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Security Theater

zuzu

So, last night George Bush announced plans to have the National Guard “support” the Border Patrol until an additional 6,000 Border Patrol agents can be hired. (This handy little graphic lists the points of the Bush proposal as well as of the House and Senate immigration bills).

While it’s nice to know that they won’t (officially) actually be used as armed border guards given differences in training and purpose between the Guard and the Border Patrol (not to mention the fact that many of the Guardsmen have already served in Iraq, where they probably got a little jumpy about strange noises), this is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

First, the Guard is already stretched too thin, what with the deployments to Iraq removing Guard units from their domestic posts and seriously affecting recruitment. While they’re stateside, they’re supposed to be assisting with natural disasters and the like. Fire season as well as hurricane season is coming up, and we saw during Katrina how much the deployment of Guard units overseas negatively affected disaster response.

Then you have the security theater aspects of this. Bush talked a lot about making our borders secure from terrorists, but putting 6,000 Guard troops along the border with Mexico isn’t going to do much about that because that’s not how terrorists get into this country. Every last one of the 9/11 hijackers got here legally, on tourist or student visas. Members of an international terrorist organization are going to have some money behind them and can buy papers that allow them in, if they don’t already have a clean record. They come here by plane or they drive across the border, through Customs checkpoints, at Buffalo or Bellingham or Detroit. It would be entirely counterproductive to their mission to have to hire a coyote or pack themselves into a shipping container and risk death by dehydration or heat exhaustion.

And this security theater is going to accomplish nothing in real terms to make the country safer. The people running across the border are coming here to have a better life, not to blow up buildings. Sure, there are undoubtedly criminals among them, but they’re standard-issue thugs, not jihadists, and probably prey on their own communities. Rattling sabers along the border sure looks like the government is Doing Something, but all it will do is stop a few gardeners, maids and cooks rather than international terrorist masterminds.

It’s freaking out Mexicans, who fear the specter of American military intervention.

It further cements the connection between “illegal immigrant” and “Hispanic” in the American mind.

Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, but from Bush’s perspective it should be: while Looking Like You’re Doing Something About National Security by putting Guard troops on the Mexican border might help win elections in the short-term, it’s going to hurt the Republicans in the long run among the fast-growing Hispanic voting population. Who would vote for a party that would sic the National Guard on people like themselves, possibly friends and family members? Especially when it appears that the administration is aligning itself with the kind of people who would write things like this (via Digby):

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Finally, do we really want to militarize the border? Border Patrol agents are law-enforcement officers, mainly, and it’s just a different thing psychologically to have law enforcement handling something than it is to have the military do it. They *are* going to have to work on their recruiting, though, if they want more agents. I’ve seen a BP recruiting ad a few times on Comedy Central, and maybe it was the channel, maybe it was the cheesy ad, but until they made the recruiting pitch at the end, I could have sworn it was for a spin-off of Reno 911! But alas, it was real; no Lt. Dangler and his little shorts in sight.

14 thoughts on Security Theater

  1. What about the Posse Comitatus Act which, generally, prohibits the use of the Armed Forces for police work? Won’t this require an act of Congress? Or is this just another inconvenient statue to be ignored at will by King George

  2. Every last one of the 9/11 hijackers got here legally

    So? The 9/11 hijackers took advantage of weaknesses in our system. If we tighten up legal entry, they’ll take advantage of illegal entry.

    It’s extremely irresponsible to think you can leave the borders porous because one group of terrorists came in (semi-) legally.

    The “semi” is there because they got two VA DLs using the illegal immigration network and they got one CA DL using an access code designed for use by illegal aliens.

    And, there was a recent suspected terrorist who was caught trying to smuggle himself in in a shipping container.

    If there’s a connection between “Hispanic” and “illegal alien” in America’s mind, the left should look to its continual attempts to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration and related attempts.

    In fact, you blur the line yourself, making it sound like every “Hispanic” is in favor of illegal crossers.

  4. That quotation pisses me off for so many different reasons. One thing that really jumps out at me is that the Nazis’ war on Jews started as soon as they seized control of the government. It took them several years to get around to implementing the Final Solution, but the groundwork was laid. It did not take less than four years.

    The stupidest assumption is that all the Jews killed in the Holocaust were German. The overwhelming majority were from Eastern Europe.

    In addition, many of them were not “deported.” The Nazis built concentration camps in the countries they invaded and many Jews died before they even saw a concentration camp (from starvation in the ghettos, in massacres, etc.).

  5. zuzu:

    There are indeed exceptions (insurrection, etc.) but I don’t think this is one of them, not without the permission of Congress. To wit:

    10 U.S.C. (United States Code) 375

    Sec. 375. Restriction on direct participation by military personnel:

    The Secretary of Defense shall prescribe such regulations as may be necessary to ensure that any activity (including the provision of any equipment or facility or the assignment or detail of any personnel) under this chapter does not include or permit direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law.

    (emphasis mine)

    So, I think this is another case of BushCo ignoring the law. The interesting thing is that Posse Commitatus is a BIG DEAL with the rightists, like the militia dudes. I think maybe Rove is too busy hiring an attorney to give the Chimperor good political advice on this one.

  6. Here’s part of the Homeland Security Act, in which a compliant and scared Congress pretty much gave Bush a blank check:

    Nevertheless, by its express terms, the Posse Comitatus Act is not a complete barrier to the use of the Armed Forces for a range of domestic purposes, including law enforcement functions, when the use of the Armed Forces is authorized by Act of Congress or the President determines that the use of the Armed Forces is required to fulfill the President’s obligations under the Constitution to respond promptly in time of war, insurrection, or other serious emergency.

    Wanna bet this will be put under the category of “serious emergency” or the War on Terra?

    Here’s a post at Balkinization that argues that the Bush people consider the Posse Comitatus Act essentially dead after 9/11.

    Also, he said during his speech that the deployment will be “with the coordination of the governors” or something like that, which means that the units would at least nominally be under the authority of the governors and thus outside the scope of Posse Comitatus.

  7. It’s extremely irresponsible to think you can leave the borders porous because one group of terrorists came in (semi-) legally.

    And yet it’s responsible to devote resources to security theater at the border that’s not a problem for terrorism when there are disasters to be dealt with? And it’s responsible to focus on Mexicans crossing the border to get jobs as domestics when millions of shipping containers go uninspected at the ports of major cities?

  8. What about the Posse Comitatus Act which, generally, prohibits the use of the Armed Forces for police work? Won’t this require an act of Congress? Or is this just another inconvenient statue to be ignored at will by King George

    I suppose this time because he’s using the military against people who aren’t U.S. citizens, it might be considered legitimate. One thing you can count on: Republican Presidents (or any President, for that matter) never let dust settle on the Armed Forces while they’re in office.

  9. What about the Posse Comitatus Act which, generally, prohibits the use of the Armed Forces for police work? Won’t this require an act of Congress? Or is this just another inconvenient statue to be ignored at will by King George

    National Guard can be used by the state governors in certain situations. And they’re (officially, anyway) only supposed to be used as advisors and trainers, right? I think that is legally acceptable.

  10. La Migra has had a military mindset for years. They tried to recruit me in the late nineties, as I was undereducated and in need of cash. The recruiter even called them America’s “secret army” and that even the desk workers serve at least one tour in the southwest.

    This was prior to Dept of Homeland Security, but nothing I’ve seen has convinced me that border patrol is anything but the military fetishists who can’t handle the real thing, and the desperate youths who would have enlisted if not for horror stories about Nam and about Gulf War Syndrome.

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  12. So, last night George Bush announced plans to have the National Guard “support” the Border Patrol until an additional 6,000 Border Patrol agents can be hired. …. this is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

    It’s a bad idea because the government has no right to shoot or restrain peaceful people just because they are trying to find a place to live in the United States. Ramping up the number of people working on making that a reality just means ramping up violence against innocent people.

    There are lots of reasons why the means that Bush is proposing are unlikely to achieve his professed ends. But since the ends are themselves fundamentally immoral, the strategic and tactical mistakes he’s making in trying to pursue them are of secondary importance at most.

  13. It’s a bad idea because the government has no right to shoot or restrain peaceful people just because they are trying to find a place to live in the United States.

    I don’t think that’s true. Can’t the border patrol arrest and restrain people crossing the border illegally?

  14. I don’t think that’s true. Can’t the border patrol arrest and restrain people crossing the border illegally?

    That depends on what you mean by “can.”
    ,
    They certainly have the power to do so. But they haven’t got any legitimate right to. Neither they nor anyone else has the right to harass or forcibly restrain peaceful people, who are, after all, simply trying to move into a new town to find work, and aren’t interfering with anyone else’s rights to person or property. Moving should not be treated as a crime.

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