Republican Steve King thinks he’s solved the problem of Mexicans illegally entering the country: Treat them like cattle:
KING: So when I get down there and sit on that border, what I do is I come to this conclusion, we can’t shut that off unless we build a fence and a wall. I want to put the fence in, but I want to put a wall in, and I designed one. And this just simply is the desert floor – put a trench in that desert floor. We have the ability to put together a machine that would be a slip form machine that would lay a footing about like this, Mr. Speaker.
And if I give you a look at the end of that, that’s so you’d have that about five feet deep underneath the ground. It’d keep the wall from tipping over. We’d pour a notch in it that’ll allow us to put pre-cast panels in. And it would sit, it would look like this, and this would be flush with the desert floor. And then you’d bring in pre-cast concrete walls – ten fee wide, thirteen and a half feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a twelve foot finished wall, just like that, Mr. Speaker. Drop these panels in together, in this fashion. Just take a crane and drop them in. Our little construction company could build a mile a day of this pretty easily, once you’ve got your system going. The whole two thousand miles are not going to work that way, but a lot of it will work this way, Mr. Speaker.
And so to just wrap up this construction, this’d be an example, then, of how that wall would look. Now you could also deconstruct it the same way. You could take it back down. If somehow they got their economy working and got their laws working in Mexico we could pull this back out just as easy as we could put it in. We could open it up again or we could open it up and let livestock run through there, whatever we choose.
I also say we need to do a few other things on top of that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top or put a ladder there. We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.
That’s Compassionate Conservatism for you.
You can watch a video clip of King describing his amazing electrified wall over at Think Progress.
Discourage, not kill. If that’s not compassionate, I don’t know what is.
I wonder if he thought that through. I think the message here is not that Mexican illegals are cattle, but that it’s a selective breeding program. In effect, he’s saying: “We only want the smart and hardy illegals that can’t be discouraged by a trifle like an electrified fence.”
Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Should Mexican border guards be equipped with electric cattle prods that they can use on American cattle, I mean tourists?