important words and immigration enforcement

Today I learned that the word in the beginning of the Colbert Report started out as grippy, followed by megamerican, Lincolnish, superstantial, freem, eneagled, and flagaphile. Just last week it changed to good.

In other news, I learned that whatever we call the INS now has arrested about 4,000 illegal immigrants in the first half of this year, up from 845 in 2004. It's not clear to me that they were really trying back in 2004, but we know they've got their noses to the grindstone now, so I'm going to assume they can get that total up to 5,000 arrests every six months. Heck, 6,000, mostly because I'm a physicist, so you know I'm about to do some estimating. At 12,000 arrests per year, and assuming we completely seal our borders, we will have worked through our illegal immigrant backlog of 12 million in one thousand years.

So, um, wow. Maybe somebody else did that calculation before now, but I've been sick. I'm going to see if I can't get that number down some using statistics I found on some website that indicate we imprison 1000 people per week. If we could arrest illegal immigrants at that rate, it'd only take 231 years to arrest them all.

I hadn't looked at it like that before.