Illegal Alien Trash
No, not the people, of course (who are all God’s children).
I’m referring to what those entering this country illegally are leaving behind as they cross the Arizona desert (HT Return of the Conservatives):
After three years of cleanups, the federal government has achieved no better than a 1 percent solution for the problem of trash left in Southern Arizona by illegal border-crossers.
Cleanup crews from various agencies, volunteer groups and the Tohono O’odham Nation hauled about 250,000 pounds of trash from thousands of acres of federal, state and private land across Southern Arizona in 2002 to 2005, says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
But that’s only a fraction of the nearly 25 million pounds of trash thought to be out there.
The estimated tab for cleanup is $62.9 million over 5 years (roughly $13 million a year, a number that will come in handy later). It’s not stated, but it would appear that the estimate naively assumes that there will be no new trash. Otherwise, I would expect scene descriptions such as these to continue even if consistent full-scale cleanups commence and continue:
Most of the garbage is left at areas where entrants wait to be picked up by smugglers. The accumulation of disintegrating toilet paper, human feces and rotting food is a health and safety issue for residents of these areas and visitors to public lands, a new BLM report says.
“It’s particularly serious in areas where there are livestock,” said Robin Hoover, pastor of the First Christian Church in Tucson and president of Humane Borders, a group that puts water tanks in the desert for the entrants and coordinates monthly cleanups of Ironwood Monument and other sites.
“I’ve even found injectable drugs in the desert,” he said. “It’s rare when we find that kind of stuff, but there’s tons of over-the-counter medication out there. If some cow comes along and eats a bunch of pills, that would be a real sick cow.”
Mr. Hoover (or Rev. Hoover, as he might prefer it) doesn’t seem to get the connection: As word of his “compassionate” group’s water tanks spreads, more illegals attempt to gain entry into this country through the desert. More illegal leave more trash behind, increasing the cleanup costs and exacerbating the ongoing environmental disaster, and making the potential livestock industry problems he described more likely.
This means Mr. Hoover and others are aiding and abetting at least two crimes: illegal entry and littering. Oh, littering is not a “real” crime? Think again — If any of us got caught even once in the act of doing what illegals crossing the desert are clearly doing routinely, we’d be lighter in the wallet by as much as $500, and in some states would face jail time.
The silence of environmental groups who have certainly watched this systematic spoilage take place over many years is very telling. There’s no big, bad industry to blame for this, so I guess to them it must not be an important problem.
Ah, but there is a big country directly and indirectly encouraging its citizens to enter the US illegally, and they should be sent the bill. Better yet, since the bill won’t be paid, arrange to have the roughly $13 million in annual cleanup costs noted earlier deducted every year from what that country, Mexico, would have received from the United States Agency for International Development. USAID said that it planned to send $33 million (5th paragraph at link) to Mexico in 2004, so in a typical year it looks like the money is there to be collected. And it should be.
