A Brief History…

The topic of illegal immigrants is a hot one since the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill was debated last year. This piece in American Thinker states the issues fairly although I disagree on a couple of points.Here is the story of the Clinton approach.  That happens to be about the Canadian border but, remember, the last two terrorist attempts, The Millennium Bomber and Jose Padilla, both came from Canada.What about the Mexican border? The numbers crossing are controversial.As of 2003, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services put the number at 7 million. Since then, United States immigration officials have said the number has grown by as much as 500,000 a year.  That would suggest 500,000 cross per year. However, in a letter to a constituent in 2004, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona wrote: “According to the US Border Patrol apprehension statistics, almost four million people crossed our borders illegally in 2002.”Which is it ? I suggest that both numbers are right and that contributes to a solution. In the Cheech and Chong movie , “Up in Smoke,” there was a funny scene in which Mexican residents of East LA were planning to attend a wedding in Mexico. The problem was transportation for 30 or so family members who wanted to attend the wedding but couldn’t afford a bus ticket. Someone called the INS and reported 30 illegal aliens in East LA. The Border patrol picked them all up in a bus and dropped them off in Tijuana. After the wedding, they all snuck back into the US and returned home to East LA. Problem solved.The obvious answer to the question of how many are crossing from Mexico is twofold. About four million per year cross but only 500,000 stay. The rest go back and forth. Building and enforcing a border fence will dramatically slow the problem and may even go a long way to solution. If the fence were there and were enforced, the word would spread rapidly among the illegal community. Since the recent discussion of stepped up enforcement, the number of illegals coming in has dropped.  And some have even returned to Mexico.The problem is easier to solve than amnesty advocates would have you believe. Enforce the law and a large part of the problem would go away. Deportation is a bogeyman used by amnesty advocates to muddy the water. Nobody is going to deport 12 million people. Some of them may deport themselves. Eventually, when we have control of the border, we can consider what to do with those who are living here illegally but who have had long term commitments to the community, like homes and children.There is a basic rule of holes. The first step in fixing it is to stop digging it deeper.

UPDATE: Despite the expertise of Kevin Drum’s commenters, the New York Times agrees that the encounter was probably an Iranian strategic exercise. The 2002 War Games in the Gulf used similar, although more complex, tectics to defeat a US fleet. The Gulf is a very confined area for fleet activity. New doctrine and, perhaps, even new ship designs may be necessary for these symmetric tactics. The Army and Marine Corps have adjusted tactics in Iraq. The Navy may need new concepts and soon. The Air Force is facing what may be the end of the manned aircraft era.

According to Kevin Drum’s commenters, this is just another BushCheney conspiracy to fool the Senate into going to war. This is BDS run amok. Even for them this is silly. Some liberals (A term I don’t use often), aren’t buying the Glenn Greenwald line.

The Navy has adopted new measures recommended by the DoD commission on the Cole bombing. The lefties aren’t interested in that incident because it happened on Clinton’s watch.

“The investigation clearly shows that the commanding officer of Cole did not have the specific intelligence, focused training,appropriate equipment or on-scene security support to effectively prevent or deter such a determined, preplanned assault on his ship,” Clark said. “In short, the system – all of us – did not equip this Skipper for success in the environment he encountered in Aden harbor that fateful day.”

Austin Bay seems to agree with me that this was probably a probe of the new “close-in” defenses that have been prepared since the Cole incident. But don’t tell that to the BDS lunatics over at Kevin Drum’s blog. They are sure it is all a Bush plot.