The Feld-Blog

Well... I was gone for the weekend... hope you weren't too disappointed, but now I'm back to fill you in on the absurdity of that institution we call our government.

So tonight President Bush is scheduled to announce that he will send about 10,000 troops to the US-Mexico Border. But deploying troops to secure our borders will likely only hurt the US immigration situation. It strains an already overstretched, underpaid, overworked military; it aggravates US-Mexican relations; and it doesn't really help the border patrol do their job.

Military force is a very specific kind of tool. You wouldn't want your surgeon to perform open heart surgery on you with an ax, and trying to control immigration flows with the national guard is no better. Many situations call for military force, but this isn't one of them. Our military is trained to kill. That is simply what they do. They carry guns and when charged with defending a city, a building or anything, they shoot at the people they are defending against. Now I know there are a lot of people in this country who don't like illegal immigration, but shooting people trying to cross the border seeking a better life seems terribly excessive.

Border Patrol are trained in the delicate art of securing our borders - how to spot people trying to cross and how to scoop them up, arrest them, and send them back without actually harming them. The military simply isn't trained for this task. Maybe they could be, but at the moment they aren't. It is bad policy to send American armed forces to do a job they don't know how to do. The whole country roared when they found out Bush had appointed an Arabian-horse trainer to direct FEMA. It's no different now. 'Brownie' wasn't trained to clean up after hurricanes and look what happened. Our military isn't trained to control immigration, I shudder to think what Bush wants them to do.

And finally, we don't have any troops to spare. Since the military cant really do anything to help the border patrol, I can only assume that this is some kind of political game, but if so, its a dangerous game to play with the few troops we have left to defend our own country. For more on this see my post: "Victims at Home, Victims Abroad."

Sometimes, political situations require a scalpel, not a hammer. There is no cosmetic solution to America's immigration problem. We need to train more border security agents, and we need to have a meaningful discussion with Mexico, California and Texas (primarily) about what to do about the illegal immigrants already here. Bush seems to think that throwing troops at any situation will solve it. This philosophy has already inspired most of the world to hate America. Are we really going to try to bolster those statistics?