I stopped into one of my local watering holes the other day and after tossing back a couple of locally brewed Hefeweizen beers began chatting with a Texas border patrol agent. He was in Southern California for some R & R after weeks in Texas chasing down migrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally.

I am not sure why he came to California for R & R. Everything here is twice as expensive as it is in Texas, the traffic is awful, we are overrun with homeless people, illegal aliens (and I don’t mean the ones from outer space—more on that later!), and more socialists than almost any place but China.

So why California? I asked Joe. (I will call him “Joe” in order to protect him from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Biden White House).

“I don’t really know,” Joe said. “I headed north away from the Rio Grande River, turned left, and found myself here. Seemed like a nice place until I saw gas was $7 a gallon and determined that half of this state’s population is here illegally.”

I nodded in agreement and took a sip of beer.

“How do you stand it?” Joe asked. “The politics here suck and your governor is a socialist dope.”

“It’s the weather,” I replied. “Most Californians—legal and illegal—are here because of the weather.”

“I get it,” Joe said. “You can get sunburned here for ten months out of the year, as opposed to maybe just three back in the Midwest.”

“Something like that,” I responded.  “But let me ask you a question, Joe. You’ve been nabbing migrants trying to sneak into the U.S. for years and nothing seems to work. They are coming in by the thousands each day. What can we do to stop it?”

“You mean short of setting up machine gun nests on our side of the Rio Grande and mowing them down as they wade across the river like they do in China, North Korea, and Russia?”

“Yeah, short of that because that seems a bit harsh.”

Joe considered my response. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Well most of us just want Biden and Mayorkas (DHS Secretary) to enforce the laws already on the books, finish building the wall that Trump started, give us money to hire more border patrol agents instead of inviting migrants to cross the border and spending billions of dollars to transport them to anywhere they want to go in the country.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“But that ain’t gonna happen,” Joe said. “We know Joe Biden’s plan is to bring as many illegals into the country as possible, give them lots of free stuff, and have them vote straight Democratic tickets until Republicans are as scarce as prairie buffalo herds.”

I nodded. “You’re not wrong. I’m from Kansas and the only buffaloes you can find there are on the backs of old nickles.”

“So, a lot of us down on the border play a little game in which we come up with new methods to obstruct and discourage migrants from flooding into the country illegally.”

“What, for example?” I asked. This was getting interesting.

“Mind you now, none of these have been officially proposed because anybody who did so, would be eighty-sixed right out of the agency.”

Now, I was really intrigued.

“One idea I heard the other day was to import about 10,000 alligators from Florida and the Carolinas and drop them all along the Rio Grande River,” Joe said. “The gators would multiply by the thousands and anybody dumb enough to try to cross the river then is definitely too dumb to become an American citizen.”

I had visions of the hungry creatures sliding stealthily into the Rio Grande as packs of foundering cartel drug smugglers attempted to cart fentanyl into Texas.

“Another idea was to import millions of piranhas from the Amazon basin and salt the Rio Grande with them,” Joe said. “Just the idea that these ferocious flesh-eating creatures were in the water waiting to strip the flesh off of your bones would definitely deter these law-breaking migrants.”

I was in the Amazon basin when I was a foreign correspondent and Joe is right. Piranhas are nasty little buggers. I’ve seen hundreds of them strip the meat off of a wounded 100-pound capybara (that’s a giant rodent) in a matter of a minute or two.

“Well, Joe those are definitely ways to deter illegal crossings of the Rio Grande, but what about those who cross by land and desert in places like New Mexico, Arizona, and here in California?”

“Minefields,” Joe said, polishing off his hefeweizen. “Not many, but just enough. Then you can put up those ‘Danger, Live Minefield’ signs. That sure as hell would stop me in my tracks.”

Having covered war and mayhem for about 25 years during my career as a war correspondent, Joe is right. Minefields are definitely areas to be avoided unless you are eager to go through life with prosthetics instead of real arms and legs.

“Still a bit harsh, wouldn’t you say, Joe?” I asked.

“I guess so,” he said. He thought for a few minutes then his eyes brightened.

“There was another plan, I heard,” he said. “It was to turn the entire 2,000 miles of the Mexican border on the American side into a military testing ground. There would be constant artillery practice along the border along with strafing runs by the Air Force. Nobody would risk crossing the border into that devastation.”

“Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Joe,” I said. “But still a bit severe and abrasive, eh? Not to mention, the noise. Americans hate lots of loud noise unless they are in some wild-ass dance club where the volume of the so-called music is at 150 decibels and people are jumping around like their hair’s on fire.”

“That’s a hell of an image, Ron,” Joe said. “But you know, it does describe those places.”

Then Joe came up with the best idea I have yet heard for deterring illegal migration into the United States.

“Look, we are spending billions of dollars on the DHS and it really has no intention of shutting down our southern border, right?”

“Roger that,” I said. “It’s right out of the Democrat Party playbook.”

“Okay, so why not take maybe half of the DHS annual budget of $52 billion and pay those migrants who make it to the U.S.-Mexican border to go back home. You could give each adult migrant $500,000 and each child under eighteen, $50,000. They would go back to their own countries, start businesses, or whatever, and we wouldn’t have millions of migrants and cartel criminals overwhelming our country, bringing in fentanyl, and voting illegally.”

I thought about Joe’s idea for a few moments.

“Nah, it wouldn’t work, Joe.”

“Why not?”

“Because American citizens would be lining up for all that dough too—and why shouldn’t they? It’s their tax dollars after all. Hell, I would line up with ’em.”

“Then we are back to square one,” Joe said. “We just need to enforce the laws we have on the books already if only the Biden administration would allow us to do it.”

“Sounds like a plan, Joe,” I said, holding up my glass of beer.

Our glasses clinked. “Cheers, Joe.”

“Yeah, cheers,” Joe said. “I’m going back to Texas. California is way too pink and sappy for me.”