Oh Rly?
During the 1950s, however, this "Good Old Boy" system changed under Eisenhower - if only for about 10 years.
In 1954, Ike appointed retired Gen. Joseph "Jumpin' Joe" Swing, a former West Point classmate and veteran of the 101st Airborne, as the new INS commissioner.
Influential politicians, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D) of Texas and Sen. Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada, favored open borders, and were dead set against strong border enforcement, Brownell said. But General Swing's close connections to the president shielded him - and the Border Patrol - from meddling by powerful political and corporate interests.
One of Swing's first decisive acts was to transfer certain entrenched immigration officials out of the border area to other regions of the country where their political connections with people such as Senator Johnson would have no effect.
Then on June 17, 1954, what was called "Operation Wetback" began. Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day.
By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.
By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.
By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.
Now, to me, that's in the neighborhood of 1,200,000 in three months.
By my cyphering, we can get rid of the mere 6,000,000 claimed by the doofuses --- in about 12 months!
What we were able and willing to do in 1954 is very different from what we are able and willing to do in 2008. You know the old cliche- politics is the art of the possible. And in this day and age, it simply isn't possible, politically, to round up hundreds of thousands of illegals, put them on buses and ship them back to Mexico.
How long do you think such a program would last with pictures of crying mothers clutching babies being forced onto buses playing on TV every night?
No- our current approach seems to be working in lowering the numbers of illegals. Let's stick with it for now and see how far it goes.