Any day now we Tan Diegans (I don’t know about you, but mine is faded: it’s almost August, where’s the frickin’ sun?) will be getting our latest gift from the Obama administration—a contingent of California National Guard personnel, 250 citizen warriors wearing cammos and carrying sidearms, in a show of force to deter narco traffickers and illegal migrants from…

…keeping our malls in business and cleaning our houses?

San Diego's border.

^{Courtesy photo}

As part of the run-up to the November interim elections, the White House revealed some months ago that 1,200 troops would be sent to our region in early August. Well known is the underlying purpose: Response (but not in a good way) to the insidious new Arizona policy allowing local police to randomly check the immigration status of free individuals—including, I suppose, the type of people like the wonderful young Mexican national who, along with her significant other, hosted me to an excellent dinner of lamb and haricots verts in her Little Italy apartment last week. (I’m sure you readers have fond Mexican friends in town as well.)

The majority of the troops will be assigned to the border with Texas, a region much in the news recently due to the discovery by investigators of a mass grave containing more than 50 bodies, most of them soldiers in the drug wars.

Before you get too nervous, a quick consultation with my research department reveals that the area in question, near Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, is more than 1,200 miles distant from San Diego. While Tijuana has become something of a ghost town, no one would dispute the fact that our border with Mexico has always been more pacific than the one Mexico shares with the Lone Star State. Even at the height of Tijuana’s troubles, it never once kept me from going downtown, though soccer games near the border during my son’syouth were life-threatening at times, as my faithful fellow parents from La Jolla’s Impact team will remember.

Our personal Guard detail will last one year. It will cost $500 million.

I like Obama, mostly. Hopefully this will buy him some votes. I can’t see what other good it will do. The new troops will be spread pretty thin, in posts ranging from Camp Pendleton to the Tijuana border to the Imperial Valley. To avoid violating the federal statute forbidding the military from policing on U.S. soil (a provision designed to keep our Democratic beacon from becoming a police state) the Guard will only “provide added eyes and ears” for the Border Patrol, federal officials say. Troops will not interact with suspected lawbreakers. And while they will be armed, they will be given orders to shoot only in self-defense, which, I believe, were the first instructions given to Israeli Defense Forces during the opening days of the Palestinian Intifada. (To make some Kent State reference here would be too much. Daises in the gun barrels? Oy gevalt. We are no longer so innocent.)

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Just about a month ago, in the wake of Obama’s announcement of the southwestern security beef-up, a group of civil rights campaigners, community workers and advocacy groups, representing interests spanning the entire 2,000 mile border with Mexico, met in a community center in San Diego.

"It was a summit of sorts," said Andrea Guerrero, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego. "We had a strategy session for all of us to come together and think about how we can push back on the ideas" coming from Washington.

“At this point, we’re looking at George W. Bush longingly,” joked one of the45 delegates, Louie Gilot, from the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso.

For once, the crunched numbers seemed oddly on the side of the bleeding-heart liberal pinkos: Arrests of illegal immigrants on the border are at their lowest levels since the early 1970s—a fact attributed to increased effectiveness and manpower. The number of border agents has risen from about 11,000 in 2004 to 20,000 today.

The delegates agreed that the public's perception that the border region is plagued by crime needs to be changed. "The image of the border as a war zone is widely accepted," Gilot said. "It has been very hard to change that. El Paso is a great city. We've had one murder since the beginning of the year, and it was a domestic issue -- nothing to do with drugs."

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I don’t know what the new Guard troops will be doing in San Diego. No doubt in their off hours they will be hitting Belmont Park at Mission Beach, spending their money in the Gaslamp Quarter and on hotel rooms for their visiting guests—all the while doing their best not to look like military personnel wearing civvies, as military personnel have done in our town since its inception. We are, first and forever, a dream port-of-call.

It is envisioned that the Guard troops, in their working hours, will do jobs that will free up Border Patrol agents for more “meaningful” endeavors, according to officials. During a similar mobilization, called Operation Jumpstart (2006-08), Guard troops ran surveillance, repaired fences, fixed vehicles and did other support work.

Given the fact that many of these same men and women have served recently in Iraq or Afghanistan (a big blow to those who signed up to fight only on the weekends, I am sure), I’ll bet they are pleased to be detailed here.

And on behalf of all of their moms and dads, and their wives and children, I’m darn pleased to have them here, in America’s most livable city.

It beats the crap out of Afghanistan, sun or not.