A Pair of Border Agents for Every Mile?

News from the last day: The number of border agents continues to sky, and the number of deportations continues to soar.

All this to stop the poor man without his paperwork. True, some of those caught are actually criminals, but most are simply criminals in that they do not have paperwork. Should they be called criminals any more than those who speed? Both are breaking the law, so both are "criminals."

The Senate voted funding for an estimate 1,000 new border patrol agents Thursday, passing a $600-million measure that also brings more equipment to the border.

Manpower is definitely on the upswing. "Today, we have more boots on the ground near the Southwest border than at any time in our history," Obama claimed in early July.

And, that was before he sent 1,200 National Guardsman to the border a month later.

How many border agents are there at the Mexico border? In July, the St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact.com website cited the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as saying about 21,000 agents were at our various borders, most of them being at the Mexico border.

And, U.S. Customs and Border Protection told PolitiFact there were 17,057 now assigned to the Mexico border, way up from 6,315 in 1997.

That is nearing a three-fold increase.

All of which leaves me wondering if something is wrong with my math. Can this be? With the Mexico border stretching 1,969 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, having 18,000 agents (assuming they work eight-hour shifts) means there should be a pair of agents for every mile, around the clock.

It does not make me wonder that ANYONE is getting across, but it certainly makes me wonder that this is the most-crossed international border in the world. It makes me wonder how 250 million people a year are crossing back and forth. (Wikipedia cites a U.S. Embassy report from 2006 for this. I assume it is counting both legal and illegal crossings, estimating the illegal ones.)

Two-hundred-fifty million? Compare that to the U.S. population of about 309 million. Almost there is one crossing every year per every man, woman and child in the U.S.

Clearly, many must be crossing the border multiple times.

How do I stand on the bill Congress just passed? I favor securing the border against crime, even if that means securing it also against the man without paperwork. The drug lords south of the border are smuggling way too much of their product north of the line.

So, do I support the bill? I might, if I knew more about it, but probably not.

First off, I question why a pair of agents for every mile, plus a fence running across the border, are not working. I imagine border officials have a reason that will satisfy me on this. I just need to ask. I also wonder why, with a pair of agents per every mile, the fences cannot be kept mended. I'm sure there is a good answer, and perhaps if I ask, I'll be told.

So, objection two to the bill: What of the amount, $600 million? If we are hiring 1,000 agents, paying them, say, $50,000 a year, that is only $50 million. If we buy one vehicle for every six agents (supposing three shifts share a vehicle and two officers are in a truck), that's 167 vehicles. Supposing the truck and equipment we put in it costs $100,000, that's only $16.7 million.

This objection, though, like the first one, might be washed away if I knew what the equipment was. It must be more than what I am considering.

Are we taking bids for the high-end equipment, not just from existing makers of the devices, but from others who would be willing to open shop?

My third objection is, do we have a system at the border that is working, to begin with? If we are doing nothing more than escorting these people back to the border, we might as well tell them, "Your did it wrong today, and we caught you, but you are free to try again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Keep on trying till you get it right."

True, not having paperwork is not such a serious thing that we should do more than escort them back. So, fighting paperwork has created somewhat of a charade at our border.

What we have is a police force just to stop those without paperwork. We can do better than that. Drugs are more of a threat than people without paperwork. Instead of paperwork police, perhaps we could man the border with DEA agents.

How about legislation mandating that when we find someone crossing the border, we call the jurisdiction where they are from and ask if they are wanted on any crime? The best I have been able to verify is that we do not doing this. We should.

Well, this blog is getting too long. The other news item I referred to was deportations. Lee Davidson of the Deseret News today reported there were a record 1,167 deportation cases in Utah this year. His source was the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The Clearinghouse said there were only 103 cases in 2002, so the numbers have shot way up.