Getting home from Suki’s after Canterbury spiked my drinks proved sporty. I remember rushing across the street with a handful of crushed bar pretzels, and then waiting for the bus next to a seven-foot-tall construction worker who was shouting, “Can you dig it?” in extremely slow motion. Still, somehow I made it home, because here I am.

I just read a headline here at my high-end internet command station that made me wonder if perhaps the effects of the unwanted chemicals were still with me, but after some research, I discovered the news is in fact real. It seems a group of vigilantes calling themselves “The Minute Man Project” are patrolling the Mexican-Arizona border to help catch illegal immigrants. They don’t do any apprehending; they just observe and report to the Border Patrol whenever they see somebody scurrying through the creosote, which is most certainly all the time. And it won’t help to tell Border Patrol, because they have all they can do to try and stop the thousands of immigrants that cross into our nation each day. Some immigrants are caught and deported several times a week.

I know all of this because years ago, before I became an Alaskan in Exile, and even before Alaska for me, I and some friends entered Mexico illegally and wrote about the experience in our own and now gone Jaunt Magazine.

              We learned much about the illegal immigrant issue while doing the story. Before breaking into Mexico – and in the process crossing paths with a line of 14 immigrants breaking out – we rode along with the Border Patrol, which deploys a little over 1,200 officers on the Arizona border, and they readily admit that’s not enough.    

The thing that struck me about “The Minute Man Project” is that they deliver rhetoric about how they understand the immigrants’ need to make a better life, but just want to help the government do more to stop them.

            That’s flawed logic.

            Some of the “Minute Men” hold signs that read, “Osama bin Laden loves open borders.” An interesting point; nobody in Tucson wants to be hit with a lethal dose of Sarin Gas or fragged by an errant Syrian while browsing the mall for a plasma screen TV. And neither do I, for that matter. But since I’m not in the market for a plasma screen TV, I figure I’m at least relatively safe.

            So, the argument is, we’ve got to secure our borders to protect against terrorism. To do that, in my view, we have to open the Mexican border.

            As it is now, the desert is crawling with immigrants, which makes great cover for any real criminals. The majority are entering our nation just to find work, which by the way they do and do very vigorously. Un-documented immigrant laborers in the southwest help our economy to the tune of something like $40 million dollars per year. If we let them in, but have them enter legitimately througha checkpoint, we will dramatically reduce the influx through the badlands, and we will be able to more effectively monitor our southern border. But as long as we keep it illegal, we're doomed to run around the desert trying to stop a human flood. And that is a condition Osama Bin Laden truly loves. At least that's what he told me last Tuesday.