More Border Patrol agents not enough

AP/Houston Chronicle:

The Border Patrol is bigger than ever, but South Texas ranch manager Bill Hellen says he still sees more illegal immigrants than ever.

When the Border Patrol put up a new checkpoint along the highway, he said illegal immigrants simply slashed his cattle fences and sneaked through his ranch.

And he doesn't see that changing any time soon, even with President Bush's promise of 6,000 new agents along the border.

"All the ranchers surrounding the checkpoint say the same thing," he said. "It's just a constant strain of illegal aliens on our pastures."

Many experts and critics agree with Hellen that building up the Border Patrol hasn't done much good. Border Patrol has doubled in size between 1995 and 2005 to 11,500 agents.

"What we find pretty consistently is that the number of agents just does not seem to be related to the number of apprehensions that they make," said Linda Roberge, senior research fellow at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University who studies immigration. "The flood, it may go up and it may go down, but there's always more that get through than get caught."

...

Reyes, chief of two Border Patrol sectors and architect of an immigrant crackdown in El Paso in 1994, said that in addition to adding agents there must be penalties for employers who hire immigrants.

"It's all smoke and mirrors," he said. "If the job is there, (the immigrants) will find a way to come."

A bill passed by the Senate on Thursday calls for an electronic system for employee verification to hold employers accountable for hiring decisions and calls for maximum fines of $20,000 for each worker and possible jail time for repeat offenders.

John Keeley, spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, wondered why there was no call to dramatically increase the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel at job sites in the interior United States.

"Border resources can't be the exclusive focus of Congress or the administration," he said. "The magnet for illegal immigration in the United States is the widespread availability of jobs."

ICE's enforcement force for the entire nation outside the border areas number about 200, he said, and Bush's 2007 budget calls for 200 more. Keeley said that was laughable considering the New York City police force numbers about 36,000.

...

The reason they keep coming is because there is no consequence if they are caught other than the inconvience of having to start over if sent back. There is also little consequence for employers hiring those here illegally. Without consequence there is no reason to stop the illegal migration.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more