>>>>>ICE just isn't working:
>>>>>
>>>>>http://www.kjct8.com/global/story.asp?s=6772183
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>You are so right, Tracy. If not for illegal immigrants there would be no crime in this country. Let's put up a wall!
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>
>>
>>I suppose it depends what you mean by control. If the number of legal immigrants from Mexico remains as artificially low as it is now (IMO) I think there will be ongoing problems no matter what we do.
>>
>>Oh wait, I was bowing out of this thread....
>
>I think immigration is cool and would support increasing the quotas from south of the border dramatically as well as having a worker visa program - as soon as the free flow across the border stops - and that is only going to happen with effective physical barriers and massive sanctions for hiring illegals among agribusiness and other industries that drive the demand and exploit the cheap labor.

What happens then after your agribusinesses begin to go bankrupt? More import tariffs? More government subsidies? As you might have gathered along the line here, I'm very much against people being exploited for their labour, but the fact is, the illegals do provide a lot of, perhaps unrecognised, support to the U.S. economy. Actually, I agree that it's terribly unfair to those who try to immigrate within the system, and something needs to be done about the issue. But I think it's also worth thinking about both the practicality and the logistics of stopping the illegals (assuming it can even be done - which is hardly a slam-dunk).