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Blogs by Bill Flynn
Patroling The Borders of USA 4/13/2009 8:57:43 AM
A Daunting Task On a recent trip to Southern Arizona I drove along the Mexican border on a desolate gravel road for fifty miles. I came across one Border Patrol Agent who had been allerted to a penetration of 20 Mexicans. He scanned the horizen with binoculars trying to locate their position.
I chatted with this agent about the task of patrolling the border. He commented that about 99 percent of those who try to cross into the United States are good people, just trying to find work to put food on the table for their families. The other 1% is made up of smugglers or gangsters. He said, the twenty that he was watching then would wait until nightfall and most likely make it through the suveilence.
This clean cut border patrol agent added that, more attention of late would be spent by his organization on trying to stop the guns crossing into Mexico from the U.S.
This would be done by doubling the effort at the car & truck border crossings. They will then expect an attempt to smuggle guns by back pack across the desert & mountain ridges.
The effort on the part of the United States Government to stop the gun traffic is commendable. Where is that same amount of effort by the Mexican Government to stop the border crossings of their inocent citizens into USA? How about generating jobs for them in Mexico so they don't have to make that perilous journey? How about more effort by the Mexican government to flesh out the drug cartels in their country?
Then, comes the most difficult of all questions. How can the United States dry up the huge market for illegal drugs in America? Make them Legal? Beef up enforcement agencies? Educate Americans about the harmful effects? All of the above?
The costs of drug trafficing in dollars,lives & crime is astounding. The cost of patroling our borders to turn back some good people to Mexico is a daunting task. It's expensive and not cost effective. Fences are expensive and only partially effective against penitration across the vast deserts and mountains of the Southwest.
I hope the answers to these problem are not blowing in the wind and that the two bright presidents of United States and Mexico may sit down and work out some of the solutions.
