Real Life "NUMB3RS" to Protect the Border
Louie Gilot
El Paso Times
Monday, December 12, 2005

Recently, U.S. politicians have come up with costly ideas to improve border security. Some want to hire more Border Patrol agents. Others push for a guest-worker program. And one, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., wants to build a 2,000-mile-long wall.

Stefan Schmidt, a researcher at New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory, came up with a pretty cheap alternative -- mathematics.

"We have ways of modeling to see how we can make the border more secure without paying too much money," Schmidt said.

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Drug war in Tijuana spills over the border
By Anna Cearley
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

December 12, 2005

CHULA VISTA – Police officer Richard Deomampo didn't know he was facing a suspected associate of a major Mexican drug trafficking group when two men started shooting at him in a busy parking lot.

U.S. authorities learned later that one of the men arrested in the Sept. 28 incident was Edgar Lopez Frausto. Mexican and U.S. law enforcement authorities say Lopez is connected with the Arellano Félix drug cartel based in Tijuana.

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Mexican politician makes migrants an issue

By ARTURO SALINAS
Associated Press Writer

TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) -- Presidential hopeful Felipe Calderon took his campaign to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, saying the United States should view Mexican migrants as people seeking a better life, not as a threat to national security.

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Time to dispel some economic myths

By David R. Francis

Immigrants, legal or illegal, take the hard jobs that native-born Americans won't do.

Nonsense, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington. If business paid them enough, he argues, native-born Americans would do the work many less-educated immigrants do.

In fact, US citizens fill most dirty or dangerous jobs that pay well - unionized coal miners, city sewer workers, and risky lumberjack jobs, for example.