Armies are for fighting wars, not for patrolling US borders

If there is a need for more agents patrolling the southern border (or, for that matter, the northern border), the federal government should hire and train additional agents.

What it should not do is assign National Guard or other military units to the job of policing the nation’s borders — or its cities, airports or train terminals.

For more than 200 years, we’ve seen the wisdom of maintaining a bright line between what the army does — protect the nation from other nation’s armies — and what our police forces and various civilian agencies do. No argument that can be made for using the armed forces to patrol our borders could not be made with equal validity for using the army to replace transportation security, park rangers, alcohol, tobacco and firearms enforcement or customs — to name a random sampling.

In any of those cases, the army would be able to provide trained, disciplined and well-armed personnel to carry out the mission of the hour. For that matter, we could call on the army to patrol troubled cities and special forces units could replace police SWAT squads.

Which is exactly why the impulse to use the army as an easy or efficient replacement for border guards or any other type of law enforcement personnel must be resisted.

A skeptical age

Our nation’s founders were products of an age that engendered respect for the armed forces, but they were clearly concerned about keeping the military in its place. In the Bill of Rights, they first preserved freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly and the right to petition the government, then the right to bear arms, and next they prohibited the government from quartering soldiers in any house without the consent of the owner.

That Third Amendment may not resonate today as it did then, but it illustrates the healthy skepticism the founders had about allowing the army to impose itself on the civilian population.

No conservative, no liberal, no libertarian should find it easy to suggest new ways in which military forces are assigned responsibilities that have been and can be handled by civilian agencies. So why are so many people so quick to endorse sending National Guard or other military forces to the border? Because fearful people are willing to seize on anything that is seen as a quick fix to a vexing problem. And few issues lend themselves to fear mongering as do immigration issues. Immigrant-bashing is nothing new in America, and historically its popularity grows in times of economic stress and tension.

There are solutions to the influx of illegal immigrants in the nation, but those solutions involve an honest appraisal of where we are, how we got to where we are and what we can realistically do about it. No solution and no combination of solutions is quick or easy. But this much should be clear: Breaking two centuries of tradition regarding the role of the armed forces in a free society shouldn’t even be on the list.