Eric Hammel blogging at the Best Defense blog on the Foreign Policy website is outlining a scenario where drought instigated famine causes mass migration from northern Mexico into the southeastern US. I hope that doesn't happen any time soon. With Obama in command and the better part of the US military deployed in central Asia a huge flood of desperate starving people would be impossible to manage. You couldn't shoot 'em and you couldn't turn 'em back and if you hold them in "containment facilities" they'll sue the pants off us just like the Guantanamo Bay inmates do. And as they give birth they obtain automatic residency rights anyway. What a nightmare.
"The only force on Earth with the inherent capability to police, process, house, feed, and move refugees on a mass scale," says Hammel, "is the U.S. military, but, though its reach is global, its capacity and stamina are nonetheless limited, probably to one or two major disasters at a time, not the overlapping rolling meta-disaster climatologists predict. (Remember, the only components of the Katrina effort that worked at all were the military responses, beginning with Coast Guard helicopters.)"
