On my recent trip from San Diego to Arizona I was using my GPS unit to navigate (I figured it was worth the expense if it helped me get out of the house and actually start taking my vacation hours) and I got a bit of a shock as I was heading out the I-8 toward Yuma.
I was so shocked that I took a picture of my GPS (left) to record the moment so that I could blog about it later. Sorry for the fuzziness of the photo, but I was driving and didn’t have time to manually focus my camera for such a close object (not that I’d know how to do that anyway).
I’d like to call your attention to three lines that are showing on the GPS screen. The first is the pinkish purple irregular line running from the top to the bottom of the screen. See it? That’s Interstate 8.
Right next to it is a dark line that is perfectly regular and also runs diagonally from top to bottom. Got that one? It’s the Mexican border.
Now look further to the right and observe the irregular yellow/orange line that mirrors Interstate 8. This line represents Mexican highway #2.
I’d also like to call your attention to a dark triangle that is located on the Interstate 8 line and that points toward the top of the screen. That represents the position of my pickup on the highway.
Now that you’ve got the lay of the land (so to speak), notice this: You see how close the pink line gets to the edge of the Mexican border? It seems to run right up to it, doesn’t it? And the tip of the triangle representing my truck seems to be touching the Mexican border as well. A couple of miles later, the tip of the triangle representing my truck was actually IN Mexico. (My truck wasn’t, of course, but the display icon for it was spilling over into Mexico.)
This gives you a sense of just how close a major American highway (a low-number interstate) is to the Mexican border–and how close a parallel Mexican highway (another low-number interstate) is to our interstate.
I mean, it would be very easy (in relative terms) to just drive up the Mexican interstate, cross the border, and have nearly immediate access to a U.S. interstate.
And bear in mind that there is NO FENCE out here. When you’re going east on I-8 and you look to your right, you’re looking DIRECTLY INTO MEXICO, with no barriers in the way (below).
Now, you might complain that the GPS screen doesn’t give you a sense of scale, so I’m prepared to help with that. Here’s a scan from my Southern California DeLorme atlas.
This is the same point that’s pictured on the GPS screen–the close pass of I-8 to the Mexican border just after the town of Jacumba (hah-come-bah).
I spliced the map’s scale into this picture so you can see just how close the interstate comes to the border at this point: It looks like about a mile and a quarter or 6600 feet (that’s about 2 kilometers for metric users).
So there you have it: At this point a major U.S. interstate is just two klicks from the Mexican border and NO FENCE.
But you might object that it’s rather rocky here and so the terrain is at least somewhat inhospitable to crossing naturally.
It’d be a moderate hike, as the mountains at this point are nothing like Everest and are easily climbable. You don’t need oxygen or anything (the elevation is only about 4000 feet above sea level).
But suppose you’re of a mind to think that the hills alone are enough to deter illegal aliens from entering here.
Okay, take a look at this map (click to enlarge):
This is a few miles further down I-8, near the Arizona border. In fact, it’s just a few miles west of Yuma, Arizona, just before you get to the Imperial Sand Dunes.
See how close it is here? (Be sure to look at the scale provided.)
It’s even CLOSER than the point near Jacumba!
Here Interstate 8 runs maybe a bit more than a quarter of a mile from the Mexican border, or 1400 feet. (That’s a bit over 400 meters for metric folks.)
And here there are NO mountains and we are right AT sea level, and once again there is NO FENCE.
You may hear people on the news talking about us having a porous, unsecured border, but the media isn’t telling you the half of it.
When you actually see it with your own eyes–when you look to your right and realize that you are looking right over into Mexico, with mile after mile of unsecured border and not even natural barriers like mountains in the way–you realize just how vulnerable to penetration the United States is.
It’s no wonder that there are over 10,000,000 illegal aliens in this country.
And at least some of those are likely to be terrorists.
Oh . . . and the immigration check points they have on I-8?
They’re closed half the time.
I didn’t get stopped at the checkpoints near Jacumba, either coming or going. They were all closed up.
MAKES YOU WANT TO MAIL A BRICK TO CONGRESS SO THEY CAN GET STARTED ON A WALL, DOESN’T IT?
