Illegal Aliens and the Border Fence

David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog ^ | September 19, 2009 | Claude Cartaginese

[HorowitzianConservative]

One of Democracy Now!’s featured headline stories yesterday centered on the Government Accountability Office audit which claims that the fence being built along the US Border with Mexico is years behind schedule and has run billions of dollars over initial cost projections. Auditors claim that the completed fence will cost an additional $6.5 billion in maintenance expenses, but more importantly, there will be “no mechanisms to gauge its actual impact.”

There are two points, then, to consider when it comes to the border fence:

1) Is it worth it? and

2) Will it work?

Naturally, Democracy Now!’s host Amy Goodman would emphatically answer “NO” to both questions. But would that be correct?

Let’s discuss the issue of cost first.

[GeronL]

Give it a few years and Mexico will be building a wall to keep all the Mexicans in the US

[bgill]

How much do gators cost?

[MissDairyGoodnessVT]

I’m so anti-illegal alien it’s not funny and if I were prez I’d beef up the entire border so it looked like a war and shoot to kill. that would stop them

[org.whodat]

One of Democracy Now!’s featured headline stories yesterday centered on the Government Accountability Office audit which claims that the fence being built along the US Border with Mexico is years behind schedule and has run billions of dollars over initial cost projections.

All of which is correct, Jorge bush and Jerkoff pissed away tons of tax payers dollars and got jack in return. But I bet several of their friends did real well.

[org.whodat]

This kind works:

[La Lydia]

Here is the original Democracy Now article, and I will follow with my comments. There already has been a thread on the GAO report on FR a couple of days ago. Anyway,

Audit: Border Fence to Cost $6.5B

A new government audit claims the program to radically increase electronic surveillance along the US border with Mexico is years behind schedule and has run billions of dollars over initial projections. The Government Accountability Office says the network of cameras, radars and fences won’t be completed until 2016, instead of the initial plan for later this year. Auditors also say the border system will cost an additional $6.5 billion in maintenance costs, with no mechanisms to gauge its actual impact.

This article is about the ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE fence project, not the physical fence project. Congress originally appropriated about $2 billion for the border fence. About half of that was used to build roughly 640 miles of physical fencing, the rest was pi**ed away on this "virtual fence" surveillance system that is being developed by -- tah dah -- Boeing, which has become a tapeworm on DHS like it is inside the Pentagon. Whether things work, or not, Boeing rakes in billions. In other words, we could have built several hundred more miles of actual, physical fence for the money that has been spend on the virtual, or we could have built a double-layer fence, as Duncan Hunter's original legislation called for, along the entire 640 miles where the Border Patrol said the physical fence was really needed. They have spend a billion dollars on the virtual fence and to show for it have an untested, 23-mile length of it in Arizona. We should have just contracted it out to the Israelis, and it would be up and running by now.

If you would like to see the physical fence, and parts of it are pretty impressive, go to this link:

http://americanpatrol.com/ABP/SURVEYS/BORDER-2009/Border-Main-20009.html