Though I've always preferred: Qui custodes custodies
Who watches the watchmen?
So who makes sure the news media is really reporting the “news”?
May 2006 Archives
Well, illegal immigration has been in the news a lot lately. I’ve made a careful study of the immigration issue, and I’ve decided that the problem is not Mexico, the Immigrants, Osama Bin Laden, Arizona, California, New Mexico, or Texas.
No, the problem is the other 46 idiots, namely all the non-border states. Sorry North Dakota, your border with Canada doesn’t count; we’re not overly worried about the Canadians sneaking across the border to get away from socialized medicine. Sure it happens, but we’re not worried about it.
No matter what you think about Bush, Napolitano, Schwarzenegger, Perry, or Richardson they all end up coming to the same conclusion: Guest Workers. When you can get the governors of 4 states to agree, that’s probably the solution. You may not like it, but it’s probably the answer.
Really though, most of us in border states agree. Yet the other 46 states keep arguing with us. That’s because they suffer from a number of delusions. The first delusion that these people seem to suffer is that we can close the border.
Not going to happen. First off, its obvious that our border with Mexico is currently about as well patrolled as the Moon. All you have to do is actually talk with an illegal alien or someone who employs them, and you’ll find out that half of them go home for Christmas. I’m not kidding. People seem to have this picture in their mind that the illegal aliens are caught in a bad episode of the Fugitive; huddled in fear from “La Migra”.
Guys, they go home for Feliz Navidad. These are not people huddled in fear, these are people who have a slightly more complicated way to make travel reservations. One person with a green card so he could cross at will told me that the coyotes were a better deal because they didn’t steal half your Christmas presents like the border guards do.
Ok, so we don’t patrol the border now. “So we should!” the idiots cry. Right now, we patrol 50 miles out of 1951 miles of the border. That’s 2.5%, and it costs us $6B per year to patrol that much. Think the war in Iraq was expensive? How does $234B per year to patrol the whole thing sound? We could invade a different country in the Middle East every year and have money left over!
Like BART in San Francisco ($80,000/year/rider), closing the border is just, well dumb. Not quite as dumb as BART, it would only cost us $21,000 per illegal alien per year, but still, not the best use of our money to close the border. We could actually buy Mexico more cheaply, 10% of their GDP/year would only be $61B. If we bought the rest of Central America while we were at it we’d only have to patrol our border with Panama.
Of course, other people besides me have run these same numbers. Our politicians are only half as stupid as they seem on TV. So they’ve come up with their own solution. “We’ll hire the Mexicans to build a giant wall.”
My jaw just drops when I hear someone say that. Look, if your solution to illegal immigration is to hire illegal aliens to build a wall, I feel it necessary to give you additional advice: socks, then shoes, OK? I mean the mind just boggles when I hear our “statesmen” suggest such nonsense.
Besides, I’ve been around Flagstaff for awhile, and half the fences in town are already built by illegal aliens and we’re still talking about $150/foot. So that would be $1.5B just to build this giant useless fence. Note that the Great Wall of China didn’t keep the barbarians out...
But we have to keep out the terrorists I hear...
Sure, in this day and age, I can understand that fear. But remember, this is the Department of Homeland Stupidity. Do you really expect them to catch 10 terrorists out of 11 million illegal aliens? These are the people who make me take off my shoes when I travel, even if I’m wearing flip-flops... (I swear, I’m going to start going to the airport naked, just to save everyone time.)
No, if we want to keep out the terrorists, we have to change the math. We have to make it so that the Homeland Stupidity Department only has to look for 10 people sneaking across, not the 11 million going through the regular checkpoints. Which means, guest workers.
Look, no one likes this solution. We’d much rather that Mexico had honest government instead of this weird mixture of socialism and corruption they have now. We’d much rather be able to hire our neighbors kid to clean out our gutters and have them show up on time, and work hard. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one, where Mexico is seriously messed up, and so a bunch of Mexicans are willing to cross the burning desert, get shot at, robbed, and occasionally beat up, so that they can make $50 for cleaning out our gutters. With that sort of motivation, no wall or fence will ever be high enough.
So there’s only one choice. We can continue to pretend that we control our borders, or we can actually start controlling our borders by making it so that its legal for most of these people to cross. At that point, we merely need watch out for the illegal crossings, and that’s a much better position to be in then where we’re at now.
But first we have to beat those other 46 states into submission.
Technorati Tags: immigration
A reader sent me this link.
Ok, if the DOD is rotating in 92,000 troops of the course of this year, and they decided NOT to rotate in 3,500 of them, that means we're now only rotating in 88,500 troops.
Yet another “troop reduction” that slips by the mainstream media.
After several straight months of declining casualties, casualties jumped back up to the level seen in September of last year (all graphs popup):
The big jump this month was mostly from IED deaths as you can see. Deaths from “hostile fire” is up this month as well. This was the second worse month in terms of IED deaths since last Jan:
Deaths among the Iraqi Police is steady:
So in general, things were obviously worse for our soldiers in Iraq last month. They're not as bad as they been in the past:
But still disappointing after so many months of declining numbers.
Woundings were constant:
We lowered the number of troops in Iraq slightly:
While the number of Iraqi Troops continue to increase:
I found a significant flaw in the Iraq Index data for civilian deaths. The “upper bound” is actually just the lower bound multiplied by 1.75, based on the assumption that 75% of the deaths go unreported. So I'm dropping the “upper bound” from this chart.
I've also pretty much decided this data is fatally flawed because its based on Iraq Body Count, which is based on media reports, which themselves are often guesses. The data is also stale, March's total from IBC has completely changed since I last looked at it. So here's a graph, but realize that April is probably a totally bogus number:
The car bombing data on the other hand, seems to be more up to date:
So as far as car bombings go, things are about the same in Iraq.
So bottom line, was Iraq better or worse in April? Definitely worse. Is it the worst its ever been? No, not really, things have been much worse in the past. I hope that May's numbers shows this as a local peak, but of course, I won't know what those are until June.
As for those of you who think Iraq is in a civil war, I have to say, you've never seen a civil war. Take all these numbers and multiply them by something between 10 to a 100 for a civil war. You're thinking too binary; there's a scale between peace and civil war, and Iraq, while not peaceful, is closer to that end then they are the civil war end. The number 4 is greater then zero, but its much less then 10 for Iraq's sake.
For that matter, Saddam was killing 10-20,000 Iraqis a month when he was in power, so its useful to keep these numbers in perspective. Iraq is more chaotic than under Saddam, but less deadly overall. Strange but true, but the wholesale slaughter of Saddam was worse then this retail mucking about between the Coalition and the insurgents.
Though to be honest, I wouldn't find the assertion that Iraq is in a civil war half as offensive if half of you didn't seem to be gloating. Remember your humanity guys; no matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, it should be a bad thing that Iraqis are dying. It will be a bad thing if America loses this war. Keep your eye on the ball.
For those of you who want world peace, well, so do we all. But its a two step process:
- World Justice
- World Peace
Sorry, but you have to do step 1 before step 2.
Let's hope the Iraqis respond well to their new government. Hard to believe the elections were in January and it took this long...
