What If We Walled Off America?

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There has been a lot of talk the past year about building a wall between the US and Mexico, thereby sealing our borders. This weekend, an art installation was put up in Laguna Beach. It was called "1/4 Mile Arc" and consisted of gorgeous mirrored poles. It was actually pretty interesting and I plan to go back tomorrow morning to watch them take the art installation down. However, as I looked at this photo of the poles in the sand, I realized that this is what it would take to actually close our borders ... a solid wall along every beach in America. There is already a very secure wall between California and Mexico ... but it does no good because people can arrive by boat. A year ago, a boat dropped off a group of people during the International Surfing Championship in Huntington Beach. There were police and television cameras that witnessed it, but with thousands of people at the beach that day, the boat passengers simply mingled into the crowd and couldn't be found. Their nationality could not be determined. A few years before that, a group of teenage girls having a pajama party at a beach house saw a group of Asian men being dropped off by boat in the middle of the night. The men swam to shore and began walking into Laguna Beach. The girl hosting the party woke her parents, the Dad called the police and they arrived quickly ... but too late to catch any of the men, who had already disappeared into town. Earlier this year, a boat full of drugs from Mexico was caught off the coast of MAINE, so full of contraband boats from other countries are not confined to California. In addition, small abandoned boats from Mexico are found all along the California coast, as well as the coastal states that surround the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, last year alone three abandoned boats were found on the beach at Camp Pendleton Marine Base. Apparently, the immigrants have no qualms about slipping onshore under the noses of the U.S. Marine Corp. So ... the way I see it ... the only way to actually seal our borders is to build a wall around our entire country, closing off ALL 22,000 miles of our beaches. The posts in the photo above are attractive. They are made of mirrors. I don't think an actual coastal wall would be nearly as pretty ... and there certainly would not be gaps between the posts to allow us to slip into the water to swim or surf. Is that what we want? Perhaps we need to explore better ways to deal with immigration ... because a wall between Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico is not going to be much more than a PR stunt.