Illegal Alien Bucket Brigade

Since the federal government seems hell bent on preventing its member states from enforcing immigration laws it refuses to enforce itself, I have a suggestion that may just work. It will require an enormous amount of cooperation between the various states in the Union, but I believe that most of them are more than ready for such laborious efforts. Frustrated by the ever-increasingly intrusive powers wielded by the federal government and its encroachment on states' rights, it might be time for the states to exercise their own rights that will be formulated in an unassailable manner.

In Colonial times, Philadelphia had a logistics problem in fighting fires in areas well developed and already having relatively tall buildings for the time. With no pumping system, it was difficult to get sufficient water to douse flames to the site of the fire, so some innovation was required.

In 1736, the Union Fire Company was formed with the assistance of Benjamin Franklin, whose name has sometimes been associated with the organization. It was a volunteer fire department, the first of its kind in Philadelphia, and one of the principles borne of its existence was the "bucket brigade". Each member of the force agreed to furnish for any alarm six leather buckets, at personal expense, to fight the flames.

They would form a line with the buckets with the first man at a well and the last at the fire, and pass buckets full of water toward the fire and the empty ones back toward the well, until the fire was extinguished. The teamwork proved much more effective than men with buckets running to and fro in haphazard fashion. Even common ants know the benefits of cooperation.

To defeat the progressive notion that illegal aliens can be protected by a federal government reticent to enforce its own laws because it's afraid to lose its perceived voting base, the states can form their own version of the bucket brigade and effectively put out the fire.

While the federal government can claim - with efficiency, apparently - that it supersedes the states' authority regarding federal law, the states still have a degree of sovereignty regarding local matters and the laws governing them. For example, states can make it illegal to reside within its boundaries if one is not a legal United States citizen. While this might be perceived as merely shoving one state's problems into neighboring states, that's where the enormous cooperation comes into play.

Rather than the state of Montana hauling a truckload of captured illegal aliens down to the Mexican border repeatedly, they could have an extradition-style agreement with Wyoming to accept custody at its southern border. Wyoming could then transport the prisoners to its southern border with Utah, and so Utah to Arizona. Once in Arizona, that state could either arrange with the Mexican government to accept its citizens, or, they could be remanded to the custody of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department are ICE certified, trained and contracted to aid the federal government in immigration enforcement pursuant to section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act; Delegation of Immigration Authority. I somehow doubt that Sheriff Joe or his deputies would mind the responsibility of being the final arbiters of the disposition of criminal invaders in America.

It seems perfectly fitting that such a solution could have been unknowingly conceived by one of America's founding fathers.

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