Can Trump Secure the Border?

Let’s start off with a little story, okay?

This was 1987 or 1988, and I was driving through Northern Israel with an Israeli friend, the purpose of the trip to take a look at the earliest kibbutzim which had been founded in what was then Palestine in the decades prior to the appearance of the State of Israel — Eretz Israel — in 1948.

At one point we were driving past the field of a kibbutz and a group of migrant farm workers were busily harvesting some kind of crop. You could tell they were migrants because their clothing and personal possessions were lying in bundles alongside the road.

I asked my friend, “Where do these people come from?”

He answered, “Somewhere in Central Europe — one of those crummy countries where nobody has a job, so they sneak in here.”

To which I then said, “But Israel is a para-military state with very secure borders. How do these people get in here?”

He shrugged and replied, “Who knows? They’re here.”

I recalled this incident yesterday when Trump announced he had tapped a ‘hardliner’ to run the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, who would tighten border security and conduct all those mass deportations promised by Trump during the campaign.