January 30, 2006

Brownsville Herald offers joke article about border security

Remember the old joke?

Q. Why are there so many trees on the streets of Paris?
A. So the German soldiers can march in the shade.

Now, in an attempt to do that old chestnut one better, Sara Ines Calderon offers "Border violence likely affecting migrants":

A recent wave of violence against Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley has the potential to harm immigrants who pass through here.

..."When millions of Mexicans crossing the border are perceived as enemies, they are going to try to respond to that situation," said Ignacio Corona, professor of Mexican and Latin American Cultures at Ohio State University.

...Increased enforcement at the border — more Border Patrol agents for example — makes migrants more desperate, driving them to extreme measures or dangerous geography, according to Karl Eschbach, a demographer who studied the causes of migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1990s through 2003.

"It would affect the ordinary labor migrant who attempts to come across, and I can't imagine that it's affecting them for the good," Eschbach said. "As enforcement becomes more effective, there becomes a motivation to act in a desperate way."

Some call this trend "increased militarization" of the border, which Corona said is bound to increase violence. A stronger militarized presence at the border makes smugglers, and by extension immigrants, more desperate, a perfect recipe for violence.

"Forces are going to be opposed, and they are going to provoke some kind of response, some kind of retaliation," he said. "If you don't have a weapon, you are going to use a stone."

Keep planting those trees.

Posted to Immigration at January 30, 2006 03:53 AM

Comments

It is as if Parisian intellectuals had fretted in 1940 about the comfort and safety of German soldiers; except that the journalistic mentality displayed above, can only be that of hardened quota case. Such mentality is so permeted with racial activism, that it cannot even conceive of the interest of the citizen and the net taxpayer, much less that it is alegitimate one, over against the convenience of the illegal alien in flagrante.

Posted by: John S Bolton at January 30, 2006 11:21 PM