Responses should be a minimum of 250 words and include direct questions. You may challenge, support or supplement another student’s answer using the terms, concepts and theories from the required readings. Also, do not be afraid to respectfully disagree where you feel appropriate; as this should be part of your analysis process at this academic level.

Respond to Jason:

In preparation for next week’s writing assignment, I began looking for sources whenever I had some extra time, luckily for me, I now get to write about what process I used to find the material, as well as what criteria I used to accept or reject the source.As I have previously mentioned in this course, I am focusing my research assignment on the southern border of the United States.More specifically, is defense in depth a viable option to secure our southern border?

The first tool I used to find sources of information is the online school library.I ensured the “everything” tab was selected, from there I began typing key words relating to the southern border.A few examples of the terms I used was “security,” “border,” and “perimeter security.”Once the list of articles/books were created, I then looked at titles.If the title caught my attention, I then opened the article and began to skim over the article.If the article provided information relevant to my research assignment, I then downloaded to my computer for use in this coming week.If the article didn’t provide information relevant to the topic, I simply moved on to the next one.

Once I felt I had enough articles or books relating to border security, I than began looking for statics relating to illegal immigration and the southern border.For this information, I used google as the search engine, and used key words such as “illegal immigration,” “southern border statics’,” “Department of Homeland Security and southern border.”Once the list of websites was created, I then focused on websites from Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol.

To this point, I haven’t fully reviewed all of the statics, but the interesting thing that I noticed was the overall numbers of illegal immigrants apprehended ranged from as low as 21,000+ in 1960 to as high as 1,600,000+ in 2000.In 2018 the total number was 396,000+.Due to the fact that 2019 isn’t over, the statics for 2019 are not listed on the document I obtained the other information from.Seeing just how much difference there is from the low end of the numbers to the high end of the numbers makes me want to try and determine if there was some type of other factor that contributed to this.Was there a significant event going on in Mexico or further into South America that caused an increase in illegal immigrants?Was the periodic increase tied to who was President (in the United States or Mexico) at the time?Does the increase correlate with the amount of funding received (or taken away) from the Department of Homeland Security, more specifically, Customs and Border Patrol?All of these topics are going to have to wait for another time because I do not want to have to broad of a topic to try and complete an assignment by the end of the course.

United States Border Patrol (n.d). Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions by Fiscal Year. Retrieved from https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/doc…