Free Republic

CorridorWatch, a Fayette County-based group that has been active in opposing the Trans-Texas Corridor plan, wants to go beyond the Sunset Advisory Commission’s recommended shakeup of state transportation leadership. The group, led by David and Linda Stall, recommends that TxDOT answer to an elected six-member board led by a chairman appointed by the governor. CorridorWatch makes it recommendation, along with various other reactions to the Sunset commission staff’s recent report on TxDOT, in written comments submitted as part of the sunset process. TxDOT, like all state agencies, “sunsets” after 12 years unless the Legislature acts to keep it alive. As...

MONTGOMERY The state Senate may have been locked down for most of the year, but it did find time to endorse a widely discredited urban legend spread by the John Birch Society. The upper chamber passed a joint resolution April 10 sponsored by state Sen. Rusty Glover, R-Semmes, claiming that Canada, Mexico and the United States are moving toward a "North American Union" and working on construction of a "NAFTA Superhighway" to link the countries and report edly destroy their sovereignty. "It's about retaining independence," said John McManus, the president of the John Birch Society, in a phone interview Mon...

Several Oklahoma legislators are concerned that individuals and organizations are quietly working on plans to create a privately-operated tollway in Oklahoma. Many referred to Spain-based Cintra, which has been involved in the development of a proposed Trans-Texas Corridor. Cintra also took over the operation of the Indiana East-West Toll Road from the Indiana Department of Transportation in 2006. Oklahoma State Sen. Randy Brogdon and state representatives Eric Proctor, Richard Morrisette, Scott Inman and Charles Key all expressed concern that efforts to open up Oklahoma to a privately operated tollway system were being kept out of the view of the general...

Topeka — Agreements with Mexico and Canada are setting the stage for construction of a huge highway that will gobble up Kansans’ property and jeopardize U.S. security, representatives from a wide range of groups said Monday. “Through incrementalism, apathy and inattention, our national sovereignty is being sacrificed on a cross of greed, socialism and globalism,� said state Rep. Judy Morrison, R-Shawnee. Morrison has introduced House Concurrent Resolution 5033 urging Congress to withdraw from further participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement and Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. At a hearing before the House Federal and State Affairs...

There's been a lot of talk about the new Trans-Texas Corridor — the next-generation "super-highway" — and opinions are varying. Now the debate is coming to Lufkin's doorstep. On Monday, the American Land Foundation, Stewards of the Range and TURF will hold a workshop at Lufkin's Pitser Garrison Civic Center on how to stop the Trans-Texas Corridor 69. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. A portion of Texas citizens have voiced their opposition to the TTC-69 in public meetings held by the Texas Department of Transportation, but believing they are not being heard, four cities and their...

Topic: Globalism The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is planning on building a new super highway system called the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC). The Trans-Texas Corridor will not be just another interstate and will it will be used by more than just automobiles. It will include 10 lanes for traffic, two high speed rail tracks, four standard rail tracks, utility lines, oil pipelines, and gas pipelines. The Trans-Texas Corridor will consist of many corridors segments that are 1,200 feet wide, with each mile consuming 146 acres of land. This land is currently ranch and farm land that is being taken by...

Texas spirit was alive and well at the Navasota DEIS public hearing on Feb. 28. Opposition groups, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, came from as far as Washington, D.C. to give recorded testimony, and get a first hand look at TxDOT process procedures. Assistant Director of Communications, Leigh Strope, who attended the meeting on behalf of the 34,000 Texas Teamsters Union members, says, “Teamsters want to stop the dangerous trend of selling our roads and bridges to foreign investors so they can slap tolls on the driving public. We are also concerned because the Trans-Texas Corridor would form...

REFUGIO, Texas - With an abandoned Wild West-vintage town of storefronts slumbering just a block from old US 77, tiny Refugio is a place where myth and reality coexist in a ghostly silence. more stories like this Obama faces heat over aide's NAFTA remarks to Canadians Texas, Ohio could decide Dem nomination Canada says didn't misrepresent Obama over NAFTA McCain tags Dems on trade treaty NAFTA seen differently in Ohio, Texas And now this South Texas outpost is swept up in one of the more intriguing tests of myth vs. reality in today's political life: the battle over the so-called...

The proposed Trans Texas Corridor did not find any fans, or any support, in Fort Bend County this week. At public meetings hosted by the Texas Department of Transportation in both Katy and Rosenberg, speaker after speaker, many in emotional tones, voiced their opposition to the proposed transportation corridor. No one spoke up in support of the proposal at either meeting. The Tuesday night session took place at Katy High School’s Performing Arts Center with over 200 residents in attendance. The evening before at the Rosenberg Civic and Convention Center, a similar crowd showed up to voice their opinions. In...

The debate in Texas over a proposed 4,000-mile network of toll roads that will parallel the state's existing highway system is heating up More than 10,000 people have attended public hearings across Texas to discuss the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, which has also been dubbed the "NAFTA superhighway." It is a project that is expected to cost an estimated $183 billion over 50 years. (hear audio report) Terry Hall with the group Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom warns the project will create widespread eminent domain abuse and involve foreign control of public infrastructure. "They're taking huge swaths of land, up...

A handful of Kendleton residents were among several dozen to speak out against the Trans-Texas Corridor at a public hearing Monday night in Rosenberg. “I personally think it's a slap in the face for Texas to take the land for pennies on the dollar, to put a road on it and to make you pay a toll for it,� said Jeremy West, one of the speakers from Kendleton. The Trans-Texas Corridor is a proposal for a network of highways, rail lines and utilities throughout Texas that would be financed by private interests who would seek to profit through tolls and...

HEMPSTEAD -- The Trans Texas Corridor may be the most controversial highway ever built in Texas. That is, if it ever gets built. All month, there have been public hearings throughout the area where people have been showing up in droves to oppose it. People don’t drive very fast on Odis Styers’ family ranch near Hempstead, but TxDOT wants that to change. “It’s quiet, it’s peaceful,” Styers said. “It’s a shame a road is gonna mess it up.” The road is the Trans Texas Corridor. The plans call for it to come through here, and with it: separate lanes for...

n what may have been the first hint of victory for opponents of the Trans Texas Corridor, a high-ranking Texas Department of Transportation official said Thursday he regretted his agency's communication failures and said one proposed version of the corridor, a 10-lane super highway with rail and utility pathways, will "probably not" be built in East Texas, based on the overwhelming resistance to the idea expressed at public hearings on the project this month. Phillip Russell, assistant executive director for innovative project development at TxDOT, was the keynote speaker at the Lone Star Legislative Summit at SFA Thursday, where he...

ROBSTOWN, Tex. — Leon Little’s farm here near Corpus Christi would not be seized for Texas’s proposed $184-billion-plus superhighway project for 5 or 10 years, if ever. But Mr. Little was alarmed enough to show up Wednesday night with hundreds of his South Texas coastal neighbors to do what the Texas Department of Transportation has been urging: “Go ahead, don’t hold back.� Don’t worry. Texans have gotten the message, swamping hearings and town meetings across the state to grill and often excoriate agency officials about a colossal traffic makeover known as the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the...

A so-called “NAFTA Superhighway� earned support from the city’s mayor and discussion among residents Monday during a public hearing on the Texas Department of Transportation’s I-69 project. TxDOT held a public hearing at the Brownsville Events Center Monday to explain the progress of the Trans-Texas Corridor, a future segment of Highway I-69, which will link the U.S.-Mexico border to the U.S.-Canada border. After a short presentation, the floor was open for comments. Among the local politicians, college students and retirees at the hearing there was a wide range of opinion on the project. According to Mario Jorge, district engineer for...

WEST COLUMBIA — When private property gets in the way of a road project, its owners will be moving out of the way, one way or another, in almost every case. With a widening of Highway 36 on the horizon and state and federal officials ready to drive the Trans-Texas Corridor through the Lone Star State, many land-owning Texans are preparing to defend their property from their own government. Brazoria County residents troubled by the looming eminent domain fights came to the Gulf Coast Christian Center on Saturday morning to voice their views to Tom Lizardo, chief of staff for...

Road plans in Texas have conspiracy theorists in an uproar I am driving along a mostly empty road in rural Fayette County, Texas, about an hour east of Austin, looking for the NAFTA superhighway -- the one that Stephen Harper, George W. Bush and Felipe Calderón mocked as a conspiracy theory when they were asked about it at their trilateral meeting in Montebello, Que., in August. Critics, who say that behind the leaders' denials lurks a larger, nefarious plan to unite North America, fear that such a roadway will eventually be a four-football-stadium-wide artery connecting Mexico, the U.S. and Canada,...

May 15, 2007 Questions are being raised over Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's policy on terrorism, after a report revealed he has strong ties to two foreign investment consortia working to own or lease U.S. toll roads, including the Trans-Texas Corridor 35, which is identified as part of the I-35 "NAFTA Superhighway."

"The NAFTA Superhighway stops here, at the border with Oklahoma," Randy Brogdon, a Republican state senator who has championed the fight to keep the Trans-Texas Corridor out of Oklahoma, told a packed 300-person audience at the first public meeting of OK-SAFE in Tulsa on Saturday. Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise, Inc. is a non-profit, Oklahoma corporation set up to oppose the NAFTA Superhighway and the North American Union, as threats to the sovereignty of the United States. Brogdon objected to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America www.spp.gov, arguing that President Bush had entered the agreement after secret...

Just when you think, you have heard it all something else pops up. I have stated my opinion on the state's effort to utilize tolls as the future funding for highways in Texas. Just in case you missed it, I oppose the idea of tolls being the primary source of funding for state highways. I need to clarify my opposition by stating I am not so much opposed to new toll roads, but rather the idea of tolling existing roads. A large portion of the price for a gallon of gas goes to the state and federal folks for highway...

...[The building of the Trans-Texas Corridor] is all too sinister for Jerome Corsi, the Vietnam War veteran who helped lead the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry. Corsi has knitted disparate strands of each of these separate road projects to help convince fellow xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society that the corridor is the first leg of a secret federal project called the NAFTA Superhighway, a four-football-field wide monstrosity that would run from Mexico's Yucatan to Canada's Yukon... Yet even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican candidate for president, has fallen...

The Interstate 69 corridor, a Mexico-to-Canada concept discussed since 1991, has received government recognition as a "corridor of the future," a designation that immediately means $800,000 in federal money for studies. Local officials say it could mean more trade in South Texas. The corridor -- a 2,680-mile international trade route from Mexico to Canada also known as the Trans-Texas Corridor-69 -- was one of two designated Tuesday as corridors of the future. Interstate 10 from California to Florida also received recognition. Hailed as a route that would facilitate trade resulting from the North American Free Trade Agreement, I-69's Texas portion...

Official Mexican government reports reveal Mexico has entered discussions with the state of Texas and top officials in the Bush administration to extend the Trans-Texas Corridor into Mexico, with a plan to connect through Monterrey to the deep-water Mexican ports on the Pacific, including Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas. The official website of the Mexican northeastern state of Nuevo León contain multiple reports that José Natividad Gonzáles Parás, governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo León, has actively discussed with numerous U.S. government officials, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the...

Texas Governor Rick Perry is being called to task by an author and investigative journalist for vetoing bills that would have blocked construction of the controversial Trans-Texas Corridor. Dr. Jerome Corsi has been one of the leading voices warning the American public about the consequences of the Trans-Texas Corridor, which will be part of a superhighway -- purported to be four football fields wide -- that will allow Mexican trucks to enter the U.S. and traverse the core of the country all the way to Canada. The best-selling author asserts that Governor Perry cleared the way for construction to begin...

MONTEBELLO, Quebec – President Bush today sidestepped a direct question about whether he'd be willing to categorically deny there is a plan to create the North American Union. Instead, he ridiculed those who believe that is taking place as conspiracy theorists. The exchange came at a news conference held by Bush, Mexico's President Felipe Calderon, and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who met at a resort in the rural woods outside of Ottawa, Quebec, to discuss their latest work on the Security and Prosperity Partnership. After the trio presented their prepared statement about the SPP, several reporters who had been...

Texas drivers are tired of traffic gridlock. We want new roads built sooner rather than later, but we do not want a Trans-Texas Corridor that would surely invite more illegal drugs and more illegal aliens. Legislators have gotten our message but since both highway funds, the State Highway Fund (a gasoline tax) and the Texas Mobility Fund (bond money), have been pilfered for other uses, there is no money for road building. Members of the Texas Senate Transportation & Homeland Security Committee met on August 7 to discuss this funding dilemma. Committee Chairman John Carona suggested a new constitutional amendment...

AUSTIN — The Texas Department of Transportation, which complains about chronic underfunding, has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign that promotes the divisive Trans-Texas Corridor plan and toll roads. The campaign is anticipated to cost $7 million to $9 million, according to a memo titled "Keep Texas Moving: Tolling and Trans-Texas Corridor Outreach" sent to transportation officials by Coby Chase, director of the agency's government and public affairs division. Such use of state highway-fund dollars is drawing questions, but the department says it's an important effort to educate and engage Texans. "It's a waste of money," said Rep. Warren Chisum, chairman of...

OTTAWA — It's a threat that has left-wing Canadian nationalists and right-wing U.S. congressmen in rare and dismayed agreement: a freeway, four football fields wide, stretching from Mexico to northern Manitoba. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum say the corridor - dubbed the NAFTA superhighway - is a primary goal of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America established two years ago by the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico. At separate press conferences in Ottawa yesterday, the road was held out as an example of the potentially repugnant effects of the trilateral partnership....

Texas needs the Trans-Texas Corridor because of its surging population, a representative for Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday while speaking in Cleburne. Plans are to build the multi-lane highway and rail system parallel to Interstate 35, north-south through the center of the state. Kris Heckmann, deputy director of Perry’s Legislative Division spoke at the Cleburne Civic Center at the invitation of the Johnson County Republican Women for their monthly meeting. Every decade since World War II, Texas’ population has increased by at least 20 percent, Heckmann said. In 1990, the state’s population was 16.5 million, and today the population is...

The Plan to Disappear Canada 'Deep integration' comes out of the shadows. By Murray Dobbin, Vancouver If the machinations going on in this country regarding so-called "deep integration" were instead a communist conspiracy to take over the country (you will, of course, have to try hard to imagine this) the news media would be blaring the story. Pundits would pontificate, editorialists would erupt, security forces would be unleashed. Instead, a virtual conspiracy to make the country disappear through assimilation into the U.S. gets barely a mention.But news of the scheme -- formally called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North...

NAFTA SUPERHIGHWAY | An urban myth or reality? Super suspicious foes The government denies any such plans, but campaign against it continues. By MATT STEARNS McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON | If the government really has a secret plan for a 12-lane road-and-rail NAFTA Superhighway that will split the heartland from Mexico to Canada, it is playing with a great poker face. “There is absolutely no U.S. government plan for a NAFTA Superhighway of any sort,” said David Bohigian, an assistant secretary of commerce. Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican and a powerful member of committees that would authorize and pay for...

A proposed North American “super corridor” would relieve overburdened highways and promote economic growth in three countries, supporters say. But others wonder whether the proposal might bring in cheap exports and put unsafe Mexican trucks on U.S. roads. The issue takes center stage at a three-day conference that begins today in Fort Worth, Texas. More than 350 transportation, logistics and economic development specialists from the United States, Canada and Mexico are meeting. The conference is sponsored by Dallas-based North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition. The nonprofit coalition, whose members include public- and private-sector organizations, wants to develop an integrated transportation system linking...

The future of an interstate planned to run through Victoria appears murkier than ever. Harris County, a key point along the proposed Interstate 69 route, pulled out of the I-69 Alliance in mid-May. In an article in the May 15 Houston Chronicle, Bill Murphy and Rad Sallee wrote that Harris County pulled out of the I-69 Alliance after county commissioners decided too much was spent annually in membership costs. The county hopes that a bill in legislation right now is passed, because it would give them access to build a toll road as part of the Trans-Texas Corridor parallel to...

Robert Poole, a mechanical engineer who has advised the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to privatize U.S. highways, estimates that more than $25 billion in Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) highway projects are planned or approved in the United States. Now, a prominent Oklahoma state representative has invited Poole to promote his PPP toll road ideas, a move evidently designed to counter growing citizen opposition. Poole Lobbies for PPP Highways in Oklahoma Oklahoma House Speaker, Republican Lance Cargill, the founder of a group known as The 100 Ideas Initiative, has invited Poole to give a June...

Rudy Giuliani and The NAFTA Superhighway - Brit Hume said on the Fox News Sunday program that it is possible that Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani could overcome his convoluted posturing on abortion and secure the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But Giuliani has some other major problems. These include foreign clients, one of whom is constructing part of the "NAFTA Superhighway" project that has people in Texas and around the nation up in arms. Hume, the moderator of Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, will be in a position to ask Giuliani about it. Questions will also be...

FEW issues find common ground among right-wing conservatives and left-of-center liberals. But the so-called "NAFTA Superhighway," potentially stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn., is apparently one of them. Across the political spectrum people have worked themselves into a frenzy over a massive futuristic transportation project that may simply be a figment of their imagination. Talk of a new north-south Texas toll road to accommodate extra truck traffic coming from Mexico has renewed bipartisan passion about the feared superhighway. There is almost a conspiratorial edge to some critics who are convinced that the "Trans-Texas...

WASHINGTON - A new Texas road being planned to accommodate truck traffic between the United States and Mexico has riled Ohio members of Congress who fear it's the first phase of a "NAFTA Superhighway" that would be used to funnel cheap imports to the Midwest as it links Mexico, the United States and Canada. Texas and federal highway officials deny that a proposed North-South toll road running parallel to Inter-state 35 is part of a planned international superhighway, and say there are no plans for a transcontinental road. They insist the new thoroughfare would merely handle some of the extra...

? 2007 WorldNetDaily.com Texas farmers are stepping up their opposition to the Trans-Texas Corridor, a massive highway project that ultimately could take about half a million acres of the state out of agricultural production ? and according to opponents possibly hasten the advent of a North American Union. "Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans-Texas Corridor," said Farm Bureau President Kenneth Dierschke, a grain and cotton farmer from San Angelo. "There's never been any doubt that the impact on agriculture would be negative, but now we see a growing number of people who believe the TTC would be bad...

The conventional wisdom among conservatives about the benefits of privatizing government programs is being severely tested in a heretofore largely obscure controversy that is now blossoming in America’s heartland. When up to several thousand people gathered in vigorous protest March 2 at the majestic state capitol in Austin, there were echoes of the formative beginnings of similar grassroots protest movements of other eras, in which the organizers were not professional political activists, but rather genuinely fed-up ordinary citizens motivated by a combination of self-interest and patriotism to seek a legitimate redress of grievances. Almost 30 years ago, a similar citizen...

Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman’s Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation’s most modern highway straight into the heart of...

News Release Contact: Randall Dillard Telephone: (512) 463-8588 Interstate 69 from Texas to Michigan is included on a short list of interstate corridors being considered for fast track development by federal transportation officials, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary. E. Peters has announced. If I-69 is selected by the U.S. Department of Transportation this summer as part of the Corridors of the Future program, the federal department will aggressively support the project to move it “from the drawing board to completion faster than ever before,” according to the announcement. The Texas segment of I-69 is being developed as part of the...

Executives of large corporations, their bankers and their allies in Congress and the White House have worked together to export our manufacturing industries and their high paying jobs to China, India and Mexico. Now they need your tax money to get the goods from their foreign factories back to your hometown where income from jobs that now pay lower wages can buy their imported products. You see, there are not enough ports and highways to handle the flood of imports from their foreign factories. In the process, they want to hasten formation of the North American Union (NAU) through construction...

A coalition to stop the Trans-Texas Corridor voiced its concerns Sunday in Austin, citing border security and gun rights as key issues not being addressed. The large crowd in attendance at the meeting represented a cross section of Texans and included a veterans group out of Houston. “We didn’t fight a war so our government could give away our land,” said ret. Col. Sam Horton of Houston. World War II veteran, ret. Col. Arthur Peterson of Houston, said national security is at stake because the Gov. Rick Perry-supported transportation project would help erase borders between the United States and Mexico...

Readers of the AIM Report are accustomed to learning of huge distortions or omissions by the media. This time, the under-reported story deals with the possible end of America, as we know it. Major players are secretive and are trying to keep the media out of the loop. But that does not let the mainstream media off the hook. There is enough stonewalling, secrecy and there are plenty of telltale signs, so that any assignment editor whose curiosity is not aroused is probably in the wrong business. But in terms of the national media, only Lou Dobbs of CNN has...

A MASSIVE road four football fields wide and running from Mexico to Canada through the heartland of the United States is being proposed amid controversy over security and the damage to the environment. The "nation's most modern roadway", proposed between Laredo in Texas and Duluth, Minnesota, along Interstate 35, would allow the US to bypass the west coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to import goods from China and the Far East into the heart of middle America via Mexico, saving both cost and time. However, critics argue that the ten-lane road would lay a swathe of concrete...

The state legislature convenes for its 80th session in January. With more than 80,000 people driving on I-35 from Dallas to San Antonio on any given day, state officials said something must be done. TxDot officials said the Trans Texas Corridor is in the environmental testing stage, which will last another two years. TxDot spokesman Ken Roberts said, "What this is is a 10 mile wide study area we're looking at from a standpoint where to best locate a 1200 foot corridor for the Trans-Texas 35." Anything along the path, up to several hundred thousand acres, and as many as...

By now many Texans have heard about the proposed “NAFTA Superhighway,” which is also referred to as the trans-Texas corridor. What you may not know is the extent to which plans for such a superhighway are moving forward without congressional oversight or media attention. This superhighway would connect Mexico, the United States, and Canada, cutting a wide swath through the middle of Texas and up through Kansas City. Offshoots would connect the main artery to the west coast, Florida, and northeast. Proponents envision a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields, with freight and rail lines, fiber-optic cable lines,...

Dan Byfield is president of the American Land Foundation, a not-for-profit organization based in Texas that helps landowners protect their private-property rights. Like an opportunistic politician, President George W. Bush in June celebrated the one-year anniversary of the now-infamous Supreme Court eminent-domain case known as Kelo v. New London by issuing an executive order called "Protecting the Property Rights of the American People." Protecting the property rights of whom? The fact that no one in the property-rights movement had any idea it was coming or, for that matter, requested it, should be cause for suspicion. After reading it, suspicion is...

Here's what the denizens of the political class are doing right now: Standing at the front door, they're saying, "Look here! See this new border security bill we just passed. You can see we're on the job protecting the borders night and day!" At the same time, sneaking through the back door is a quiet but well-greased effort to build a monster highway that is part and parcel of a plan to wipe out the borders altogether. And by the way, that border bill does create a fence — maybe, somehow, sort of — it all depends on how the...

Some members of Congress have stated that we must first secure our borders before we can even discuss immigration reform. I part company with some of these folks, because despite their tough talk, their view of immigration reform, even post-border security, still translates into a diluted version of amnesty, and the allowing of “day-workers” to transverse our border, and potentially abuse their privileges. While I disagree with the latter part of that plan, the first part is correct, or at least, it was until recently. One of the biggest obstacles to real border security and immigration reform has been our...