Some thoughts about that 700 mile fence

Jack wrote this in October, 2006:

I keep hearing about the multi-billion dollar 700 mile fence debate, despite myself.  At first I thought it was a silly idea, doomed to just be a way of pouring a lot of money into the pockets of contractors using cheap Mexican labor.

But on second thought, if approached properly, I think it might be a boon, an improvement in the lives of a lot of people.

Consider this.  Suppose, instead of hiring contractors to build that fence and spending all that money, we use labor from our fullsome prisons.

Each day we send, say, a couple of thousand prisoners down to the International Border with a suitcase full of clothes, a pair of running shoes, hammers, shovels, and a hundred or so bucks to buy refreshments while they work.

For each group of a hundred or so, a guard.  A guard hired from one of the sheriff departments.  You know the sort.  The kind who would consider it a cramping imposition to squeeze another person into the front seat of a full-sized automobile with him.

The fence might take a while being built, but it would pay for itself many times over.

For every illegal alien crossing northward for honest work, hundreds of prostitutes, gang-raped-to-death 20 year-olds who got caught with an ounce of weed, wife beaters, child molesters, gangsters, robbers, and politicians-caught-with-a-hand-in-the-till would probably escape to the south.

They’d have all their fences behind them.  Those prisons in the US would empty, the cost of maintaining them would vanish.

All those folk who used to be prison guards would have to go back to selling dope to school kids, doing stickups at convenience stores, and eventually they, too, would have their day in the sun.

I like it.

A win-win-win is rarely seen in this life.

Jack