Remember all the controversy a few months back about building a fence along the US border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants? Some $2.4 billion has been spent since 2005 on a still-unfinished project to erect more than 600 miles of new fence along the US-Mexico border – a finding that is being met with surprise, anger, and consternation by immigrant groups and at least some border residents. The entire length of the Mexico-United States border is 1952 miles long. [Border Fence Project]

Last September the [Christian Science Monitor] reported that “$6.5 billion will be needed to maintain the new fencing over the next 20 years. So far, it has been breached 3,363 times, requiring $1,300 for the average repair.”

The Anderson Cooper video demonstrates that the border fence does not or will not work. The cost of building and maintaining the fence is exorbitant. Those billions of dollars can be put to better use. Health care reform certainly comes to mind. If you add in the billions of dollars spent, and still being spent in the war on Iraq, was a waste of money and lives. The cost of the war in Afghanistan is questionable as well. The United States has, during my lifetime alone, spent trillions of dollars in war. My lifetime experience includes World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The United States, as a nation, seems enamored with war. Only in World War II were we attacked by another country—Japan. We were not attacked by the countries of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

That tunnel under the border fence with Anderson Cooper was located at Otay Mesa which is at Tijuana. The tunnel would have permitted a flow of illegal immigrants and narcotics into the United States from Mexico.

Last spring President Barack Obama’s budget blueprint canceled plans to extend the border fence along the U.S.-Mexico border beyond the 670 miles already completed or planned, symbolically breaking with a much-heralded approach to border security advocated by President George W. Bush. [Dallas Morning News] That should end the waste of money for the ineffective border fence project.

The US-Mexico border will re-emerge again as soon as Congress can get back to it from their arguing over health care reform. The question about security of the border will center around illegal immigration and Mexican drug cartel’s entry into the United States. [Politico]

It may well be that the security of the United States is in more danger from the drug cartels than either illegal immigration, terrorists or Al Qaida in Afghanistan/Pakistan. You might want to add citizens of the United States who are addicted to drugs and buy them from the drug cartels as threats to national security.

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