>>ICE just isn't working:
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http://www.kjct8.com/global/story.asp?s=6772183>
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>You are so right, Tracy. If not for illegal immigrants there would be no crime in this country. Let's put up a wall!
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>OK, I'll drop the sarcasm. But all this talk about building a wall really does have me scratching my head. Think about the precedents for building walls along a border. The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall. (Are there others you can think of?) Is that the kind of company we want to keep? It would be an admission of utter failure to fix the situation by any other means.
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>Let's build walls around ghettoes while we're at it. Whoops, back to sarcasm.
Bad historical analogies -0 or at least probably not the ones you want to make. Great Wall of China was built to keep out hordes of invaders and under the Qin was very effective in keeping out invaders from the north and two thousand years later the expanded version protected the Ming against the Manchu until a traitor opened the gates.
Berlin Wall, of course, completely the opposite as it was built to keep people in, not out.
Border security is by no means an unreasonable requirement of any society. Of course our real problem is our ambivalent attitude about our southern border and the vested interests that profit from the status quo.
Actually being able to control the border though would seem a pre-requisite of any rational immigration policy.
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.