President George W. Bush went on prime time television Monday night to talk about immigration reform. “We will fix the problems created by illegal immigration, and we will deliver a system that is secure, orderly, and fair,” he said. So he proposes to send the National Guard to patrol the border, a task for which they are ill-prepared and not at all trained.

The National Guard proposal has come up before. Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff discussed it last December with Bill O’Reilly. “Well, the National Guard is really, first of all, not trained for that mission. I mean, the fact of the matter is the border is a special place. There are special challenges that are faced there,” he had said. “I think it would be a horribly over-expensive and very difficult way to manage this problem.”

He also said that the National Guard would need to be deployed continuously for months on end and that an “enormous number” would be needed.

“So, in coordination with governors, up to 6,000 Guard members will be deployed to our southern border” for up to a year, Bush said. “After that, the number of Guard forces will be reduced as new Border Patrol agents and new technologies come online.”

Homeland security analyst Christian Beckner points out some serious problems with the proposal:

1. How are these Guardsmen going to be trained?
2. Where are they going to live?
3. Can the National Guard communicate with the Border Patrol?
4. How do the Border Patrol and National Guard work together?

These problems have to be worked out before the first deployment next month, but even if they are, Beckner calls it “a political proposal designed to grease the legislative skids in Congress, but one that will have little impact on border security, and even worse, is operationally flawed and quite likely to be a costly diversion from other border security priorities.”

Interested-Participant puts it a little more bluntly:

Unfortunately, the plan doesn’t stop people from sneaking into the U.S., it only catches more of them after they have entered. So, rather than fixing the leaky boat, we’re just going to employ more bailers. — Interested-Participant

“We’re a nation of laws, and we must enforce our laws,” Bush said. “We’re also a nation of immigrants, and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways.”

The National Guard isn’t going to help much. And while building a fence certainly would slow down illegal immigration, it’s a very unwise idea for other reasons. The first thing that needs to happen to get a handle on illegal immigration is to make legal immigration easier. It’s almost impossible to legally immigrate into the U.S., and for those who attempt to go through the system, a monstrous, inefficient, unforgiving bureaucracy awaits. It’s no wonder millions of people bypassed the bureaucracy; it’s far too large and cumbersome.