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I understand that area of parkland has been closed since 2006. A sensible security measure IMO.

sjfcontrol wrote:4 miles per hour is a VERY brisk walk -- almost a jog. Probably not something most people would want to do for a solid 20 hours straight.

With a HUGE pack of contraband on your back as seen in the videos.

baldeagle wrote:Well trained squads can cover 80 miles in a (long) day easy if they don't encounter resistance. (Which is sort of the point, isn't it?)

You can walk a mile in fifteen minutes at a leisurely pace, so covering 80 miles would only take two ten hour days for a normal person. Even with breaks, an average person could walk that distance in two sunup to sundown days and still get a good meal and plenty of rest at night.

But if the surveillance of the border area (aerial or otherwise) is continuous or nearly so (every few hours?), 20 hr still seems like a good window of opportunity to respond by helicopter.

suthdj wrote: Another camera in the air or otherwise wil not do anything but take pictures, unless we arm it with some .50 cals or rocket launchers then maybe it will do some good.

I was thinking of many more than one more camera in the air. Also I was thinking that when the cameras in the air detect humans crossing the border, a Blackhawk helicopter or two with men and guns could be quickly dispatched to intercept them. If I understood the reports correctly, armed drug runners were crossing up to 80 miles of desert on foot. That must take quite a while (days) and would seem to allow plenty of time to deploy a response. My best guess would be that like the fence such an idea is not currently considered cost-effective. Or maybe we have the resources but they are mostly deployed overseas at present?

What I find surprising is that there isn't a sufficient fleet of manned aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to continuously monitor the borders. Maybe most of them are in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threats coming across the US borders are not considered of sufficient importance to bring some of them back home?

SwimFan85 wrote:Mexico has a lot of narco-terrorism, but there is a mountain of evidence that Middle Eastern illegals are also coming in through Mexico.

Exactly! But the Border Patrol is kept busy by the much larger number of crossings by economic migrants. If I was a drug runner or terrorist, I would be very grateful that the Border Patrol is kept distracted in this way.

Most of the posts seem to me to have been way off-topic. The original post was about nationals of countries that sponsor terror against the USA coming in over the border.

baldeagle wrote:Duns, you are entitled to your opinion, but my research indicates that no one has been able to determine the authenticity of the sign one way or the other.

So what about the authenticity of this one? Same photo, flipped horizontally, and different text on the sign.

AndyC wrote:They're misunderstood folks who just want a fair shake...

The above photo has been digitally modified to change the text on the sign held by the protester. Look at the enlargement below that I made in Photoshop. See how each line of text has noise around it? See how the length of each noisy area varies with the length of the text? I hope you can see the noise. I can see it on my screen but I have a very hi-res screen. This is proof positive that those inflammatory words were added in Photoshop or similar program. The sicko who wanted to stir up hatred didn't have the digital editing skills to blend the noise in to disguise his edits. Should be obvious it's a hoax anyway since no immigrant is going to make a demand like "jobs - no taxes" or publicly threaten to shoot police in Arizona.

It's easy to react to reports of people entering illegally across the TX border by demanding a 1,952-mile long fence along the entire border. Easy to react that way if someone else is paying for it. Those who make decisions about national security need to consider all the security threats, all the potential mitigating measures against each threat, and the costs and benefits of every potential mitigating measure. In other words, rational decision-making requires a huge, integrated, risk analysis. The border crossings are just one threat and the fence is just one possible mitigating measure. Comprehensive analysis is needed to ensure that resources are focused where they are most needed. I am sure that to some extent that analysis has been done and that is why we don't see government rushing to build the fence.

When weighing the costs and benefits of security measures, I think we need to make a distinction between economic migrants and terrorists. The former come in large numbers but are relatively harmless. The latter are potentially deadly but come in very small numbers.

Is the cost of the fence justified to keep out economic migrants? Many people would argue that we need those migrants and we should be letting them in not shutting them out.

I would not expect a fence to be effective against terrorists. If they have clean records, they will just fly in as visitors. If they are on a watch list, they might sneak in over the Rio Grande at the present time. Build the fence and those terrorists will probably just charter a small plane to fly them in over the fence or take a boat around the coast. It would be a waste of money to build a fence impregnable to terrorists if they can just go around it or over it.