As I was sitting in traffic on an interstate highway the other day, the entire solution to the border control problem became clear. Why don't we build a west-to-east-to-west super highway along our US-Mexico border?
Instead of using public funds to pay for a south-to-north International Mid-Continent Trade Corridor between Laredo and the Canadian border invisioned by the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) U.S./Mexico Border Planning Group, why don't we use that money to build a limited-access east-to-west-to-east road from Brownsville to San Diego and back to Brownsville? We can call this new east-west superhighway "Opportunity Road" or "Interstate O." How will that stop illegal border crossings, you ask. I'm getting there. Just hear me out.
"Interstate O" or "Opportunity Road" is a better idea for many reasons. First, it provides an "opportunity road" to move pass the current debate on how to fund a border wall and whether we need a wall or fence or just a few cameras here and there to record border crossings of the million new illegals that come across the border every year. That's just too many options for our simple-minded Congressional and Senate folk to get past. We need a tried and true approach they can sink their teeth into, namely "pork project."
Building a highway is the best pork -- excuse me, public works project -- ever dreamed up. After they finished the railways across the US in the 1890s, they started in on road building, and they've been at it ever since. Interstate highway building, road building pork on steriods, worked in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and it's still working in the 2000s. In fact, the very same interstate highway where I sat in a traffic jam last week has been underconstruction in that very same spot since I first moved to this major American city in the mid-1970s. They had it pretty much built by 1980. Then they tore it up to to build it wider. They got that built, then they tore it up again to build it wider still. They've been rebuilding this same section of interstate highway continously for the past 30 years that I personally know about. If they ever get this road built, it will be a heck of a highway. But, for the past 30 years, it's been one hell of a traffic jam! And the beauty of my idea for Opportunity Road is that the same thing will happen with it! It will stop traffic; it will provide jobs Americans don't want to do close to where Mexicans want to do them.
Building highways provides good-paying benefit-laden middle-American jobs for the US construction bosses, and it gives road-building corporations lots of no-benefits low-wages jobs "Americans won't do" to keep Mexicans working. In the case of Opportunity Road, it will give Mexican workers a place to do the jobs Americans won't do much closer to home than if we built a road from Laredo to Duluth.A quick look at all the "numbered roads" in the US, both interstate highways and state roads, show that there are no shortage of routes from Laredo to Duluth already. In fact, Interstate 35 starts in Laredo and goes all the way to the Canadian border. It also shows there are no continuous highways between San Diego and Brownsville along our southern border. Which part of the US has a greater need for NAFTA's economic development and USDOT dollars?
Highways are good ways to bring economic development to blighted areas. Gas stations and fast-food resturants every five miles along an interstate highway soon bring towns every 10 to 20 miles, each with its own Wal-Mart and Home Depot and McDonald's and KFC and Taco Bell . . . This is an interstate highway we're talking about. If we build it, opportunity will come. Both sides of Opportunity Road, north of the border and south of the border, will soon be laden with all the economic development they can handle. Both sides of the highway will quickly develop loads and loads of minimum wage no-benefit service jobs just as soon as it is completed; both sides will have public works projects jobs while it is being built; both the US and Mexico will have sustaning revenue from tolls to support their border control bureaucrats.
Interstate Highways Encourage Tourism. Think of all the scenic beauty between San Diego and El Paso that can be developed into tourist traps. There must be Indian village ruins and Conquistador Spanish church ruins scattered every 50 miles along the route, plus there's all that western landscape beauty to behold. The scenery must be as good in the southern parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as it in the northern parts of the states. It must be just as pretty across the border in Bajo California Norte, Sonora, Chihuahua, Cocahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas. Tourists always need new scenic places to visit. When they visit, think Motel 6, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Suites . . . oil change places, car wash places, laundramats . . . (now we're building towns!) Once the route enters Texas, the Rio Grande is a natural wonder, perfect for the development of "river walk" towns like San Antonio all along its path -- I see another 6-Flags, and maybe another Disney World! If you build it, they will come. We learned that from that baseball movie.
Highways, specifically freeways, are perhaps the best way to control traffic, and if you control traffic, you control people. Only people in motor vehicles are allowed. People in motor vehicles get on feeways and can't get off, except at an exit. People get on on one side of the freeway and can't get to the other side, except at an exit. It's even possible to build fences along highways to make sure people on foot don't wander into traffic. After a few years of operation, there will be enough truck traffic from the ports in San Diego and Brownsville and all those new Mexican ports the Chinese are building that no sane person would think of trying to cross Opportunity Road on foot. And after all that economic development south of the border, why would they want to?
Exit points on freeways are good places to install border-check booths. Border check booths are good places to check immigration papers and search for non-permitted transport items, such as guns and drugs and illegal immigrants. Those people we want to exit off Opportunity Road, north or south, the ones with valid immigration documents, we allow through the exit/immigration check points to whichever side of the border they are trying to enter. Those who can't produce valid documents get funneled back onto Opportunity Road so that they can continue driving from San Diego to Brownsville to San Diego to Brownsville.If we want to make Opportunity Road even more high-speed-truck friendly to get NAFTA goods to market faster, we can make it "limited-access," meaning that the places to get on and off are few and far between. Every developed country in the world had limited access roads; many of these are toll roads that employ high tech toll road technology. We do not need our homeland security spending billions of dollars to develop camera to record illegals crossing the desert when we can use existing toll revenue generating technology and effectively block the desert crossing at the same time. Viva Opportunity Road!
How do we pay for Opportunity Road? Simple. Make it a "revenue neutral."So, how do we do that? The quickest answer is to redirect all funds allocated to the south-north Mid-Continent NAFTA Corridor. Unlike the "bridge to nowhere," the proposed new NAFTA-Corridor route goes from somewhere to somewhere along almost the same path as other roads now go. Surely it would be better to spend the money to build a road where no road now goes than to build it alongside a good interstate highway. I-35 has done a good job for years getting goods out of Mexico and into the US homeland. It gets NAFTA goods north to I-10, I-20, I-30, I-40, etc, etc, all the way into Canada, and along all thoses east and west crossing interstates into all of the US.
Sure there are bottlenecks that can be improved by limiting access or building by-passes around major cities, but those fixes would be low-budget fixes compared to building an entirely new road to transport goods from Mexico to Canada and back. Many US towns and cities are there only because the current interstate system is there. Once the new NAFTA road bypasses them, they will be history, another verse to the Route 66 song. That doesn't sound like it's good for the Old USA. And just what is the rush to get all that Mexican-made and/or China-made-Mexican-imported stuff to Canada anyway? Can't the Canadians import their stuff directly from China? Why should we put our cities and towns out of business so they can enjoy economic growth?
A road is cheaper than a wall to nowhere. A wall will cost billions to build, billions to maintain. It won't solve the economic-development woes of the millions of Mexican citizens now crossing the border to find work in the United States, and it won't pay its own way. The Trans-Texas leg of the International Mid-Continent Corridor is already underway. World Net Daily reports that the first leg, from the Mexico-Texas to the Texas-Oklahoma border has $184 billion heading to Texas: "The stretch through Texas, running parallel to Interstate 35, would be the first link in a 4,000-mile, $184 billion network. Supporters say the corridors are needed to handle the expected NAFTA-driven boom in the flow of goods to and from Mexico." Well, maybe not. There just aren't that much in the way of US-made goods going to Mexico, now, or likely to be in the future. The US doesn't make goods anymore. We're a consumer nation, a service enconomy. Why make it, when the Chinese can make it cheaper?
Why should US taxpayers bear the cost of building a road that primarily benefits Mexico and Canada, expecially when the citizens in the towns along the existing I-35 in Texas oppose the new NAFTA corridor. Maybe it's time to use some of that $184 billion to build a road to opportunity along the US southern border and let Canada and Mexico figure out how best to get their goods back and forth. We're going through more states to get from the Mexican border at Laredo to the Canadian border. Each state along the proposed north-south NAFTA corridor already has a good north-south interstate highway system. Each of those states are slated to get around $200 billion for their leg of the project -- possibly the reason those states haven't protested the project too much except for a little "re-route around forest and wetland" controversy and the massive concern expressed by business along existing highways. Since there are fewer states to get through to build Opportunity Road, we ought to be able to save billions and billions of dollars (remember when that sounded like real money?). If that's not enough money, then the US government can float "transportation bonds," sort of like "war bonds," and for the same reason -- to protect our nation from foreign invasion. If that's still not enough, maybe Mexico can borrow money from the World Bank to build its toll booths.
It should be noted that not even the truckers like the idea of the NAFTA Corridor roadway, because they don't like the idea of paying the tolls that would be charged on the new roadway. When has it ever mattered what any US worker thinks about new burdens that prevent them from earning a decent living?
Toll booth reveneue would make Opportunity Road self-supporting. If tolls are a good way to finace a north-south NAFTA Corridor, then they ought to be a good way to finance an west-east Opportunity Road. If the numbers crunching indicates a decent economic return, it may be possible to make this a private enterprise operation, much like the US ports operations. Public-private financing is a proven approach to highway building. Prephaps our friendly mid-east partners in ports operations would be interested in participating in building Opportunity Road across our southern border.
I'm betting that even if the federal government won't step up to the plate with construction financing, if this became a state and local revenue bond issue, the good people of California, Nevada, Arizonia, New Mexico, and Texas would quickly vote the money to build Opportunity Road through their blighted southern deserts if for no other reason than border control. Since federal, state, and local governments would be saving on health-welfare cost for illegals as well as crime-fighting in their towns and communities, money that is never coming back to their local economy, you'd get revenue bond money like you wouldn't believe. Toll revenue would be used to pay back the bond holders. Opportunity Road could be self-supporting state highways with "reasonable" tolls at every exit north or south. A brief inspection of vehicle and person and documents while collecting the toll free would go a long way to both getting and paying for the cost of border security.
Building a road instead of a wall saves lives. The death toll for illegals now dying in the desert or otherwise undertaking risky border crossings in hopes of finding work in the US will be substantially reduced. Just building the road would provide Mexican jobs where they are most needed -- along the Mexico-US border. By only allowing safety inspected vehicles on Opportunity road, we could cut the number of traffic deaths.How do we make vehicle inspection happen? Simple. As we now do in most of the US cities, we require inspection stickers on vehicles who want to enter Opportunity Road. Those inspection stickers could be purchased for a reasonable fee at any "toll authority" station inside Mexico or inside the US. If vehicles are not allowed on the road without an inspection sticker, and they can't travel from one side of the border to the other without an inspection sticker, people will buy inspection stickers. And if they can't exit without paying the toll and providing valid immigration documents, people will pay the toll and provide documents.
To assure Mexico's cooperation in the project, first we do as we always do with road building projects -- use Mexican labor. Then, all vehicle inspection fees and all exit tolls beyond what is needed to maintain Opportunity Road would go to the "Joint US-Mexico-Border Control Agency," a "private enterprise" organization much like the US Post Office. We can staff this new Joint Agency with Homeland Security border control agents and Mexico border control agents, sort of like Bush's plan for joint US-Iraqi troops providing security in Bagdad. The "Agency" splits all fees collected, so my money is on Mexico doing their fair share of vehicle inspections and exit toll collection from their side of the border.
The beauty of this kind of system for controlling the border is that we're not reinventing the wheel and we're not putting up walls that will get torn down or tunneled under. We know how to build highways. We know how to build limited-access highways. We know how to build toll roads. We know how to scan vehicles and occupants on roadways. And so does Mexico. A vehicle-occupant checking system is now being instituted agains US citizens by Mexico, so one-half of this new agency's personnel are already trained, and the Mexicans can train the US border control toll-booth personnel. Check out what our Security and Propserity folk in our government have to say about why we need to support Mexico's new border security system. If it's good for US citizens crossing into Mexico, then it ought to be good for Mexican citizens coming into the US.
So, what do you think? Be the first in your neighborhood to travel Opportunity Road. Send an email to your Congressman/woman or Senator and tell them what you think about federal transportation dollars being spent on a Mid-Continent NAFTA road and how you think they ought to be spending those dollars. Remind them that you changed the faces in Washington last November and you can do it again if they can't or won't listen to the voters. The people who want a NAFTA corridor are telling your elected officials what they think, so maybe it's time you put your two cents in. It's your tax dollars they're spending and it's up to you to control how they spend your money. If you don't like my ideas, propose some of your own. Don't tell me, tell the people who matter -- your elected officials -- the people who have a blank check on your account. Join the nationwide term limits rally every election! Register to vote, then vote!
