I'm tired of listening to pathetic, worthless, weak responses to the problem of illegal immigration. Digger links to a story in the Washington Times about snipers in Mexico firing at our border patrol agents.
Snipers working as "lookouts" for drug traffickers and illegal-alien smugglers are targeting U.S. Border Patrol agents from vantage points across the U.S.-Mexico border.Within the past week, agents assigned to the Douglas station in Arizona's southeastern corner — one of the nation's busiest illegal-entry points — have been fired at on at least six occasions, according to federal authorities, and although none of the officers was injured, several reported near-misses.
The rule should be: if you shoot at America, you die. I don't care what side of any border you're on. Illegal immigrants flouting our laws with impunity is bad enough, but violence like this is simply intolerable. It's time for President Bush to quit worrying about complicated programs that may or may not work; it's time to put soldiers of our own on the border.
Where will we get the soldiers? We can move -- over the course of years -- our major training facilities down to the border and use those bases to establish a military presence between us and Mexico. The trainees can run patrols and get experience in a desert environment (which seems to be a common battleground for us these days).
A day or two before the elections in Iraq, Fox News was running a video taken from a drone. It showed 6 bad guys shooting off some kind of rocket, then running to their vehicle, driving a few blocks, then getting out and running into a house.
The good guys went to the house and arrested them.
I had heard from various folks that drones would be incredible at the border. They are cheap, easy to use, etc. Seems like this would be an amazing way to stop the influx.
Snipers are way, way over the line. Fortunately, there are plenty of technical solutions. Combine a gunfire detection system with something like this and you end up with sniper fire being reliably returned by mortar fire.
I'm guessing that the present strategy is to snipe as a form of covering fire, never intending to hit. That's likely to evolve into something nastier as the dollars involved get high enough.
In the end, we're going to have to thin out the pack of coyotes by offering some sort of legal work visa. Once you take away so much of their market, it gets harder for them to keep their police bribery up to snuff.