NYT Editorial: False Victory at the Border

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/opinion/05sat1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Published: July 5, 2008

How secure is the border? The opinion of government optimists is that it is way secure. So secure you wouldn’t believe it — and not as secure as it will be.

That is the least the country should expect after all it has given up to lock the border down. Billions of dollars since the 1980s in fencing, razor wire, electronic sensors and vehicle barriers. A major deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops in 2006, to bolster the Border Patrol. The trashing of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and a host of environmental and land-management laws. (When Congress ordered the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, to build 670 miles of border fence by the end of this year, it decreed that no law or judge, no wild creature or endangered homeowner, should stop him. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to intervene in one of the many legal disputes the fence has provoked.)

The National Guard is leaving the border at the end of the month. And even though the border states want them to stay, the Bush administration is declaring victory. That’s how good things are down there.

Too bad, though, that the results that restrictionists predict from victory — an end to illegal immigration, the expulsion of illegal immigrants, the restoration of jobs to American workers, the protection of American culture and language from a Hispanic invasion — are not coming anytime soon. That’s because fixing immigration has very little to do with any of the hustle and bustle along the 2,000-mile line from San Diego to Brownsville, Tex.

FULL story at link.