Where is the fence? Which is more secure: American borders – or DisneyWorld?
Where is the fence? Which is more secure: American borders – or DisneyWorld?
And how long would stockholders of The Disney Company Inc. continue to employ Congress and Bush if they were in charge of securing Disney World?
Maybe another amnesty will solve the crisis?
From the San Jose Mercury on the state of the long promised fence.
Border system plagued by problems
TECHNICAL GLITCHES DELAY ‘VIRTUAL FENCE’
By Spencer S. Hsuand Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post
Article Launched: 09/26/2007 01:36:35 AM PDT
WASHINGTON – Technical and management troubles have caused the government’s effort to secure a portion of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border with a chain of surveillance towers to fall behind schedule, jeopardizing the success of a costly project meant to showcase the Bush administration’s tougher stance on immigration enforcement.
A $20 million pilot program to safeguard a 28-mile stretch of rough, mesquite-dotted terrain that straddles a smuggling corridor south of Tucson was supposed to be operating in June, but now is expected to be delayed until the end of the year, according to the officials at the Department of Homeland Security who are overseeing it.
Ground radar and cameras that were to identify illegal border crossers so that armed patrols could be dispatched to capture them have had trouble distinguishing people and vehicles from cows and bushes. The sensors also are confused by moisture, the officials said.
James Jay Carafano, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the program’s troubles show the danger of premising immigration law changes such as a new guest-worker program on untested long-term enforcement strategies. Bush officials’ rhetoric last year about the virtual fence raised “kind of unrealistic expectations about what you’re going to get at the front end,” he said.
If the program falters, he added, “it’s embarrassing for everyone” who pressed for comprehensive legislation in Congress this year.
Read it all here.