Tancredo, Wall-builder

Did you misplace your own copy?

I’m all for building a wall between Canada, especially if it will keep out those no-good Canadian academics who come here, while keeping in place their own protectionist measures, and take tenture track jobs away from good, hard working Americans like myself!

(Please note this is said jokingly, except for the protectionist measures part.)

Along the same line of thinking, don’t we need walls along our entire shoreline as well?

I haven’t got to that article yet, I’m still working on the Marie Claire roundtable on Bretton Woods II.

Yeah, they coulda kept my great-grandfather out and we’d be as contented as our Canadian O’Grady cousins up in Bastard Township (not to mention British Columbia).

For a touch of the good old days, my late mother-in-law came to Corpus Christi by ship in 1916, speaking only Swedish and Spanish, and they didn’t check on her “citizenship” until 1980 — after 50 years or so of voting.

The floor would help keep out mole men, too. That seems a good idea to me but I don’t see Tancredo supporting it. Jerk. Just because that’s how _his_ family came in he thinks it’s fine.

You’re all missing the point. Tancredo was suggesting that there should have been a wall along the northern border of Canada. That would have kept the immigrants out.

My copy’s not for reading. It’s for preserving in acid-free mylar in a long box in my closet, with all my other copies of Marie Claire, dating back to 1956.

John wins his own thread.

Instead of being silly about it, be practical. Individualized, wearable, personal walls. In times of trouble masses can convene at the appropriate geographical feature, shoulder to shoulder like the good old days. Living walls.

Sounds an excellent idea. It would make it more difficult for those libruls to flee the US and erode the tax base.

#18–Progressive thinking like that would have prevented the Columbine massacre.

Because i remember how people used to get over that wall that ran through Berlin, perhaps a more practical solution would be to make a pair of massive incisions through the Mexican and Canadian borders, attach the worlds largest steel cable to California, and tow the continental USA out into the middle of the Pacific ocean…

#19 — Which parts of “the issue” do you believe folks here are ignorant of? The part where not a single 9/11 hijacker entered the country illegally, or through Mexico? Pray tell, what wall would have prevented the 9/11 attacks?

And I thought the whole working mom-study of empires thread was bizarre.

Good stuff this week, if a little unsettling to the sleep deprived.

Personally, I always found that a wall of Protoss Photon Cannons three deep to be ideal for home(land) defense.

“Phased-plasma rifle in the forty watt range.”

“Hey, just what you see, pal.”

So, why not just build a wall around Tancredo? I think that would make just about eveyone happy.

Obviously we are missing the easiest solution.

Not a wall around the US to keep immigrants out, but a wall around Mexico and Canada to keep “immigrants” in.

Guantanamo, Mexico, Canado,

Terrorism! terrorists!! terrorism!! walls!! mexicans!! terrorism!! criminals!! our families!! hard working americans!! terrorism!! terrorists!! mexicans!! walls!! walls!!

A leaked copy of tancredo’s upcoming speech (with a few adjustments it would be similar to any other republican candidate’s, except perhaps Ron Paul’s)

34:You forgot “hard-working mexican terrorists!”, and by adjustments you probably mean adding a good smattering of God and Jesus to it.

See, no-one’s spotted that a wall only works in three dimensions. It’s those crafty time-travelling immigrants you’ve really got to watch out for. They could use a time-machine (devious foreign technology) to get into the States just before The Wall was built. I recommend, therefore, that US scientists invent a time-machine (Patriotic version with Stars and Stripes and tax breaks for rich travellers) to construct an EternaWall which continually loops itself back into existence. That should do it.

Dave Barry having a go at Tancredo

http://www.realcities.com/mld/miamiherald/16561492.htm

Building a wall is not the solution. The solution is a mile-wide moat filled with sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.

re: #39

We need roofs, roofs I tell you!!!

When the DDR built their wall, they claimed they were building it to keep out spies, sabateurs and terrorists. In actuality, it was built to imprison their citizens.
When the US builds “our” wall, “we” claim that we are building it to keep out illegal immigrants and terrorists. To leave the US requires a passport. As of today, in 2007, one only requires the passport to leave the US via plane or boat. As of 2008, even people fleeing the US via car or foot will need one. To board a plane, boat, or leave via car requires positive permission from the DHS.

Many people who have been detained/arrested at anti-bush or anti-wto events are being refused passports (either new or renewals), and so are becoming the nucleus of the future political prisoners of america. You voted for the jackbooted thug. Even if his jackboots are crocs.

Tancredo’s wall is meant to imprison Americans, just like the Berlin wall.

John is trying his best to point us toward the obvious solution, but we’re all missing it.

Mylar bags around every country.

Mylar bags around every country.

And sealed with… duct tape! This is the perfect assignment for our crack Dept. of Homeland Security.

#27: I’m pretty sure most of the people posting are only familiar with this issue to the extent that the MSM had fed them information, i.e., hardly at all.

First, the 911Hijackers entered due to weak visa rules and had questionable apps. Second, they obtained DriversLicenses because of the IllegalImmigration infrastructure. Third, not only were all or most IllegalAliens after having been here for a while, some were stopped for traffic violations and the DHS could have been notified and that might have stopped the plot.

And, HezbollahMembers have entered the U.S. illegally through Mexico, as have tens of thousands from SpecialInterest countries.

I’ve got a whole category just about this specific issue, so feel free to come by and get educated.

HomeGrownCrank!

And he has a WholeCategory about this SpecificIssue!

why doesn’t the government just hire Christo or whoever that guy is who wraps islands as “public art” and put him on the task?

Surely a wall between the US and Canada would be an impediment, no?*

_____________________

*This is assuming that the planned invasion of Canada is going ahead as scheduled.

Were our crack Dept. of Homeland Security up to the task of securing our borders, and keeping us safe from the threat of terrorism, it would equally be capable of keeping out the deadly scourge of illegal drugs, or at least those not grown locally.

We seem to be unable to conceal our revealed preference for both drugs and immigrants (“smokes & folks from Mexico”). Is this a bad thing?

Surely a Canadian wall could only hinder the one border-crossing approved by our Lord: the eventual northern migration of US climate change refugees.

Doggie doors, cut for the American tush?

Doesn’t this entire discussion of walls keeping people out (or in) miss the point? That decision has already been made: the US has a border and has immigration law. The US-Canadian border, mainly due to its length and the terrain, contains many spots at which that law is not always enforced. The reason to build a wall is to try to close those gaps and thus better enforce existing law.

Has Tancredo proposed changes to immigration law? If so, that’s what you need to concentrate on. If you believe that a wall would by itself make matters worse, then that can only be because you oppose current immigration law, in which case that’s what you need to concentrate on. This obsession with walls is like discussing the War on Drugs purely in terms of how fast the DEA’s cars are.

Maybe those people who think building a wall is going to make any difference should look at the UK – surrounded by water, which is far more effective than a wall at keeping people out, and thus having very few border crossing points to monitor (airports, the channel tunnel, and ports). Even with this, which is a situation that the US can never achieve, even with walls on every inch of its borders, the UK gets plenty of illegal immigrations getting through.

If you want to deal with illegal immigration you go to the source of the problem – ensure that all companies have to account very clearly for all their employees, and make it a serious offense (harsh enough fines to shut down most small companies, for instance) for them to employ people that do not have a legal right to be in the country. Of course, conversely this also means the government has to make it easy for companies to check up on these things, and thus they can only be blame if they have followed best practises in ensuring their employees are legal.

Of course because the US has basically encouraged illegal immigrants over the last two decades to fill gaps in the unskilled labour force during boom times to the point there are so many, any action the government takes will have to be measured, at least if the aim is to eject rather than give amnesty to previous illegals (and equally amnesty could be seen as a dangerous precedent for continued illegal immigration).

At something like 4-8% of the US population even if they could all be removed in a short time doing so would be damaging to the economy – it would lead to labour shortages, business failures, wages at the base of the economy would probably rise pushing inflation, house prices at the low end of the market in the south particularly would likely drop and this would probably spread to other areas, and higher up the market. It would seem very likely that a serious recession would be caused, and possibly a period of stagflation, especially given the continued weakness of the dollar and the large amount of deficit spending during a buoyant economic period that has passed recently. The cure could be worse than the disease. (Probably a bad phrase to use given Lou Dobbs recent anti-mexican screeds about leprosy, but I couldn’t think of a better one offhand)

Tancredo should’ve followed up with saying “and if you haven’t got your health, then you haven’t got anything.”

More seriously, people like myself, who think the level of net immigration to the US is a problem, can hang it up when so much of the support for this side of the issue comes from racists.

By the way, Arriana Huffington’s statement that no terrorists entered the US illegally so far, therefore it can’t happen that way in the future, is almost as embarrassing as Tancredo.

I largely agree with Stuart’s senible points above. But one thing that gets me with those who favor very harsh employer sanctions along with the means to make the effective (Mark Kleiman and sometimes Matt Yglesias on the left, at least sometimes) get’s me in Stuart’s remark: _If you want to deal with illegal immigration you go to the source of the problem – ensure that all companies have to account very clearly for all their employees, and make it a serious offense (harsh enough fines to shut down most small companies, for instance) for them to employ people that do not have a legal right to be in the country._

Do we really think it would be sensible to put, say, the Balkin resturant that I like to go to out of business because it payed a woman from Belarussia here on a student visa to work under the table as a waitress? Especially given that the other option _wasn’t_ hiring an American to do the job but rather the owners working longer hours themselves, or having their kids work? I don’t object to some versions of employer sanctions, especially for large-scale violations, but think they would have to be very carefully crafted to not be perverse. (I don’t mean to attribute the bad view to Stuart here, just to be clear.)

Matt, I agree as you say that its easy to go to far against the employers – when enforcing it the initial targets should be those employers that are based pretty much entirely on illegal labour and in those cases whatever the penalties are they should be significant enough to be shutting down those sorts of companies, or at least at that sort of level, as opposed to the sort of slapped wrist fines that considering their infrequency are often cheaper than hiring a legal worker.

The situation you suggest should be more likely to be issued a warning that they may face action if they continue employing illegally. Although an alternative might be just to allow people to work if on a valid guest/student visa – is there any good reason to stop people doing so? You would think if someone has a valid reason to be in the country, then they should be able to work if they want/need to without having to dodge the law. The limited duration (I presume) of such visas should implicitly act as the break on them being used as defacto permanent immigration alternatives I think?

Bush’s legacy is 3,500 dead. And he does not need another legacy against the American people.

don’t feed. Please.