Your analogy to a concentration camp is utterly wrong.

"While we do need tighter control over who comes and goes, what does this suggest? Not arrest. The armed forces are not police. It suggests shooting people.

Do we also shoot the people who hire them? No supply without demand, remember."

Nice try Mary Anne, but you don't really believe that. Most liberals have no problem with, and in fact encourage, illegal immigation. To say you support border control, but oppose any attempt to do so by saying it will lead to a totalitarian state is a not so slick way of avoiding the problem.

Military police are used in all sorts of roles other than shooting people. The Coast Guard is also a branch of the military, and they do just fine patroling our coastline. Having a militarized border patrol would be no different. As for the people who hire them, try enforcing the law. Such practices are already illegal.

"And how will the law enforcement authorities identify an American from a non-American? Why, we would all have to carry our internal passports at all times, of course. "Show me your papers" would no longer be a sinister phrase one only hears uttered by an SS officer in the train station scene of The Great Escape.

BTW, do we get to keep the children born here and deport their parents? Inquiring minds want to know."

Again it would be easy if the liberals weren't trying to make it impossible. It's called a driver's license and or a social security card. Notice how many liberals are wanting to help illegals by trying to allow them to recieve driver's licenses and social security cards. They would like nothing more than to try to blur the line between citizen and noncitizen.

As for the kids, send them back with their parents.

"The future policy of the United States would thus become much like the policies of totalitarian nations in the past. Not that anyone would want to seek asylum in the nation described. Let the other nations accept the courageous people who would need to flee; we don't want them. They have questioned their governments -- they might do the same thing here! Who needs courageous people? We will have our internal passport system to keep us secure."

Totalitarian Regimes had to put up barbed wire to keep people in, not to keep the barbarians out. The vast majority of people coming into this country every year are not asylum seekers, but rather parasites coming to feed upon the greatness of Western civilization. If the unwashed masses were half as industrious as you would have us believe, their own societies wouldn't be in such a sorry state. Mexico would be an economic superpower instead of the open sewer that it is.

"But you're right: not so much like a concentration camp, except for the random strip searches and incarcerations, and the barbed wire wrapped around the country. A lot like the former Soviet Union, though. Some of us need to have that enemy to define ourselves so much that we want us to play the dual role, just like the "identical cousins" in The Patty Duke Show."

Random incarcerations of who, illegals? You have a problem with this? And barbed wire wrapped around the country (what an exaggeration) wouldn't be a problem with most of us, only to people who have a problem with the idea of borders in the first place. The enemy isn't a character from an old sitcom, but rather it's the millions of Joses who seem determined to make a Greater Mexico at the expense of our territorial integrity. The Serbs only wanted cheap labor too, but ended up loosing a large part of their country to Albania. Sounds like a rather expensive price to pay if you ask me.

"We won't have to worry about other people taking our way of life away from us. We can just take it away from ourselves."

I'm sure you're not worried about it anyway. It's just another form of wealth redistribution after all, and what's wrong with that?