What Would Sun Tsu Do ... ?

Cross posted from Red Hot Cuppa Politics

For those who are unfamiliar with the Art of War, Sun Tsu was an ancient Chinese general, who probably wrote the definitive analyses of strategy in warfare.

Gary Gagliani is a master of Sun Tsu strategy; I like to read his WarriorClassBlog, since he analyses current events through the very interesting lense of SunTsu:

For example, Gagliani disagrees with President Bush that deportation of millions of illegals can't be done.

From WarriorClassBlog: (red highlighting mine -- FB)

Strategy requires doing a little simple arithmetic. You break big goals down into small, bite-sized goals that can be easily reach in a small amount of time given your available resources. This allows you to take the first steps on a larger campaign to see if those steps work. As time goes on, you learn to leverage your progress into larger and larger steps.

For example, I read today Bush's statement that "mass deportation" of illegal aliens was impossible. On the contrary, such a "mass deportation" program is relatively simple if you break it into small bites, and simple arithmetic tells us that, without such a program, no other solution to illegal immigration will work. Sun Tzu said that if you want people to stay away, you must threaten them with danger. If there is no danger for illegal aliens in coming or staying here, nothing else Congress does on immigration will matter.

Let us start with the logistics. Does a "mass deportation" program have to move 11 million people? Or would the simple existence of any reasonably designed program of deportation, coupled with an equally reasonable legal immigration program, convince 11 million illegals that they are better off moving out of the country on their own and then applying for legal entry?

While 11 million certainly seems like a large number–if you don't want to analyze it–there are almost a million full-time law enforcement officers in America. (There were 800,000 in 2000 and I assume that number has gone up since 9/11.) If we think about doing this job in a 10-15 year period, this means that each law enforcement officer would only have to apprehend one illegal alien a year to make it work. One illegal alien arrest a year per full-time paid law enforcement officer. That is all. Given the number of illegals in the country, does this really seem impossible? The average person probably runs into on illegal alien a month. If that person is in law enforcement, all they have to do make one arrest per year. (Doesn't one arrest per month per officer seem possible? In that case, you are talking about 11 million arrests in a ONE year!)

Again, a 10-15 year program means moving out approximately 3,000 people a day. If we had ten exit processing centers on the southern border. This means each center would be responsible for moving out 300 people a day, 30 people an hour in a ten hour workday. (A typical Las Vegas resort handles thousands of people a day.) Given the size of law enforcement in the US, these numbers are pretty trivial. Regularly scheduled trains and busses could carry illegals from throughout the country back these processing stations on the border.

Since we want to give illegals an incentive to leave on their own, we would set up the deportation system to penalize deported illegals in various ways. You could make them pay an additional fine (equal to about half of what a coyote charges to bring them into the US) before they could reenter the US legally. You could put the exit centers in inconvenient locations where they would have to work to get back to cities. (This would also put pressure on Mexico to handle the influx, which seem like turnabout is fair play.) If you wanted to put even more pressure on them, you could do even more like confiscate their money as proceeds from illegal activities.

Think of this as a quota system. If a local police department has 20 officers, their quota would be responsible for apprehending 20 illegals aliens a year to qualify for any federal funding they are currently getting. In addition, the federal government could offer a bounty of $1,000 for each illegal apprehended (a billion dollars a year funding) to the local offices. Since illegal aliens aren't distributed equally throughout the country, a quota trading system would allow one department to buy credits from another but with the apprehending department would get all the bounties.

Since all strategic moves are part of a larger system. You have to ask how a given strategy affects the behavior of everyone else in the system. This is actually what separates good strategy from stupid strategy. Without any real threat of an active deportation system, people will continue to seek illegal entry. Even given reasonable quotas in legal immigration system, there would still be every incentive to jump the line by jumping the border without such a deportation system.

However, just the implementation of a "mass deportation" system would give people an incentive to leave on their own. If illegals felt that they were actively being hunted, their lives here would be a much more difficult. Such a program would probably pay for itself because if illegal aliens knew that they were being actively hunted by everyone in law enforcement, they would avoid using most government services.

Instructive, and enlightening -- also, about half of those 12 million are supposed to pay taxes, so doesn't that mean the IRS knows where they are ... ?

While Republican Senators two-step away from their constituents, there's a case before the Supreme Court today:

The court will hear a case in which one of the nation's largest carpet manufacturers, Mohawk Industries, is accused of conspiring to hire illegal immigrants to reduce labor costs.

In a novel legal argument, current and former workers of the company are seeking to file suit against their bosses under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, to prove the company illegally conspired with an outside employment agency to hire undocumented workers to keep legal workers' wages low.

The use of RICO, normally associated with organized crime and gangs, alarms the business community, because the act allows triple damages against companies in violation

Well, we'll see. Bush has managed to put a couple of terrific new Supreme Court judges on the bench.

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let us know at what level you would like to participate.**

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