Since everyone is throwing around ball park figures for construction of a fence and/or a wall to secure our borders, let's not forget the Border Patrol. The BP needs serious beefing up and the feds needs to start that process NOW. If you open employment hiring to experienced law enforcement officials and start them out at say $50K/year with benefits, you would get many folks applying who could get the job done. Double the amount of BP agents from the current level of 10K to 20K and you'd spend $500-million/year. Increase to 30K and it would cost $1-billion. If you went to 100K BP agents, a ten fold increase, that would cost the American taxpayer $5-billion. When you consider that the recent highway bill the President signed into law contained some $30-billion in pork barrel projects, increasing the size of the BP ten fold and building a wall on our borders is really a drop in the political bucket.
"When you consider that the recent highway bill the President signed into law contained some $30-billion in pork barrel projects, increasing the size of the BP ten fold and building a wall on our borders is really a drop in the political bucket."
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The REAL I.D. Act authorized an additional 2,000 new BP agents each year over the next ten years.
That's an additional 20,000 new agents.
To date, the Bush Administration has funded only 200 for FY 2006.
What does that tell you?