I've been along the border in Texas, but only while cruising through Hell Paso a couple of times. I've seen pictures of the Rio Grande, and it seems to range from a backyard creek to a swamp. That's definitely not the hardest area to cross in, and it does need visible enforcement.
New Mexico's border is a disaster all around. There is some rough terrain, but for the most part, yeah, it's broad and flat. Making things worse is that the government cheaped out and put "vehicle barricade" fencing all over the place. I am not a fan of a border fence based upon things I saw in San Diego; it's way too expensive for the little good it does, and way too easy to defeat. That said, vehicle barricade fencing is the absolute dumbest of the dumb ideas. Want to walk across the border? Cool, duck under it or use the base as a stepstool to propel yourself over the top. Want to drive around it? Get a nice, rugged vehicle and put up a ramp. It's beyond useless.
Arizona's border tends to be pretty flat, but the southeast corner of the state gets to be pretty rugged, and as you move west, you encounter an entirely different problem: the Tohono O'odham Nation. It's a reservation, so the US government has very little power there, and the Tohono can (and often do) just tell them to get out entirely. When you consider that the typical "border crossing" down there is a gated range fence, the area surrounding the reservation needs to be watched perhaps more closely than anyplace else along the entire border. Thing is, the sand is loose and easy to get your ankle stuck in, and the temperatures out there are dangerously high to be sending a National Guard trooper from Minnesota into with a 60-lb. pack. That's an area where drone patrols would be extremely helpful.
California's border is an entirely different ballgame. It's sand dunes in the east, which gives way to mountains, then open, hilly desert, then mountains again before reaching the shoreline. You can literally swim around the border at Imperial Beach. I saw someone try to make the swim across, and they were swarmed by Border Patrol upon reaching the shore. It was kind of funny.
Southwestern California is the part of the border I know best, from San Diego over to Jacumba, and it's a wild place. Once you get out near the Otay Lakes wilderness (an area that I refused to go through after dark), the terrain becomes rocky and overgrown. Follow that through Tecate towards Potrero, and it's mountains, sometimes steep cliffs. From Potrero to Campo it opens up into hilly desert terrain again, easy to patrol, but once you get towards Jacumba and points east, you're back into mountains so jagged and steep that there's no way to safely patrol the area, let alone build a fence.
I don't think you and I are too far apart on this one. I'm not in favor of trying to round up and deport immigrants who are already here. I think it would be a massive time and money sink. I don't even think we should be spending too much effort trying to track down illegal immigrants who are crossing the border by themselves or with one or two trusted friends. They're just coming over to find work, and I can respect that. America was built by people like them. Where I draw the line are drug smugglers and human traffickers. Anyone caught in the US illegally with any illegal substances on them, regardless of type of amount, should be charged with smuggling and get to spend some time in a nice, cold jail cell before being dumped back into whatever country they came from.
Human trafficking is a different story for me. On the one hand, I do genuinely feel for people whose lives down there are so bad that they're willing to spend all their family's money to try and get into America for a better life. On the other, the guides those people pay their money to are cartel employees, and they instill the fear of God into their paying customers about what will happen if the guide is ratted out when the group is caught. You just can't let anyone from those large groups across, because you might be letting the guide in along with them, and you're legitimizing the trade.
And welfare, there's a fun topic. Without diving too far into it, I believe that the majority of people on welfare have no business receiving government money, and if locking the doors on illegal immigrants helps force them back into the workforce, then I'm all for it.
