Texas

Governor Abbott has just signed legislation criminalizing undocumented immigrants who are in Texas, making this crime a misdemeanor, and making it a felony if they refuse voluntarily to return to Mexico. Supposedly, this is to correct the failure of the federal government to control the situation of immigrants streaming across the Texas-Mexico border. The problem is, from the standpoint of the governor, that all the millions of undocumented immigrants in Texas have to do to bankrupt and shut down the state of Texas, is all turn themselves in simultaneously, and refuse to return to Mexico. Since it costs fifty thousand dollars a year to incarcerate prison inmates, we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year that the Texas Governor has just put his state on the hook for. This makes one wonder if the Texas governor is, in fact, a direct descendent of Bud Abbott, of the Abbott and Costello comedy team. Of course, Bud Abbott was the straight man, he wasn't supposed to give the punch line!

Now, there are indeed ways to slow down the number of undocumented immigrants to a trickle, although not entirely, even along such a long border as Texas has with Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of heavily armed troops, with orders to shoot to kill, mines along the border, etc., these would indeed work wonders. The Russians found the Berlin Wall worked pretty well, most of the time, anyway. And, currently, the Israelis aren't bad, much of the time, anyway, in controlling the Palestinians. Problem is, it's terribly expensive, and it creates a state of war between you and your neighbors, in this case, Mexico. In Europe, I believe they really would like to limit the number of Muslim immigrants they're getting from Africa and the Middle East, but, they're finding it very hard to do.

So, in the U.S., we resort to joke laws intended to create the misimpression that the government is actually doing something, when, actually, they're not doing anything at all, other than causing problems and costing money. Texas is also very proud of its "secure" locations for producing so-called "Real ID" -- making it impossible for citizens to pick up their driver's licenses by producing them at inaccessible locations from which they are mailed. Obviously, this has no security function whatsoever, it's merely inconvenient and inefficient -- what the bureaucrats call "win-win"! And, in Texas, we can see precisely how effective this is in reducing undocumented immigration! Of course, the more of a mess they make, the more they claim this justifies messing things up even further.

Take Homeland Security at airports -- please! Now the events of September 11, 2001 were quite specifically caused by FAA policies at the time, for pilots to always cooperate with hijackers, because there's no way a few men armed with box cutters could have overwhelmed hundreds of passengers. The passengers and pilots were being told by the FAA to cooperate with the 911 terrorists, and that's the only reason the twin towers went down. Now, having messed up completely, Homeland Security has now used this excuse to grope pretty females at airports on a regular basis, for reasons of "security". Nice work if you can get it!