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Officially November 30^th is the last day of the hurricane season, but with tropical storm Epsilon popping up today as tropical storm Delta came ashore in Morocco, it doesn’t look like everyone received the memo.

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Showing once again his inability to face people, the Shrubbery held a speech on immigration reform before an array of customs, immigration and border patrol officers at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.

Davis-Monthan is best known as the graveyard for old aircraft. You can see the rows, upon rows of aircraft from the Interstate as you drive by.

Again, he speaks on a military facility before a pre-selected audience. We have a shortage of people along the border, but dozens got time off to show up in uniform to act as a backdrop while the President of the United States compared their job to bass fishing.

I’m probably a bit uptight about this, but I don’t think it is appropriate to call our current policy “catch and release”.

If an undocumented individual is picked up, if they are determined to be Mexican, and if they waive a hearing, they are immediately transported back to Mexican control. If they are not Mexican, they are detained until they go through the deportation process.

If someone had improved our relations with the Mexican government, as they indicated they would, the system would probably be more effective. As things stand, the Mexican government has no reason to assist the current administration.

Of course, if the businesses that recruit undocumented workers faced real penalties, for example if certain large retailers were discouraged from using undocumented workers when building new Supercenters, and the government contractors hired to work in New Orleans lost their contracts for running buses down to Texas to bring back undocumented workers, things might improve.

The problem with building a fence from the Pacific to the Gulf, is that the contractors will probably hire undocumented workers to build it, and the smugglers will pay for unauthorized “gates” to be installed.

As for the “jobs that Americans don’t want”, how about paying a living wage for those jobs, something that doesn’t require living in a canyon or tent, and Americans might want the jobs.

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