At the urging of Republicans, nearly $47 billion was added to the Senate's immigration reform bill. The money was dedicated to increasing border security. The first question that must be asked is -- was that additional spending on security at our southern border even necessary? Many people (including me) believe it is not necessary.The truth is that there is not a continuing problem of undocumented immigrants flooding into this country. In the last couple of years, undocumented immigration has slowed considerably -- and now is at a zero growth rate (meaning there are as many undocumented immigrants leaving this country as there are entering it). Add to this the fact that only about half of the undocumented immigration crosses our southern border anyway -- with the other half either coming down through the Canadian border, or entering by plane or ship.
Then there is the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has already given our borders their highest rating for security. And that doesn't even consider that this country spent $18 billion on border security last year -- far more than any other policing agency in the country. It sounds to me like we are already spending plenty of money on border security -- to solve a problem that no longer exists.
So why are the Republicans demanding $47 billion more in government spending -- at a time when they claim the government is spending too much already, and are demanding cuts in all other government programs (except military spending)? How does that make any kind of sense?
Well, Joshua Holland over at Salon.com has a theory -- and it makes a lot of sense. He believes (and I tend to agree) that the spending is to bulk up the profits of the corporations in the military-industrial complex. After all, the Iraq war is over, and hopefully the president is winding down the Afghan war -- two conflicts that poured billions of dollars into the coffers of those corporations. How are these corporations going to continue getting billions of dollars of government (taxpayer) money once those wars are over? The American people are certainly not interested in waging any more wars right now.
The GOP's answer is to continue to fund those corporations by conducting a "phony war" on our southern border. That's also why they must continue to scare people by claiming hordes of undocumented people are flooding over our southern border -- because if people realized the truth they would not stand for the new expenditures. Consider these items they want for a section of the border in Arizona:
In the sector covering Yuma and Tucson, Ariz., for example, it calls for 50 fixed surveillance towers, 72 fixed camera towers with remote surveillance capabilities, 28 mobile surveillance systems, 685 unattended ground sensors and 22 hand-held night-vision and thermal imaging systems.
And that's just a small section of our southern border. To call this an unnecessary boondoggle would be an understatement. It's a payoff by the GOP to the corporations who have pumped millions into getting Republicans elected -- and that pay-off is being done with taxpayer dollars (billions of taxpayer dollars). And the taxpayers should be very angry. That money should be spent to help hurting Americans trying to recover from the Bush recession -- not pay off corporations by claiming to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
