Our Border, Our Safety & Our Army

California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas our border states with the nation of Mexico. Historically a place of great debate. What do we do with the situation of a bordering nation that within its borders there are high levels of unemployment, corruption, death, despair and human strain. Many postures have been proposed. Our president attempted to build trade with Mexico in an attempt to create opportunities for its citizens. Simultaneously, the drug trade and organized crime seem to de-rail any direct benefits of international trade from reaching the everyday man and woman. One of the results of this phenomena, people begin to migrate to the land of opportunity-America. So much so that we have found that we do not know what to do about the mass amounts of people in this nation. We talk of assimilation. We talk of deportation. We speak of creating laws to provide criminal charges~as if this will stop a nation of people seeking a better life for self but mostly for others. Many nations have tried to regulate immigration through legal means, I don't know of any nation that has had success in doing so.

So now we wait on the eve of our President's speech where it is purported that we may use the National Guard of the border states to assist in closing the door to illegal immigrants from Mexico. I guess I heard this correctly, the plan is to deploy the reserve forces of the United States Military to the border to "police" the border. Hmmm. I am not an expert on the constitution, but I think there is some policies or laws that state what the military can do and what they cannot do. National Guard troops are designed for state emergencies (floods, earthquakes and such) I am not sure (someone can correct me) if border security is their funciton. I served in the National Guard and I don't remember border security as a mission we trained for.

So we are at a place where our President is contemplating or perhaps his staff is contemplating moving in the direction of placing an overexteded military (in this case the US Army) into another deployment cycle. This time to the border between the US and Mexico. This plan goes into increasing a military budget for that deployment, the absence of wives and husbands from homes and places of business, and a cost to the readiness of Army units for a war on terror and a war to get Iraq on the road to Democracy. When we add in other plans from this administration to address the oil crisis, raising national debt, the trade deficit, national administrative unravelings and the perception by some American voters that our current president is being seen in a less favorable light than his predecessor who was seen as a "scum bag" because of his personal indiscretions~is it any wonder that this time in American history is confusing and troublesome.

But what about the immigrants from Mexico? What do we do? It appears to me that we need to do what American businesses have always done, find a way to capatalize on their being here. Not in such a way that we manipulate them and abuse their humanity, but in such a way that communities are improved, schools are repaired and made to be beautiful, that our highways get cleaned, that our factories produce more goods and services and reduce cost to the consumers, and that people help people make contact and grow the American dream, a dream that is being lost by a lot of Americans, for everyone.