Meat our illegal friends
In an odd and vaguely disturbing twist on the growing national problem of Identity Theft, 1,000+ immigrations officials swarmed into packing plants owned by Swift and company and arrested a gaggle of illegal aliens. The weird twist to this story is that the charge was identity theft. It turned out that many of the illegal workers were using stolen Social Security numbers to get hired. Apparently the agents checked everyone at all of the plants, seperating the legals from the nons on the spot, effectively shutting the company down for the day, while their workers were culled and processed, although hopefully the metaphor ends there.
So my first thought when reading this story was why do I have take my shoes off at airports? If the government can't spot a huge amount of illegal aliens who have stolen identities so often that it's became an employment method for an entire industry for crissakes, then who cares what's in my shoes? Clearly it's not hard to get into the US across the borders. Clearly Social Security numbers are a horrible identification method. Clearly the Feds are clueless, even with the help of their trusty megamillion computer systems--this decade's sop to the defense contracting industry.
If we can't stop illegal aliens how can we hope to catch terrorists?
I live in Herndon, Virginia, an incorporated town near Dulles airport in the Washington, DC area. Up until a few years ago, the biggest controversies in this burb were whether to pay for a dog walking park and how to get the subway to stop out here. In the last few years it's become one of the hotspots in the illegal alien problem as the percentage of illegals in the town has risen dramatically in recent years to a double digit number. A controversy last year over a day laborer's site catapaulted the town to national prominence as the town divided into two camps fueled by outside wingnut agitators. Last spring, the mayor and town council of Herndon, reasonable people, were swept aside by rabid Know-Nothings who goose-stepped into office on the strength of a single issue--dealing with illegal immigrants living in the town.
Throughout this controversy, I bemusedly watched the furor and wondered not why or when, but how? How had 5-10,000 people crossed the Rio Grande and made their way across much of the United States and ended in the Northeast corner in Herndon, Virginia?
What does that say about our National Security?
Posted on December 13, 2006
