Honestly sometimes I think land mines and soldiers with machine guns would be the best solution. If you put up warning signs and someone chose to cross anyway, turn them into Swiss cheese. I think that would be an effective deterrent, better than anything else. As long as we have such a porous border people can just walk over it’s also a matter of national security. It would be too easy for some Muslim radicals to learn Spanish and disguise themselves as illegal immigrants and come right over the border and wreak havoc. The only downside I could see is shooting innocent children which is not ok with me, and unfortunately the illegal immigrants would prob not care enough about the danger and drag their children along anyway.
Drug cartels aren’t capitalism?!
Then why does that never happen?
No, no, he meant they’re bringing therapists!
We can’t be tolerating that, of course. They’re all old-fashioned unreconstructed Freudians, them Meskins are, they’ll do more harm than good.
BrainGlutton:
I don’t know why did 9/11 not happen sooner. Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean something like this can’t or never will happen. Regardless a secure border is something that needs to happen for multiple reasons among which national security is one.
Well, the perps didn’t get in here across the southern border, nor by impersonating Mexicans.
It doesn’t have to be terrorists, more than enough people have already been killed or had their lives negatively affected by illegal immigrants that should not have been here in the first place and wouldn’t be if we had secure borders. The United States government has a responsibility to protect it’s citizens and their interests before those from other countries that brazenly break our laws.
The fact that the 9/11 hijackers didn’t come across the U.S.-Mexican border is irrelevant and just reinforces that we need to better monitor the people coming into our country from all different areas. We need to have a better way to monitor and track people that are even here on Visas such as the 9/11 terrorists. The Mexican border is a gaping hole in our National Security and there have even been reports of ISIS mentioning it in social media postings as a viable way to enter the country in order to conduct a terrorist attack. Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t, but even if it never occurs it’s just one aspect of why the border needs to be secured.
I’m not for blanket amnesty of illegal aliens but neither am I for kicking all of them out of the country which would probably be impossible and undesirable anyway, there needs to be a pragmatic middle-of-road solution but I believe we need to secure our borders before we can grant any amnesty or path to citizenship for Certain illegal immigrants that meet certain criteria. If we go ahead and move forward with this without securing the border it’s a major incentive and open invitation for Mexicans to continue spilling into our country until some kind of crisis happens.
Wait, aren’t you one of those who trot out that Bush was responsible for 9/11 because it happened on his watch? Assuming so, shouldn’t he have taken steps to stop it BEFORE it happened? Same logic here. It seems quite logical that Muslim terrorist scum will try to enter the U.S. via our porous southern border, so shouldn’t we protect against that now. Or are you of the mind that we should wait and see if it will actually happen, and if it does, then act and protect against it?
No, because it was his watch and he was warned.
First of all, there’s no way that’s a true number. The government doesn’t track how many illegals are in various State and Federal prisons so there’s no way to know the real number. Secondly, even if it was true, it represents a huge problem! That’s not a good number. You’re saying that 11 million people are responsible for 8% of the people in prison in the US! That’s not a good thing.
If your numbers are correct, then you are saying group that makes up about 3% of the population, which shouldn’t even be here at all, is more than twice as likely to end up in prison as the native population. That’s hardly an argument that they aren’t a problem.
Well, you’ve now been warned that there’s nothing stopping Islamist Extremists from coming in through our southern border along with the other illegal immigrants and attacking us within the US.
I really hope I never have to search back for this post for an “I told you so”. I predict I will, though.
There’s also nothing stopping Islamist Extremists from arriving on a legitimate student or work visa, because in our country, we have freedom of religion, and we don’t (correctly, IMHO) consider religion for students or workers. There’s also nothing stopping Islamist Extremists from being born in the United States. We have whole populations of young people growing up in poverty, many experiencing racial discrimination. Islamist Extremism might appeal to these young men or women. There’s 350+ million Americans: if you have one-in-a-million crazy, you have 350 problem people.
In other words, closing off the border doesn’t really solve the problem that concerns you. It might help keep extremists out, but it also helps fuel people’s anger at the US.
Like many other deluded liberals, I keep thinking the concern is to identify what causes Extremism (ignorance, lack of enfranchisement, lack of meaningful community engagement, lack of economic opportunity). Address those issues, and the other problems melt away. But people are greedy, and think in the short term.
You didn’t read what he quoted very well. That crime number includes both legal and illegal immigrants, or more than 50 million people. So 17% of the total population makes up 8% of the prison population; or, in other words, immigrants are far more law-abiding overall than people born in the US.
I have no problem believing that legal immigrants are. That statistic does not tell us anything specifically about illegal immigrants.
True. I was merely correcting Debaser’s misreading. I’m not sure what to take from that statistic either.
Immigration and Crime - a study demonstrating just how incomplete and contradictory the data on immigrant and illegal immigrant criminality is.
An excerpt:
“A comparison of the 2000 census and government estimates shows how difficult it is to draw conclusions about immigrant criminality. Results from the 2000 census imply that only about 4 percent of prisoners in jails and prisons are immigrants (legal and illegal), but the new ICE estimates show it is 20 percent. What’s more, an audit by an outside firm of eight million inmate records paid for by ICE found that about 22 percent of inmates are immigrants. But questions remain regarding all of these numbers.”
… conclusion:
“In conclusion, we find that it would be a mistake to assume that immigrants as a group are more prone to crime than other groups, or that they should be viewed with more suspicion than others. Even though immigrant incarceration rates are high in some populations, there is no clear evidence that immigrants commit crimes at higher or lower rates than others. Nevertheless, it also would be a mistake to conclude that immigrant crime is insignificant or that offenders’ immigration status is irrelevant in local policing. The newer information available as a result of better screening of the incarcerated population suggests that, in many parts of the country, immigrants are responsible for a significant share of crime. This indicates that there are legitimate public safety reasons for local law enforcement agencies to determine the immigration status of offenders and to work with federal immigration authorities.”
TL;DR - even for immigrant (and not just illegal immigrant) population it is hard to tell what the criminal rates are. Even more so for illegal immigrants. The data is fragmentary and hard to obtain.
Actually, it’s a pretty even handed analysis. Not what one expects from CIS.
Ha. The old ignore the message attack the messenger trick. And both your cites point to the same source as to why CIS is so bad: The Southern Poverty Law Center, which ironically, is one of the most biased, most wacky organizations to exist.
But as long as it saves you from responding to the facts represented, thank goodness for the good old SPLC, right?