Bart Stinson
I lived in San Diego near the Mexican border about a quarter century ago, when illegal immigration was peaking. Thousands of illegal immigrants rushed northward through our community every evening.
The Border Patrol was out in force, but there were way too many illegals to be apprehended, much less processed, fed and medically screened. Despite their best efforts, the officers barely made a dent.
Jack Bostrum, chief of the San Ysidro international crossing, wrote an internal white paper during the Reagan administration that proposed using cutting horses to push the massed intruders back across the border without processing them in any way.
Somebody inside his organization leaked the paper to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), who denounced him as a bigot and said he considered Hispanics animals to be herded. The Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner found it too hot to handle and exiled Bostrum to the Guam office, where he shaved about 10 strokes off his golf handicap over the remainder of his federal career.
Dogs barked all night, and Border Patrol vehicles sped through parking lots. Illegals hid in culverts near our trolley stop, then ran uphill to leap onboard just before the trolley departed. My kids witnessed dozens, maybe hundreds, of apprehensions by the Border Patrol on foot, on all-terrain vehicles, and sometimes on horseback or in helicopters.
Once, my son and I were interrupted playing catch in a park when an illegal alien sprang from the bushes and ran between us.
At a Little League ball field, our sweet golden retriever bared her fangs and gave chase to a man who had inexplicably vaulted a residential fence and run into center field toward us. She chased him all the way back to the waiting arms of two huffing-and-puffing Border Patrolmen who scaled the fence in pursuit.
We eventually moved away, and by the time we came back for a visit, everything had changed. The federal government had built a fourteen-mile wall along the San Diego sector, and it worked. It was a two-part barrier with a high inner anti-climb fence to slow them down, a massive high steel barrier, and a no-man’s land in between.
An Obama official famously said “show me a fifty-foot fence, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” But you have to take turns on a ladder. And that ladder just gets you to the top. A 50-foot wall would be 50 feet on both sides.
Illegal alien apprehensions in the San Diego sector dropped from 202,000 when we lived there, to 9,000 in 2004 after the wall was built. We still needed the Border Patrol – not just law enforcement officers, but welders who daily repaired breaches by the Mexican “coyotes” who cut holes to accommodate human smuggling. But the wall gave the Border Patrol a fighting chance.
Who wants a border wall? This guy.
There’s not room here for the full rationale for a wall at our southern border. I would just refer you to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s excellent 2006 remarks in favor of a 700-mile wall. It’s all on YouTube.
He has changed his position since then. He now ridicules the idea of a wall. Principled patriotism is exhausting, and in any case his party has bet its future on importing and naturalizing foreigners to outvote fickle Americans. Foreign bloc voters are kryptonite to America’s noble experiment in self-government. Build the Wall.
