Guest Post by Concept Junkie
A regular reader who is helplessly addicted to concepts did not actually intend this as a guest post, but merely a comment. Nonetheless, I thought it both wise and a testament to American ingenuity, so I here reprint it. Someone had the effrontery to suggest that it was a lack of technical ability rather than a lack of political will that prevented the Federal government from doing its job securing our borders.
Concept Junkie writes:
If we can put a supercomputer with high-speed telecommunications capability, access to global satellite positioning, various media capabilities and sensors, basically a Star Trek tricorder minus the made-up physics… into the pockets of almost everyone in the country, then it should be possible for the government to figure out how to screen and process an applicant for entry into the country with less paperwork and effort than it took to complete the Louisiana Purchase.
There are thousands of miles of border? The Chinese built a 1500-mile wall thousands of years ago, and we have a little more technology available to us these days.
We have literally dug a canal through a continent, dammed up rivers, brought mountains low and raised valleys. We smash atoms to power our XBoxes. We tease our cats with lasers and heat our Hot Pockets with microwaves. We harness quantum mechanics to look at pictures of Yvonne Craig. We have cars that can drive themselves. Any one of us can communicate with a significant number of the people in the world in real time for negligible cost. I could find a satellite image of your backyard in about 3 minutes if I knew your name and enough to uniquely identify you. My phone tells me traffic conditions for my daily commute in real time, and I never had to tell it where I work or live. I’ll read about a new book while eating lunch at work, buy it and read the first chapter on my tablet without leaving my seat (Amazon is proving very dangerous for me).
So I don’t buy that keeping the monthly number of people entering this country under the size of a small town needs to be “hard”. I don’t buy that we can’t screen these folks to find obvious criminals, communicable diseases or other problems with much more manpower and paperwork than it took our employers to do the same for you and me.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
