Our view illegal immigration: It will take more than fences .

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion...ial21_ST_N.htm



The Bush administration touted it as a smart, high-tech solution to one of the nation's most vexing problems: illegal immigration. A "virtual fence" of radar, sensors and towers equipped with night-vision cameras would feed real-time pictures of illegal intruders to a central control room. There, the Border Patrol could see the intruders, safely dispatch agents and apprehend illegal immigrants and smugglers.
But, like so many grand government schemes, the virtual fence fizzled. A week ago, the Obama administration put it quietly to rest.

OPPOSING VIEW: Embrace SBInet
Small wonder. Originally announced in 2006 as a $67 million project to be completed by the spring of 2007, "SBInet" finally went into operation nearly four years later along 53 miles of Arizona's porous border with Mexico. The Boeing project was hampered by bureaucracy, environmental reviews, construction delays, cost overruns, technology glitches and political wrangling. The usual stuff. Its ultimate price tag? Nearly $1 billion.

In an assessment of the project, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, said essentially that while the initial section works to apprehend intruders, the project is not "cost-effective" and would not be extended elsewhere. And, at $19 million a mile, who would argue?

Newspapers in the Southwest applauded Napolitano's move, as did the project's critics in Congress. But the decision to let the virtual fence strategy quietly die is no more a solution to the nation's immigration problems than was the decision to build it.

Over the past two decades, Congress has thrown billions of dollars, hundreds of miles of fencing, truckloads of fancy technology and ever-increasing numbers of border agents into a battle to seal the nation's 2,000-mile border with Mexico. And now Homeland Security promises to deploy more "proven" technology, from truck-mounted radar to unmanned aircraft, to cover the other 323 miles of the Arizona border for what the department touts as "less than $750 million."

So is the public getting its money's worth?

Hard to say. According to Mexican government figures, immigration to the U.S. is down 50% from 2006 to 2009. What's not clear is how much of that is the result of border enforcement and how much is because of economic factors. The old joke among experts in the field goes: "How do you stop illegal immigration? Have a depression." America came close.

The 850 miles of fencing approved by Congress in 2006 was part of a sensible overall strategy championed by the Bush administration — one that coupled border control with tough workplace enforcement to deter businesses from hiring immigrants illegally: temporary worker permits so employers could legally hire the labor they need, and a path to legality for migrants who stayed out of trouble and paid their taxes. A shortsighted Congress defeated comprehensive reform in 2007, leaving the nation with "enforcement-only" instead of an "enforcement-first" approach.

Secure borders and fences are an obvious part of any immigration strategy. But they don't work as the whole strategy. They don't deal with the millions of illegal immigrants already in the USA, or stop people who come here legally but overstay their visas, or create more good jobs in Mexico. Exchanging one billion-dollar boondoggle for $750 million worth of different technology doesn't change that reality.

This.

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This is straight up fact -> Undocumented immigrants will not disappear from US until they die of old age. When they die, their children who were born here will grow up here as citizens.

"There is no way in hell 20 mil undocumented immigrants will go back."

Once we accept this fact, we can start making policies from here.

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they would leave if there's war, concentration camps, teabaggers "hunting" in other words:

Sarah Palin 2012 Y'all!

Just the thought of Sarah Palin even winning the primary for the GOP makes me laugh, she needs to stop smoking whatever she is smoking and get off that pony.

uuummm.. Sarrrahhhhh....