The Perimeter of the United States in Miles: from 10,000 to 50,000 Miles Depending.
By reducing your inflated numbers by 80% to reflect the actual border perimeter of the United States, that would mean that the number of guards necessary to patrol our border would be about 600,000.
Where are you gonna find 600,000 border agents? They gotta come from someplace. Not from the military I hope. We currently have about 1.4 million active duty military soldiers. And you want almost half of them to patrol just the US border?
Keep in mind we have about 180,000 soldiers in Iraq right now, God bless them. They have not done a perfect job of securing Iraq's 2,200 mile border.
Also keep in mind that the soldiers in Iraq likely face less border traffic and can shoot first and ask questions later, with little fear of civilian deaths or destruction of property, if they catch a large mass of people moving across the border surreptitiously in the dead of night.
Some soldiers may not believe they are best suited for defending the nation against hungry Mexican families, and there could be further declines in active military troop strength.
Actually I don't advocate putting 600,000 guards on our country's border nor do I think it's even feasible to do so. I was simply pointing out to bayourod that his stated figure of over 100,000 miles as the length of our country's border is exaggerated by quite a bit.
By the way, thanks for the link that you provided.