Thin gold line of border defense

As migrants' routes are shut down, elite teams of agents take to mountain trails east of San Diego in a high-energy effort to intercept intruders.

SAN YSIDRO MOUNTAINS, Calif. — The Black Hawk helicopter slips between craggy peaks looming over the U.S.-Mexico border and makes a lights-out landing in a barren valley.

Five agents of the U.S. Border Patrol's elite Air Mobile Unit jump into the darkness and take a narrow trail, their night vision goggles illuminating the treacherous terrain.

The mountain ranges east of San Diego extend to the Imperial Valley and rise to 4,000 feet, towering over Mexico like a giant rock wall. "You'd think it would be a deterrent, but it's not," said Agent Brandon Longaker

On the starlit night of the Black Hawk landing, the agents of Team Gold walk down a wide, well-marked path that receives so much migrant traffic the agents call it a superhighway trail.

If the team encounters migrants, agents must walk them back out to the nearest road, which often takes several hours. The migrants are transported by vehicles because the unit doesn't have access to enough helicopters to fly them out.

McPartland asked in Spanish if they had guns, knives, "bombas atomicas?" A young man wearing work boots chuckled at the joke question and said he was just trying to get to his cooking job at a P.F. Chang's restaurant in San Diego.

He turned out -- once they checked his fingerprints -- to be a suspected smuggler with a Mexican arrest warrant.

Smugglers in these mountains are known for ruthlessly abandoning migrants, leaving them without food or water at the first sign of trouble. "They're the true criminals," McPartland said. "That's the kind of guy we're after."

The Unpleasant FACTS ARE

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-08-29sm.html

>>Both studies found that immigrants used government services at a greater rate than native-born residents did. The New Jersey study found, for instance, that the typical immigrant family received about $4,044 annually in government services, about 11 percent higher than the average native-born family. At the same time, immigrant households paid about 8 percent less in taxes. The net result was that “the average native household generated an annual fiscal surplus of $232” to government, while “the typical foreign household was a net burden of $1,484.” The gap was even wider in California, where immigrant households produced a net deficit of $3,463 each, because so much of that state’s recent immigration had been in the form of low-wage, low-skill workers.

Though the study did not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, it did break down foreign-born households by the regions of the world from which they had come. In both states, the study found the steepest deficit in Latin American households, which in New Jersey consumed 26 percent more in government expenditures than the average native-born family, but paid 38 percent less in taxes. By contrast, immigrant households in New Jersey that hailed from Europe or Canada actually consumed, on average, less in government services than the typical native-born family, and paid nearly as much in taxes.<<

LAPD Most Wanted - 74% Hispanic"

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