USA 2024 Elections Thread

[grarpamp]

Funny What Even A Flimsy Border Fence Can Do...

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/funny_what_even_a_flimsy_border_fence_can_do.html

https://www.borderreport.com/immigration/the-border-wall/migrant-crossings-plummet-as-texas-guard-expands-barbwire-fence/


Well, here we have it.

    This morning, service members deployed to El Paso, Texas
constructed a triple-strand concertina barrier near the border to
secure the area from illegal crossings. pic.twitter.com/X6JUkr9iQV
    — Texas Military Dept. (@TXMilitary) December 25, 2022

At a time when Joe Biden and his trusty sidekick, Homeland Security
secretary  Alejandro Mayorkas, claim there's nothing they can do about
the border surge as they wave illegal aliens through, illegal border
crossings in the El Paso area have ... gone to almost zero.

According to Border Report:

    EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Migrant crossings have plummeted
in a mile-long stretch of Downtown El Paso where the Texas Army
National Guard has set up concertina wire and portable fencing along
the Rio Grande.

    The guard began setting up the barrier last week at a gap in the
border wall west of the Paso del Norte port of entry. In the space of
eight days, the barbed wire has nearly reached a second port of entry
and chain-link fence anchored by sandbags extends even farther. The
result is that asylum seekers can no longer walk across ankle-deep
water in the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to waiting Border
Patrol agents in that area.

    “The difference is vast,” said 1st Sgt. Suzanne Ringle. “The 19th,
the 20th and the 21st we had large groups of families and individuals
who were wanting to come across. Now, it’s almost a ghost town out
there.”

    She attributed that to the “visual deterrent” of the barbwire,
parked Humvees and soldiers patrolling the area with their
semi-automatic rifles. As of Tuesday, 600 guard members were in El
Paso on border security duty associated with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s
Operation Lone Star.

So that's all it takes?

It makes sense that it does.

Put a fence up, even an ugly, flimsy one, redolent of a communist
regime, complete with a few guys with guns and patrol cars out there
and they won't come.

So much for all the arguments that "walls don't work" because migrants
will find ways to scale,catapult, or tunnel under the walls. Yes,
there are a few cases of this, but the big mass surges suddenly end.

There have been arguments that big, high-tech, and impressive walls
are what it takes, but these ideas have been thwarted by open-borders
leftists, screaming about wildlife and illegal alien "rights."
President Trump's border wall was largely thwarted that way, and
Arizona's effort to set up stacked boxcars as an impenetrable wall met
their fates this way, too.

But barbed wire and chain link fences work, too, a hell of a lot
better than a naked, open, inviting border space, sometimes with only
a puddly river to cross. It's makeshift and it's ugly, sure, but the
obstructions of open-border leftists and their leftwing lawyers and
roundheel judges are why we can't have nice things. So now we get
crappy, unsightly things, like razor-wire rolls and chain link fences,
along with a few guards with guns and it works just as well.

The left has had a grand old time running circles around the larger,
and more permanent fencing projects, but it's a lot harder for them to
challenge tiny, temporary, barriers and make an issue of them.

The success of this old and tried border solution raises questions as
to why this wasn't done earlier, back when President Trump was trying
to get his wall built. Hindsight, of course, is easy for us now, but
it's sad that this idea didn't come up earlier, even as a temporary
solution while the bigger battles over the wall construction were
going on. While Trump was valiantly battling leftists in the courts
over his wall's construction and funding, the barbed wire fence
solution sat right there, seemingly unused. The barbed wire fence
apparently could have been dragged through national parks, national
wildlife refuges, and perhaps even private lands, with minimal
disruption and no big symbolic images such as the border wall for the
left to rally round in outrage. Those were some of the obstacles he
endured in his battle to get the border wall built.

A lousy barbed wire fence worked just as well, and could be thrown up
quickly, cheaply, and with immediate effects, all of which was in the
thinking of that master-problem-solver, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who
deserves kudos for this simple and effective idea. Abbott has a lot of
those.

It works because I know it works.

I'll share a personal story: My mother has an ambitious kitten whose
great goal is to romp around in the canyon behind her house, which is
filled with packs of hungry, pet-eating, coyotes. City officials do
nothing about the problem and the den is proliferating. Once in
awhile, I hear a gun go off at night and with no cops called, it's
almost certainly someone taking out a coyote and everyone else in the
neighborhood just keeping quiet. Since kittens don't belong in
canyons, I found that the solution for her issue is to block the hell
out of the flimsy fence she has, with flower pots, old boards, dirt,
nearby jumping points, anything that will keep the kitten inside his
yard and out of the canyon. Rather than wait for a coyote to come, the
blocked fence is the one thing that keeps the kitten inside. Focus on
the fence openings, I've told her, not on taking the kitten back to
the shelter, as she frets every time the kitten gets out. We are still
working on the fence openings, but when a known one is blocked off,
the kitten stays in. When he discovers another, it's back to the
drawing board, but one day, we will have the entire fence turned into
a kitten-coyote barrier. We will get there.

So will the people of Texas, with guys like Gov. Abbott around.

The lesson here is that even a bad fence works wonders to deter the
tens of thousands of unvetted illegal aliens from crossing in, so
let's see more of them.