If you shut off the government benefits to illegal immigrants 90% of them would self deport. Cross border incursions would plummet.
Why spend hundreds of millions on security when you can save billions and get the same results.
The state of Massachusetts alone spend over $1 billion a year in state taxpayer dollars on benefits for illegal immigrants.
Multiple branches of my family immigrated to the US going back to the 1600s. Not one of them got a welfare check to meet them. Beyond a medical quarantine on Ellis Island or at one of a dozen other points of entry, not one of them got free health care when them arrived.
They came here to work. They came here for the opportunity to succeed. Many of them did well with no government aid.
Fraternal organizations formed by immigrants helped later immigrants. Interestingly when this was the way things worked poverty in the US was lower than it is today. With the emergence of the federal welfare state many of those organizations have seen declining membership as people became dependent on the government. Not themselves.
The result has been increased poverty and longer lasting poverty for a growing number of new immigrants.
I say we go for the better fix for border security and society. Cut off the welfare state mentality.
With our once great nation now a debtor nation running massive deficits at all levels of government we cannot afford to pay people to come here.
That money should be going to the people who pay the bills. The hard working US taxpayer.
The U.S. government’s plan to lay sensors across the Mexico-U.S. border has been stopped yet again due to technical flaws.
First reported by Wired, the Customs and Border Protection Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition’s (OTIA) original filing in 2011 for the intent to install unattended ground and image sensors (UGS) has now been updated with a cancellation notice.
The business solicitation, submitted by the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection Office, documents the use of UGS to help “track, identify, and classify illegal incursions,” therefore saving border agents time and energy.
However, the notification now reads that the unattended ground and imaging sensor technology plan has been cancelled. In addition, “OTIA is not planning to release a solicitation for this specific requirement in the near future.”
Why? Wired reports that the reason for the cancellation — or delay, as it may be — is that the sensor technology has both bandwidth and frequency issues that haven’t yet been ironed out. Jenny Burke, a public affairs officer with CBP, told the publication that they hope to replace over 12,000 current, ageing sensors within the next six to nine months, but will not be able to install new UGS technology quite yet. Burke commented:
“We’ve determined that we need to resolve issues with saturated radio frequencies, limited bandwidth and system integration with the existing CBP infrastructure.”
It may be that further delays in replacing old, damaged sensors means a tougher job for border patrol agents, but there is no point replacing the old system with sensors that do not fix another urgent issue — that of false alarms. According to a report from the DHS Inspector General, only four percent of alerts (.pdf) are actually caused by illegal entrants, and the rest are false alarms. In addition, last year, a border agent was killed when a false alarm caused two agents to open fire on each other in the dark.
(via Wired)
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