Wiggling Through the Virtual Fence

Preznit Bush may have a fairly moderate view on immigration but he seems to be using the recent crisis as an opportunity to offer more profit to defense contractors by asking for bids to install a “virtual fence” along the border using "unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection equipment."
Today the Prez appeared in Yuma, Arizona for his photo op which featured him riding in a dune buggy along the US Mexican border where the virtual fence will be constructed. This immigration thing and virtual fence brings back a couple of memories. The first is that we’ve tried the virtual fence before. Around 1967 during the Vietnam War when the US Air Force, CIA and Special Forces weren’t able to stop the flow of material down the Ho Chi Mihn Trail, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered a sort of virtual fence built. The monitoring center for this fence was at Nakhon Phenom Royal Thai Air Base where I was a guest along with a couple thousand other airmen. We watched as a huge clearing was made in the jungle and a multimillion dollar building was constructed. The fence wasn’t put into operation until after I left Thailand. But I heard about it. Essentially what we did was air drop a lot of ceramic motion detectors along the trail and intelligence personnel in the big building at NKP listened for sounds of trucks and men. When they heard them they called in air strikes. The fence cost a lot and didn’t work very well. It’s hard to even find out anything about it. Bush’s fence will probably work as poorly and determined folk like Alberto Gonzales' grandparents will no doubt figure out a way to wiggle through. 
My other recollection goes way back to the late forties when, as a very small boy, I would go to a labor camp with my grandfather early on Monday mornings to look for Manuel. Manuel was a Mexican guy in his late twenties who worked on my grandfather’s ranch in the San Juaquin Valley. He worked there for several years. Manuel was usually pretty hung over on Monday and it was always hard to coax him out of his cot in the squalid little shack where he lived a couple miles down the road. Manuel was a “wetback” and spent much of the year in California earning money which he sent or carried back to Mexico. He was a hard worker who usually worked nights as an irrigator (nights because there was less evaporation of the precious water). Manuel had a job because he was needed. This was at the end of the Bracero Program and Manuel might have been a legal visitor. It seems to me that if we are really serious about stopping illegal immigration  the quickest way to do it would be to prosecute people who employ these folks. If my grandfather had been in jeopardy of going to jail or paying a large fine I doubt that we would have been searching for Manuel on Monday mornings.