Saturday, March 15, 2008
Is security improving on the southern border?
If not by land, then by sea:
For years, smugglers have sought to bring people into the United States on boats in the Pacific Ocean, usually hiding among the bountiful pleasure craft off San Diego in the summer. People have also been caught trying to surf, use jet skis and swim in.
But the arrests this week, the authorities said, point to a troubling turn to the prospect of year-round smuggling; some 20 boats have been intercepted or found washed ashore on the San Diego County coast since August. Twenty-six people have been apprehended in those cases, but several more probably made it to their destinations: some have been observed by homeowners coming ashore and leaving their boats behind.
“We have never seen an increase like this in the off- or winter season,” said Michael Unzueta, the agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Mr. Unzueta said that more elaborate security on the land border, rife with cameras, sensors and steel fences, was pushing smugglers east into remote terrain and west into the ocean.
Border security is an odds game, so anything that we do to lower the odds of success will deter some people and channel other people to physically riskier points of ingress. The greater risk will mean that more Mexicans will actually die in the crossing. Deaths at sea will probably be more visible via the media than deaths in the desert, because there is a lot more reporters in San Diego and Los Angeles than in the Arizona desert. Here's the question: Do Americans have the fortitude to accept the consequences -- not the fault, but the consequences -- of aggressive interdiction at the border?
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Mar 15, 09:21:00 AM:
"Do Americans have the fortitude to accept the consequences -- not the fault, but the consequences -- of aggressive interdiction at the border?"
No
Next question
My community went from 95% white to 60% Mexican in 30 years while Washington did NOTHING significant to enforce the law except give amnesty to the law breakers. There will be another amnesty, followed by another wave of illegal immigration, followed by mandatory rationing of essential goods and services. What we see now in California is one of the great failures in democracy.
By , at
Sat Mar 15, 02:14:00 PM:
Do Americans have the fortitude...
No. And the reason is that the media will take a single case of someone being intercepted and put a face on it and turn it into a human interest story, rather than dealing with immigration at large and all of the consequences, since that's a more difficult story to tell.
By 
Donna B., at
Sat Mar 15, 06:05:00 PM:
No, Americans don't have that fortitude, mainly because the illegal immigrants don't yet pose a severe enough threat to us or our economy.
By Consul-At-Arms, at
Sun Mar 16, 03:38:00 AM:
You can't do just one thing, after all. Which is not a justification for doing nothing at all or simply giving up.
I've quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/03/re-is-security-improving-on-southern.html
By , at
Sun Mar 16, 05:11:00 PM:
More reasons why we need the MINUTEMAN PROJECT and to remove the LA RAZA radicals from america
