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The Annoyed Man wrote:Does the fence work? You tell me.....



I do like the idea of a fence, but as fickman and others have pointed out, it simply isn't practical in some places, and it is an insult to wildlife and natural beauty in others. And in the places where there IS a fence that you'd think would work, the Border Patrol are often overwhelmed trying to keep up with enforcing it, as the above video demonstrates. Adding insult to injury, the people who are caught breaking U.S. law don't seem to pay any real penalty for it, other than the narrow possibility of being deported. Most illegals seem to understand that if they can get in without being caught, they can just fade into the woodwork and enjoy the benefits of living here in obscurity (at least, compared to the "benefits" of living in poverty in Mexico), without having any burden other than that of lying low and avoiding the 'migra.....and still be better off than they were.

And, I will add this....... I totally get it. If I am a father to children without access to adequate food, shelter, medical care, or equal opportunity before the law, and I can look to the north and see a huge Walmart with a parking lot full of shiny cars, a big hospital, lots of construction projects, supermarkets, etc., etc., just 300-400 yards away on the other side of the river, I'm going to do whatever it takes to get my children across the border.....legally if I can, but legal or not, I'm going to get my children there.

We don't have a problem of inadequate laws. We have a problem of refusal to enforce those laws. I am going to quote verbatim from an email response I just sent a former member of this board not 15 minutes ago:

The last time I was in Europe was in 2005 when I went to France. Border entry was radically different than it had been the last time I was there in 1971. In 1971, my passport was stamped on entry into France, right at the airport outside of Paris. If you went from France to Germany, you had to stop at a frontier border post, where a german official checked your passport, which was stamped with an entry stamp. On reentering France, you had to stop at the same place, on the french side of the border, where a french official examined your passport, which was then stamped with an entry stamp. Upon reentering the U.S., your passport was stamped by american officials. Then came the EU……

When I traveled to France in 2005, they looked at my passport in the Airport upon arrival at Charles De Gaulle airport, but there was no stamp authorizing entry. I could have traveled anywhere around the EU without ever having my passport examined. And then (and I just now checked this to be sure) my passport was again examined but not stamped upon reentry into the US. I could have flown from France to Cyprus - an EU member nation off the coasts of both SYRIA and TURKEY, had lunch with recruiters for ISIS, flown back to France, spent a day getting to know my ISIS handler in Paris, and then flown home to the US without ever once having my passport given more than a cursory glance, without any entry stamps to track my whereabouts. However, even though I am an American citizen, because my passport says I was born in Morocco in 1952, my southern accent notwithstanding, I got dragged off to the side and given the 3rd degree (by an asian with a Texas accent, no less), while total foreigners wrapped in daishikis and hijabs were passed through the immigration checkpoint with no issues………

………by the same government that won’t enforce our border integrity.

When you add in that the democrat lapdog media complain that the fences are too high for the border-jumpers' safety, you have a completely untenable situation: http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/us/l ... als-safety

A mainstream Arizona newspaper is decrying the small section of the Arizona-Mexico border that has a 14-foot-high primary fence because it is too high for illegal immigrants to safely cross. The article, “Border Fence Jumpers Breaking Bones,” includes the claim that sections of the border with a 14-foot-high fence are “as tall as a two or three-story house” and tells the stories of several women who broke bones and were treated extensively to healthcare and surgeries at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. The writer never mentions any lives directly lost as a result of there not being a border fence in most sections, such as when Mexican nationals crossed into the U.S. and murdered father and husband Robert Rosas, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

The bottom line is this: NO nation in all of human history has ever retained its national integrity for very long once it stopped defending its borders. The easiest to dig up information on is the dissolution of the Roman Empire toward the end of the 4th century AD. Thomas Cahill's well known book "How the Irish Saved Civilization" details in Part 1, "THE END OF THE WORLD! How Rome Fell— and Why", how the Roman frontier along the Rhine river became irrelevant:

On the last, cold day of December in the dying year we count as 406, the river Rhine froze solid, providing the natural bridge that hundreds of thousands of hungry men, women, and children had been waiting for. They were the barbari— to the Romans an undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with— non-Romans. To themselves they were, presumably, something more, but as the illiterate leave few records, we can only surmise their opinion of themselves. Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 140-146). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[......and a few pages later.......]

Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure— the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening. Clues to the character of the Roman blindness are present in the scene along the frozen Rhine. The legionnaires on the Roman bank know that they have the upper hand, and that they always will have. Even though some are only half-civilized recruits recently settled on this side of the river, they are now Romans, inheritors of nearly twelve centuries of civilization,

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 195-196). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[......and a few pages later.......]

To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry. The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration— a year-in, year-out, raggle-taggle migration— and not an organized, armed assault. It had, in fact, been going on for centuries.

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 213-217). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[......and a few pages later.......]

When, at last, the hapless Germans make their charge across the bridge of ice, it is head-on, without forethought or strategy. With preposterous courage they teem across the Rhine in convulsive waves, their principal weapon their own desperation. We get a sense of their numbers, as well as their desperation, in a single casualty count: the Vandals alone are thought to have lost twenty thousand men (not counting women and children) at the crossing. Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea. From one perspective, at least, the Romans were overwhelmed by numbers— not just in this encounter but during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire. Sometimes the barbarians came in waves, though seldom as big as this one. More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought honest employment, as warriors who enlisted with the Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and sometimes raped and murdered.

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 220-227). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I could go on....but you get the drift. Every single time a nation - even a very powerful empire like Rome was - has failed to uphold the integrity of its borders, that nation/empire has eventually collapsed under the effect of that failure.

Now, I'm not saying whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I've already given up on vast swathes of the country, and I'm not sure they are worth defending. If they want that badly to destroy themselves, maybe we should let them.......so long as they don't infect the rest of us with their insanity. But absent the political will to enforce the immigration laws, with consequences for those who break them, no amount of fences, no matter how high, is going to prevent illegal aliens (or terrorists) from entering the country surreptitiously.

And if Trump thinks he can make that stick, he's delusional. If you believe him, you're a sucker.

This is why I am very pessimistic for the long term.