We’re missing a good bet here.
How about this?
Instead of a worthless, meaningless, ineffective and costly 700 mile fence, suppose we build the same fence 700 yards long, with bleachers, ticket booths for spectators.
Anyone who wishes to compete can do so, but only after having signed away all television and media rights.
Anyone who can cross the fence, or go around the end of it carrying whatever he wants to take with him is assured a hassle-free life in the country of his choice, only having to earn an honest living there.
The starter gun fires. All down the line Chinamen who want to go to Hong Kong or Australia, Russian and Filipino women who want to find husbands in the US, gunrunners from the US with backpacks full of machine guns who want to go to more exciting places, starving Africans, pot-bellied from malnutrition, flies swarming over them, ribs showing, who want to go somewhere, anywhere out of the sun where there’s food…. Bang! goes the starter pistol.
The competitors run, walk, crawl to the fence, examine it, and decide whether to cut through, go over, go around. Same as they’d have done if it were 700 miles long.
The way things are going in this land, I think there might come a day when a lot of American citizens are down there, televisions packed up on their backs, pizzas and hamburgers in their lunchkits, crouched on the starting line waiting for the pistol.
I might be there myself. A cage full of angry cats on my back, trying for some deserted island somewhere.
Jack
So Far From Heaven 