Is The Fence Worth The Cost?

The New York Times editorial wrote an article entitled “Border Fantasies” which talks about the difficulties the border fence is experiencing and the money it is costing taxpayers. It is directed towards that wide spectrum of people who don’t believe spending billions of dollars on something investigators “concluded that there’s no good way of gauging the effectiveness of” is a good idea(New York Times, September 21, 2009). That argument is backed by an eight digit long budget that seems out of place given the current economic climate. Is a multi-billion dollar symbol worth what it really buys?

The article ties the fence to the Bush administration, a tactic dating the proposition immediately. Of course, any new idea for immigration reform will eventually be dated and will most definitely cost a lot of money but a fence is not a solution. A solution will come when resources are spent centering at the heart of the problem instead of cleaning up the mess made by current geo-political and economic occurrences.

Any solution will take time, but the fence is already losing time. The entire project is seven years behind schedule, and when we get into solutions that span generations it is probably a good idea to reframe and evaluate ideologies that may not also span generations.

I am not sure if the article intentionally directing it so but Texans in particular should be interested in this article because the fence spans from San Diego, to Brownsville Texas. Perhaps the people in Congress should be more concerned with the people crossing the border than the technology used to monitor it.

Texas Unemployment Rate Rises

Despite many people's views that Texas' strong economy is outside the realm of national recession, Texas' unemployment rate experienced a slight rise this month. Although this shows that the nationwide recession is in fact having an impact on the Texas economy, Texas' unemployment rate is still far below the national trend. The Dallas Morning News reported that although the employment of financial and education and health services are on an upward swing, other industries are still below what one would consider healthy in better economic times. This is important because although many consider Texas and its economy something to itself, we are not beyond the repercussions of an economic recession.