Boarder Security

I have a couple of boarders living with me and they feel secure.

 

Good question. After centuries of hostility, the European nations have opened their borders and it's working fine. Their biggest "problem" is Gypsies (Rom) because virtually all Europeans despise Gypsies. But the Gypsies had already been there for centuries. All the wealthy nations hope to do is confine them to the poorer nations like Hungary and Romania.

The USA and Mexico, on the other hand, have one of the most cordial relationships of any two adjacent nations on earth. We are each other's biggest tourist destination, each other's largest immigrant population, one of each other's largest trading partners, and the Mexican people have always stood up for us in times of trouble, forming queues two blocks long around our consulates of people wanting to enlist in the U.S. Army after both Pearl Harbor and 9/11. We haven't been as kind to them, supporting an elitist government for more than a century while exploiting their labor and other resources for our own corporate profits and keeping their people dirt-poor and uneducated... yet they have never forgotten our help in overthrowing the French occupation of the country in the 1860s and they still love us unconditionally.

Trying to "secure" the Mexican border is both quixotic and ridiculous. The days of mojados ("wetbacks") swimming across the Rio Grande in the dark to illegally immigrate are long over, since Mexico is now a middle-class country and more people are moving back than coming here. To build a barbed-wire fence with machine gun turrets, reminiscent of the Iron Curtain, would be a sign to the entire world that we shoot people who love us! What the hell kind of image is that, for a civilized country to create? The Commies were at least shooting people who HATED them and were trying to run away!

But moreover, the USA has two incredibly long coastlines! It may be practical to defend a coastline against a military assault (or not--I think it's still possible to deliver a chemical weapon or a small "dirty bomb" to one of our commercial seaports on a cargo ship and bribe a few people to make sure it's not intercepted), but against tiny boats carrying Guatemalan refugees, or high-tech miniature submarines carrying bags of cocaine? How much of our shrinking GDP are we willing to piss away on this?

I don't have any children but some of you who do have done a rotten job of raising them. They're too lazy to get a good education (what moron decided that children should be able to decide to "skip school" and not be punished? They won't be able to do that when they're working!) so they can't get good jobs (and even if they could, they haven't been trained to put in full five-day weeks for months on end!), yet they're unwilling to take the jobs that uneducated people traditionally settle for. Hanging drywall, packing chickens... there are quite a few jobs in this country that are almost exclusively performed by immigrants. When the Redneck states recently began cracking down on undocumented immigrant labor, they ended up with thousands of unfinished houses and warehouses full of rotten chicken.

The fertility rate of the native-born population of this country has already dropped below replacement level (2.1 children per woman). The only thing that's propping up the Ponzi Scheme we call "Social Security" is immigration. The same is true of almost all of the Western nations. Ultra-xenophobic Japan doesn't admit a lot of immigrants and they make it almost impossible to become naturalized citizens, so their economy is in deep shit with their rapidly aging population.

Living in the Southwest most of my life, I've only been to Canada a few times, but yes it was fast and easy. The Mexican border was not much more difficult, although it was congested because of the volume of traffic between San Diego and Tijuana (both large cities) or El Paso and Juarez (ditto). I remember that going from Nogales, Arizona, to Nogales, Sonora, the car never even came to a complete stop. Coming back, our guys just asked how much liquor we had bought because there was a limit, I think it was one quart per person.

Getting into Mexico is slower but bearable. Getting out is a nightmare.

This is a website for discussing and learning science. The vast majority of the people who come here are highly intelligent and well-educated. Someone who can't bother to learn how to spell the word "border," which is in the headlines of half the newspapers in the country every day, comes across as a person who doesn't care what kind of impression he makes. People like that are going to go through life being the butt of jokes. That's the way society deals with them: Put a little energy into their spelling or be laughed at, their choice. They're still welcome and we'll still answer their questions, but we will still laugh at them until they get tired of it. It's not like having a twitch or a birthmark, something you can't fix.

How many times do you encounter the word "boarder," anyway? How would someone pick it up by accident, and then think it's common? We seldom use it anymore in the USA. They're "tenants," "roommates" or "housemates." That's a rather amazing error and we are simply going to laugh about it because it's also an amusing error. "Boarder security" makes a really good joke and Americans love to laugh!

There are civil engineers in the USA who avoid driving over our country's bridges because they are all many years beyond their projected safe lifespan. One even fell down recently! Before we start wasting money on constructing fences, let's fix our own infrastructure. Our highway, bridge, levee, port, rail, air, and energy systems are primitive and routinely fail from stress. We spend the same amount of money on infrastructure as we did fifty years ago. Chinese supersize transport ships have to dock in Canadian ports because ours can't handle them. Road traffic is gridlocked coming out of our port cities. Last year the electricity for millions of people in a gigantic area around Washington DC (the nation's capital!) was out for several days just because of a really strong wind! New Orleans was flooded because its levees were out of date. New York and New Jersey are still recovering from flooding, weeks later.

This is NOT the time to spend billions of dollars on a motherfucking fence, just to keep the racist Rednecks happy!

The reason Americans import drugs is that our shit-for-brains government has made it very difficult for them to buy these drugs from Americans. In the 1960s, an ounce of marijuana cost $10 (about $60 in today's money) because it was grown in the USA--and the money stayed in the American economy. The dealers even paid income tax because the IRS didn't care where the money came from, they just wanted their cut. Today we have to import it from Mexico so it costs six hundred dollars--and the money goes to drug cartels.

If there's one thing the American people should have learned from our own history, it's that the second-order effects of drug prohibition cause far more harm than the drugs themselves. My parents lived during the era of (alcohol) Prohibition: 1920-1933. (They were born in 1910 and 1911.) This is what they saw:

• You cannot stop people from buying something they really want.
• If they can't buy it from respectable businessmen, criminals will spring up to take over the business.
• Crime is a dangerous business so criminals charge more for their products than respectable businessmen.
• They bribe police, district attorneys, and officials all the way up the ladder, causing our entire government to become corrupt. It was commonly put this way: "We made the WCTU happy (the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the spearhead for Prohibition) by passing a law against liquor. And then we made everybody else happy by not enforcing it."
• Criminals have no conscience so they don't worry about the purity of safety or their products. Much "bootleg" liquor was contaminated with wood alcohol, which caused blindness and even death.
• Criminals can't take their disputes and complaints to the court system, so they have to resolve them their own way. This results in gunfights in the streets, and innocent people are killed. In the 1920s it happened in Chicago, where my parents lived. Today it's the entire country of Mexico--30,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug cartel violence. That's okay, because Americans don't give a damn about dead Mexicans. (See my comment above about the odd way we treat Mexicans, even though they love us dearly.)
• Children are recruited as runners by the criminals, because they're harder for the police to capture and they're not usually punished as harshly.
• Children see gangsters with fancy clothes and big cars, while their hard-working parents are barely making a living. This makes them want to go into the crime business instead of going to school.
• Americans are not a people who respect authority. Our country was founded by rebels who didn't want to be subject to the laws of a king. So when something becomes illegal, it acquires a cachet of being naughty or "cool." Children become attracted to it. My mother said the worst thing about Prohibition was that women started going to taverns for the first time ever.
• In addition, outlawing a product that so many people want further erodes what little respect we have for authority already. In the last poll only a tiny fraction of the American people approved of the job our government is doing.
• Because criminals charge higher prices for their drugs than shopkeepers, using the drugs becomes an expensive habit. This was not such a big problem with alcohol, but it's a tremendous problem with today's drugs. My grandfather sold Heroin (a Bayer trademark: it makes you feel like a hero) and cocaine in his drug store. The drugs were cheap and nobody had to commit crimes to support their habit.
• This is another point that is more relevant to our era than Prohibition: Drug-testing. The most popular drug in America is marijuana, and because of the chemistry, traces of are still visible in your urine a month later. If you snort cocaine or even shoot heroin on Friday night, and your boss demands that you take a drug test on Monday morning, you'll be clean. But marijuana will still be there for weeks. This has motivated many people to give up marijuana, one of the least dangerous drugs on earth, and go out searching for new drugs like methamphetamine. It won't show up in their urine Monday morning, but it will make the rest of their weekend miserable, and it is far more addictive. People are even just getting drunk instead of smoking pot, and studies in Montana after medical marijuana was legalized there indicate that stoned drivers are far safer than drunk drivers--something all of us old hippies already knew.

This is a classic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is usually stated, "You can never do just one thing." By making drugs illegal, you cause more problems, and worse problems, than you started with.

I too would rather not see heroin, meth and all the other "designer drugs" become so prevalent. The answer is to just let Americans have their damn marijuana. It's (arguably) safer than every other recreational drug on the planet. Certainly less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.