Close down the checkpoints - North San Diego County Times

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/02/03/opinion/editorials/2_2_0422_02_31.txt

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These counterproductive, costly, inefficient and annoying roadblocks have got to go. They disrupt business, foul the air, snarl commuting times for more than 100,000 citizens a day and intrude on their rights. They are not worth even a fraction of the money that taxpayers spend on them.

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Apprehensions of aliens at the checkpoints have declined by more than 93 percent from fiscal year 1992 to 2002 ---- from 70,118 to 4,823. Issa, R-Vista, and Calvert, R-Corona, have asked the agency to quantify the checkpoints' cost in time and money to local residents and to evaluate whether the agents would be more effective elsewhere ---- on the border, monitoring workplaces, or at jails and prisons, escorting newly released criminal aliens back where they came from.

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We'll do the math for the GAO to show how ineffective these boondoggles are. More than 250,000 people drive past the checkpoints each day, Caltrans reports: 140,000 a day on Interstate 5 and 114,000 on I-15. Half of them (northbound) pass through the checkpoints. If each northbound traveler is delayed for only one minute a day ---- and that's a laughable understatement ---- that's 2,116 hours, or three months, of time lost each day ---- a century wasted each year.

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In one of the most economically productive regions in the world, it should not be necessary to crawl through a bottleneck comparable to an international border just to pass from one U.S. county to another.

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