Letter from Terris N. Teale
July 1, 2010
I sympathize with the situation in which Ms. Tucker found herself at the border checkpoint in May. But I believe she expended too much effort and too many words writing about why she was detained rather than about where it happened. If she takes the time to think about some of the efforts that have been made to commit terrorist acts upon the United States, why would she think the detention of a traveler emitting radiation from their person or vehicle would not be detained? And, even though the request for documentation of her medical procedure, and the length of time they detained her seems unreasonable, consider the issue from the point of view of the folks whose job it is to identify possible terrorist perpetrators. If she were they, would she disregard a person emitting radiation? I imagine she would not. She would have reacted in much the same manner the checkpoint agents did. So let’s get on with what her letter likely was really all about: Protecting the Border at the Border.
Our border with Mexico is 1,969 miles long. Some folks in our federal and state governments thought it would be a good idea to build an impenetrable fence along the entire length of the border. Are you for or against that? I suspect you are against it. Some others, or maybe the same ones, thought it would be a good idea to build some towers at some point inside the border to detect, and help in the apprehension of, ILLEGALS (I’ll use that word here instead of another editorial writer [Ms. Bushmaker’s] “workers, visitors or travelers”). Are you for that or against it?
And, just as an aside, did you and others in your part of the country know that the folks who put up those towers also spent great heaps of your tax dollars for folks to drive their fancy trucks down there from Tucson every day to post a security guard at each of the towers? But I think all that has been scrapped now, or is about to be. For some reason, the system seemed unable to distinguish between ILLEGAL and JAVALINA.
So, we don’t want our government to build a fence, right? We don’t like security towers in our back yards, right? And we don’t want to be stopped at checkpoints inside the border, right? Because, if those things happen, we then say that our politicians and law makers are committing terrorist acts upon us because they “violate the rights of American citizens without the worry of any repercussions, right? We just want the ILLEGALS stopped at the border, right? And we want that to happen 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year, right?
All that would take is one, or maybe even two, border agents for every, let’s say, 300 yards of border. And, since we wouldn’t want any of them working overtime, we’d have to have three shifts a day, right? And let’s not forget all the fancy night operations equipment that would be needed, right?
Just to put the required staffing in perspective, there are 1760 yards in a mile, right? So that’s, um, 5.87 agents per mile (if we just have one agent every 300 yards – and one likely isn’t enough). And 5.87 multiplied by 1969 miles is 11,558 agents on each of three shifts, right? And these agents are needed 365.25 days a year, so we’d need 101,317,428 (that’s 101.3 million) labor hours to cover 24 hours, 365.25 days each year. Using an average annual hours worked by these agents of 1,920 (after vacation and sick leave), that would require 52,769 agents. And how much money might it cost to maintain an agent for a year? My estimate is around $50,000 including all their benefits. That equates to over $2.6 billion, each and every year. And that doesn’t include all the support personnel required to maintain a force this large. You could probably tack on another 10,000 or more support personnel. And that would be another $500 million. Is it worth $3.1 billion to stop the ILLEGALS at the border? I don’t know; maybe it is.
Then, what would you propose be the duties of each of these nearly 53,000 agents? Should the agents shoot the ILLEGALS they see? I suspect that shooting a few would make the next group think twice, or even three times, about whether they want to come to the United States. Should the agents run the maximum 150 yards thru the desert and hope they get to the ILLEGALS before they disappear into the next arroyo? And, while they make this run, don’t they have to hope that 5 more ILLEGALS don’t cross while the one is being chased down? Should the agents have helicopters every mile or so to drop a net on the ILLEGALS? Maybe snares should be placed every few yards in the hope of keeping the ILLEGALS in one place until the agent(s) arrest them?
And what about the Canadian border, eh?
For crying out loud! What it sounds like to me is that we just want to beef about what we don’t like, but we don’t really have any sensible ideas to replace what we don’t like. Except maybe to make citizens of all the ILLEGALS already in the country. And then implement a “guest worker” policy for those who would otherwise be the new wave of ILLEGALS. I’ll admit that these might be good ideas if it was feasible to make them happen. But, if the government put a system into effect to make that happen, it would take another huge bunch of federal and/or state employees to oversee and administer it. And, if that happened, those who are opposed to the steps being taken now would beef and moan about all the tax money being spent on that solution.
So, what do you think now? What’s the answer?
Terris N. Teale
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