6000 A Lot Or A Little?

President Bush laid out his latest plan for immigration last night.  Chief among the proposals: sending 6000 National Guard troops to the border in "support roles".  Most people yawned.  While some people are worked up about "militarizing the border", most view sending 2% of the Guard to do some office work for the Border Patrol as meer window dressing – and not even a good dressing at that.  

Considering that there are 35,000 police officers in New York city – 6,000 people helping to secure thousands of miles of open border doesn't really inspire awe. Pres. Bush also gave lip service to many, many immigration ideas such as ID cards, walls, fences… enforcement.  But the tone definitely came across as "X, Y, and Z are all great ideas… and we're going to do them… in the future… so lets go ahead and pass the amnesty -er- guest worker program today."  Even the stop gap Guard deployment will likely take weeks if not months to occur, but the Senate is trying to push through amnesty by Memorial day.

On the whole, it doesn't seem like the speech did anything to change anyone's mind.  It simply added one more facet (the Guard) into a growing debate.