Pyongyang on the Potomac

Conservatives have sure gone all America-hating, foreign ideas loving on us lately. I mean, first it was the new found appreciation of the French approach to immigration, now its even weirder -- shorter Charles Krauthammer: North Korea, now that's the ticket for our illegal immigration woes.

My proposition is this: A vast number of Americans who oppose legalization and fear new waves of immigration would change their minds if we could radically reduce new -- i.e., future -- illegal immigration.

Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols.

Can't be done? Israel's border fence has been extraordinarily successful in keeping out potential infiltrators who are far more determined than mere immigrants. Nor have very many North Koreans crossed into South Korea in the past 50 years.

The mind reels. I'm surprised no mention of the Berlin Wall. I mean, not have many East Germans got into West Berlin once that puppy was erected. You just can't argue with that kind of success. Of course, like the Berlin Wall, as a symbol it is not exactly The Statue of Liberty.

Oh wait, he just told me not to tell him that.

Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don't tell me that this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that's a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that's an expression of sovereignty. The fence around your house is a perfectly legitimate expression of your desire to control who comes into your house to eat, sleep and use the facilities. It imprisons no one.

Odd, I don't recall any of those reasons coming into play when we put up a fence around our property. It was to keep the dogs in, not the neighbors from stealing meat off the B-B-Q.

But I digress. No, building a wall the length of our border with Mexico (interestingly Kruathammer, never uses those words...perhaps some ghost of sanity remains in his head warning him off actually describing the insane proportions of what he's proposing) would not be an expression of sovereignty. It would be an expression of unhinged fear and a symbol of lip curling contempt for the people living to our south.