The Border Question

I just saw an interview on Fox News with Chris Wallace, who will be airing his own interview with Gov. Arnold tomorrow on Fox News Sunday.

The clip they showed of the Arnold interview was about border security. Chris tried to get tough and put Arnold to the mat saying "Briefly, explain how you would control the border."

Arnold said he would have more troops and that this issue is not "reinventing the wheel" and that it's a "no brainer," that one need not be a "brain surgeon" to know that if you have more people patrolling the border, you have less people coming in illegally.

Well. Yes. He's right about this. But still...

Chris wisely points out that there are thousands of miles of border. Arnold's comeback: "Well, we have a big country with thousands of cities, and they all need to be patrolled"

Yes. Those cities are patrolled, but every foot of every one of those cities is not visible all the time to that city's law enforcement.

This is what really gets me about people being mad about President Bush not doing more about the Border. I mean, we need to be clear that immigration is one thing, but border security is another. It just seems impossible to have every inch of the border covered by the eyes of a patrol officer at all times. And you know that people wanting to come into America are going to find the weak points, no matter how strong the strong points are. Which kind of means...you might as well not have the strong points, because everyone will just enter at the weak points.

It's like my friend SpiderChick and her 3 dogs. She put up a fence in her back yard for these dogs. But the dogs, they're smart. In less than 30 minutes, they found the spot in the fence that would allow them to escape the nearest squirrel.

And these are DOGS people...and a fence! How much quicker will people, who have a desire to do more than just chase a squirrel, be able to find the unmanned section of America's border??

I agree that the border is a problem. But I don't think that President Bush is ignoring it...or that there is much he can do at this point that is fiscally or practically reasonable.