Congress has been pushing to pass bill that turns border security into a matter of zero tolerance: by 2020, every single person entering the US from Mexico illegally must be apprehended. Every. Single. One If even a single unauthorized immigrant gets across the border without being caught, DHS will get hit with penalties — getting everything from overtime pay to government aircraft access taken away from them. Youre probably going to be hearing more about this idea in the coming months, as both the legislative battle between Congress and the president over immigration reform and the 2016 presidential election heat up. The border bill was scheduled for a House vote the week of January 26, though its been pulled from the schedule. The Senate has introduced a similar bill, and might try to pass it soon — maybe even making it a condition of Department of Homeland Security funding. And the Republican primary candidates whove talked about the border at all seem to see guaranteeing 100 percent security as an obvious first step. (One candidate, doctor Ben Carson, said that the next president should promise to seal the border within his first year in office.) But the zero-tolerance standard is plainly unrealistic, according to experts. Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute, who worked for the Congressional Research Service on measuring border security, says that no serious student of the border could possibly believe that the GOPs standard is a good idea. Think of this bill, Rosenblum suggests, as the border-security equivalent of No Child Left Behind. Border agents have a limited amount of time to meet a testing goal: in this case, zero people cross the border illegally and get away. (By the same token, NCLB required schools to reach 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2013 — though most of them didnt.) Theyre given some resources to help meet that goal, but that doesnt change the fact that the goal itself holds agents accountable for factors that might not be in their control. And if they dont meet the goal, theyre punished — which creates incentives to juke the stats. As Rosenblum says, Whenever you have high-stakes testing, theres an incentive for teachers to cook the books. That hasnt stopped immigration hardliners from attacking the bill themselves — because their definition of border security isnt limited to whos apprehended at the border. So to understand the fight, you need to understand how the government actually measures border security — and what a zero-tolerance mandate would actually do. AS I say who would it be a disaster too ? The Illegal Alien Criminals and their supporters...........? I bet.......... vox/2015/1/26/7899337/border-security
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 03:43:03 +0000
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