda to the contrary, statistics show that Americans are the hardest-working people on the planet. For those who say the contrary, all I can say to you is this -- why do you think Americans are inferior to Mexicans? Are you really saying that Americans can't out-compete Mexicans, if both are on an equal basis? Anyhow, if Mexicans can't get jobs because Americans have taken back those jobs, and if Mexico is a good place to live again, where do you think those Mexicans will go? Yeppers, right back to Mexico!

But this whole notion of putting up a Tortilla Curtain across a 2000 mile border... it won't work. Short of putting major military formations on the border to murder unarmed men, women, and children guilty of nothing other than starving to death because of their own government's near-genocidal policies, you simply won't stop the Mexicans from coming, and as long as the Mexicans are illegal and thus slaves once they get here, employers will prefer employing Mexicans rather than Americans. And all the tough talk about a "border wall" and "mines" and crap won't make a damned bit of difference there. Facts is facts, and this is a problem that has no easy solution. The "Tortilla Curtain" makes a nice soundbites, but soundbites are a terrible method for solving complex problems. Not that this stops our society from basically being run by government-via-soundbite, sigh...

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

Cross-posted at the Medley