Operation Lone Star

This is a federal responsibility

It’s difficult to blame Texas officials for this mess. They seem to want to do what the federales in Washington won’t do: Protect the nation’s borders. Like some of those National Guardsmen down on the Rio Grande might have heard in officer school: When nobody’s in charge, take charge.

The Biden administration got its win at the U.S. Supreme Court this week when the Supremes “cleared the way” to allow border patrol agents to cut and remove the concertina wire that Texas officials had ordered to be placed along the Rio Grande. The back-and-forth between the state and the feds, and all the filings by the various lawyers on different levels, started months ago. The Supremes ruled in the administration’s favor, 5-4, this week.

The administration had argued— and there’s no proof it isn’t right—that this razor wire interfered with border patrol agents as they tried to do their various jobs. Some of those jobs include chasing illegal aliens. Sometimes the officers need to get to a boat at a dock that the Texas people had cut off with the wire. Sometimes they need to get to illegal aliens in distress—from cold, heat, or water. Sometimes these agents don’t have 30 minutes to cut through the concertina.

Sometimes the razor wire presents a health hazard itself, from illegals trying to go through it to border agents trying to push it out of the way. (For anybody who’s ever got their BDUs caught up in that stuff, it ain’t fun. Concertina will rip you to shreds, even if you’re just trying to handle it.)

We feel for Texas. But border control is a federal responsibility.

So why don’t the feds take responsibility?

There’s no denying that the country’s immigration system needs fixing. It may be impossible to make our borders airtight after years of neglect, but if a country’s going to have a border, it should have a border. And the national government ought to be in charge.

A good place to start would be to beef up the budget for Customs and Border Patrol. Then build a real border wall. Not necessarily a physical border wall, but a real one. Cameras and drones in the most secluded areas might work wonders without the cost of brick and wire. The paper said that U.S. agents recorded nearly 250,000 illegal crossings along the Rio Grande in December alone—the highest onemonth total ever. Please, somebody, tell us how that makes any sense.

Fences work. That’s why people put them around their homes. As the late, great Charles Krauthammer once put it: Fences are good not because people are unwelcoming, but because they want strangers to knock at their door before coming into their houses.

(No wonder Joe Biden can’t get over 50 percent in approval polls. The American people see this failure every day as the networks show people breaking our laws to get here.)

And while the border is being fixed, the feds (the administration, Congress) can fix policy.

1. Those brought to this country as children—aka Dreamers— should be allowed to come out of the shadows and become citizens. This is the only home they’ve ever known.

2. Their parents should be made to pay a fine, get on a path to citizenship by taking English classes, passing background checks, and going to the back of the line, which is only fair.

3. All talk of another amnesty, such as another Simpson-Mazzoli Act— passed during the Reagan years— should be off the table.

Immigration needs to be an orderly, open, rational process—and a legal one.

Instead, an underground economy and a new underclass has been allowed to grow beyond control. The whole system needs to be brought into the light of law and reason. It can be done, but only if we think in terms of practical solutions, not empty sloganeering. Till now we’ve been mainly just drifting, letting things fester.

We can meet this challenge. This nation of immigrants has done it before. Time and again. It’s almost the story of America.

We can do it if we resolve to solve this problem, not just fume about it.

And if the current administration will take charge.