Border fence incomplete and incompetent

The fiasco continues on our Southern Border with Mexico. Failure to protect our borders, with the ATF and other agencies making them more dangerous, is both outrageous and heartbreaking. [See the following post.]

John Derbyshire expresses it in best in this part of his April 1st RadioDerb podcast.

Border fence incomplete. The most elementary function of a national government is to secure the nation's coasts and borders. This is apparently beyond the capabilities of our own federal government.

Here's Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, speaking of our southern border earlier this month at a conference on border issues, quote: "In spite of an effort to do more, there does not appear to be a plan in place that actually accomplishes the objectives of a secure border," end quote.

This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Just reflect on all the grandiose projects our government is involved in: the wars, the entitlements, the subsidies and food stamps and housing programs, the interstates, the regulation and lawsuits and tax-gathering. Take a stroll through central Washington D.C. and look up at all the huge building complexes housing untold thousands of federal employees beavering away to make sure Doctor X gets his Medicare reimbursement, Farmer Y gets his mohair subsidy, and Dictator Z gets his bribe so he won't misbehave.

Reflect on all that; and then consider that, by the Depatment of Homeland Security's own admission, only 129 miles of our 1,954-mile border with Mexico is secure.

That's one-fifteenth of the border, less than seven percent. And that's Mexico, a dysfunctional state whose own government is waging a war against drug gangs — a war that's cost 35,000 lives so far — and 40 percent of whose population would mnove to the U.S.A. if they could, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Remember SBInet? That was the so-called "virtual fence" — cameras, sensors, and other gadgets designed to detect illegal border crossing. SBInet was announced in September 2006, frozen in March last year, formally canceled in January this year. Cost: over a billion dollars.

Well, now there's a new plan for a new fence, also virtual. More gadgets, more cameras, more satellite surveillance … and more than a billion dollars this time, you can bet. However, the Government Accountability Office tells us it won't cover the whole border until at best 2021 and maybe not until 2026. That's assuming, of course, that this one isn't a total fiasco like SBInet.

Here's another quote, this one from Bradley Schreiber, vice president for the Applied Science Foundation for Homeland Security. Quote from him: "We don't know what the threat is because we haven't done a thorough assessment. We don't know what's coming across and we don't have a strategy to address it." End quote.

Bottom line here, folks: Our nation's borders are wide open, and the federal government is doing essentially nothing about it. In the Year of Our Lord 2011, after thirty years of uncontrolled illegal immigration. Meanwhile we've got 100,000 troops in Afghanistan trying to secure that country's border with Pakistan — two no-account pseudo-nations of no importance to the U.S.A. Or, to be a bit more precise, of importance to us only because we utterly fail to control who comes into our own country.