[ahenry]

I’d be happy to support and even petition for, troops on the border once six things have been met (BTW the first three apply to every instance where gov’t intervention is considered as an option).
1) Gov’t is granted the authority to do such things (check)
2) There is a true and necessary need for such gov’t intervention (debatable, but possibly check)
3) The private sector cannot acceptably solve the problem (again debatable but I’ll give it to you, check)
4) Other, less intrusive solutions have failed (no way has this been done)
5) The initial measures are at the lowest level of gov’t and the lowest level of intervention possible (definitely no check)
6) Escalation of gov’t involvement (i.e. from Border Patrol to military) only happens when the lesser methods cannot handle the problem (again no check)

If those six things were satisfied then I would be willing to consider the extremely dangerous (to our liberty) measure of putting troops on the border as a viable option to solving the “problem of illegal immigration”. Since it could easily be argued that only one of those six have been met (constitutional authority) then you sure will not get me to support such a move. In fact I’d do everything within my power to keep it from happening. Troops on the border is a very, very dangerous move by the gov’t. It sets all sorts of precedents that I would just as soon not have set. The actual housing of troops down there in and of itself isn’t necessarily so dangerous (note the word necessarily), but it puts us on a road that I don’t want to tell my kids 20 or 30 years from now that I helped start. Ideas and actions have consequences and I don’t like the consequences of this idea.