“It is deeply disturbing that one in five veterans under the age of 25 is unemployed. The men and women who fought for our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan have to fight for a job when they return home — and the odds are stacked against them” Harkin said Thursday during a conference call with reporters.

“We have a solemn obligation to do right by the men and women in uniform who put their lives at risk for our nation.”

Government officials estimate that roughly 240,000 veterans who served in the Middle East are currently unemployed. The bill approved by the Senate provides tax breaks of up to $9,600 to businesses that put them to work.

The tax breaks were included in the Obama administration’s American Jobs Act, a $447 billion package that was wholly refused by Republican lawmakers last month. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley says the initiative dates back to May 2010 and this past January, when he and U.S. Sen. Max Baucus introduced and reintroduced the Veterans Employment Transition Act, or the VETs Jobs bill.

“These men and women are extremely capable,” Grassley said. “They have a lot of skills to offer in the workplace. The legislation that Senator Baucus and I put together clears some bureaucratic hurdles and adds a financial incentive to encourage employers to seek out veterans.”

The legislation reinstates a tax credit that expired at the end of 2010, and makes it easier for veterans and small businesses to use. The credits will range from $2,400 to $9,600 in 2012, depending on the veteran hired. Tax exempt organizations are eligible for the credit.

• $9,600 for veterans with service-connected disabilities unemployed for 6 months or longer in the past year
• $5,600 for veterans unemployed for 6 months or longer in the past year
• $4,800 for service-disabled veterans hired within 1 year of being discharged
• $2,400 for veterans who do not fit any of the above categories and are unemployed for between 4 weeks and 6 months in the past year

Any veteran who has left active duty in the past five years who has discharge paperwork showing 180 days of qualified active duty would be eligible for the credit. This would include those men and women who were activated by their states as members of the National Guard. The bill also helps service members market themselves to prospective employers by requiring the military to educate service members about how the credit works.

The only senator to vote against the Vow to Hire Heroes Act of 2011 was South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint, who indicated the measure gave veterans an unfair advantage.

“I cannot support this tax credit because I do not believe the government should privilege one American over another when it comes to work,” DeMint said on the floor Thursday.

The U.S. House is expected to take up the measure next week, and U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack is optimistic that the bill will be quickly passed.

“Tomorrow, we set aside time to honor the men and women who have served our great country in uniform. As we pause to pay tribute to them, we must also remember that we have a moral obligation to serve our troops and veterans with the same dedication and honor with which they serve us. Yet our troops are returning home from the battlefield to face the same economic reality that families across our country are facing,” Loebsack said in a Thursday statement.

“The World War II generation returned home and became part of our nation’s economic recovery. Today, as we work to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, it is up to all of us as a grateful nation to ensure that those who have fought for us overseas do not have to fight for a job here at home. This generation of veterans can and will be part of our economic recovery, but we must give them the opportunity to do so. This bipartisan legislation demonstrates the progress we can make when both sides of the aisle work together.”

Two members of Iowa’s federal delegation are veterans. Harkin served as an active-duty jet pilot in the U.S. Navy from 1962 to 1967. U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell served 20 years in the U.S. Army, including two one-year tours of duty as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.

According to a January 2011 report by Jennifer Rizzo of CNN, only 20 percent of the members of Congress have served in the military — 25 from the Senate and 90 from the House. It is the lowest level since World War II.

It’s an interesting question, particularly given the debate over when the country should take on comprehensive immigration reform to deal with the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country. One side of the debate argues the borders must be secured before the government can take steps to allow some of those illegal immigrants to gain legal status. On the other side — the one the Obama administration has supported — reform advocates argue that providing paths to legalization for some illegal immigrants is necessary to reducing tensions and creating secure borders. But neither side seems to provide a clear answer as to what factors would indicate that the border was officially “secure.”

Bersin did not make such a pronouncement either, but he did provide some clarification into the Obama administration’s objectives. “What we mean by border security is public safety, and this perception in the community that the border is being reasonably managed,” he said.

It’s possible to measure public safety: The FBI and other organizations track rates of violent crime and property crime across the country. But perception is trickier to define. While some polls have indicated that residents of border regions feel safe, rhetoric among some officials encourages high levels of fear about illegal immigration. Warranted or not, this definition means the border cannot be secure unless all residents of border regions think it is secure — a seemingly impossible feat given the length of the border and the differences of opinion on the issue.

The problem is that no one seems to be exactly sure how many resources should be directed at the border. After National Guard troops were deployed to the southern border in recent months, national security experts argued that the government had done too little research to determine what methods were actually effective at keeping illegal immigrants and smuggled items from crossing the border. “We frankly don’t have a very good understanding of what we should invest more in and where we should spend our resources,” Jack Riley, director of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, told Politico last month.

When Bersin was asked how many agents, roughly, would be needed to secure the border, he hedged. “We need to obtain a secure southwest border to say how many agents we need,” he said.

On the one hand, this makes sense: The border is 1,950 miles long, and needs for agents shift as migrants and smugglers change their routes for entering the country. But the lack of specifics seems to leave a large window for anti-comprehensive immigration reform to demand more border patrol, whether or not it is actually increasing safety and security.

There are currently 20,000 Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border — higher than at any time in the country’s history. The Obama administration argues the border is at its most secure point in history, citing lower rates of illegal immigration and increased enforcement within the country.

But in the end, securing the border fully — or completely eliminating illegal immigration — is impossible while illegal immigrants can still find work in the U.S., Bersin said. “Absent comprehensive immigration reform, people will try to enter the country illegally,” he said. “We will try to stop that, and we are doing that better than ever. But absent reform, that will continue.”

If Republicans define a secure border in absolute terms, then, it seems likely gridlock over immigration reform will continue.

The problem is that National Guard troops have no power to make arrests. This is partially to maintain foreign relations: Mexican President Felipe Calderón said in May he would support the deployment as long as National Guard troops did not make arrests. “If the National Guard helps toward a common purpose of having a safer border and if they can do this without detaining Mexican migrants, I think this [planned deployment] could bring about positive results,” Calderón said.

But without arrest power, critics argue the troops will be ineffective. Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce (R) told the AP the troops amount to a “welcome wagon” for illegal immigrants:

“They’re military, and instead of letting them do their job, we let them down there with typewriter ribbon and oil cans,” said Pearce, who wrote Arizona’s controversial immigration legislation. “We send them overseas in harm’s way but we don’t let them defend our own borders in a proper manner?”

On the other hand, critics of the deployment argue there are too few troops to substantially increase border security. Of the 1,200 troops deployed, 524 went to Arizona, 224 to California, 72 to New Mexico and 250 to Texas. The final 130 went to a national liaison office. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has pushed for additional troops as part of his 10-point border security plan, said in May that he welcomed the troops but that the move was “not enough” to stabilize the border.

Questions over the National Guard’s effectiveness do not just come from the right: Human rights groups argue the troops are unnecessary because residents of border states already feel safe.

Still, Border Patrol officials said the National Guard is boosting security. About 400 illegal immigrants were arrested this summer after being spotted by National Guard troops, the AP reported.

What is the right number to make the southern border secure? No one is really sure. The government has not done a comprehensive analysis to determine which border security methods are most successful:

“We frankly don’t have a very good understanding of what we should invest more in and where we should spend our resources,” said Jack Riley, director of the RAND National Defense Research Institute in Pittsburgh.

Blazquez, meanwhile, remains critical of the administration for failing to advance any sort of immigration reform, but he’s also skeptical about Republican calls for more troops, branding it an “optical solution.”

“There comes a point of saturation. At times, throwing individuals at the border without accurate forms of measuring success is futile,” he said. “We may have reached that saturation point.”

For now, then, border security becomes a “he said, she said” debate: McCain and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer claim Arizona is suffering from unprecedented danger from Mexico, while Obama and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano argue the border is at its most secure point in 20 years.

Drug cartel violence in Mexico is a very real problem, but most experts argue spillover violence in the U.S. is more fiction than fact. McCain’s evidence seems mostly anecdotal. “Our border is not secure,” he told Politico. “In the southern part of our state, there are signs that say, ‘Warning: drug smuggling, human smuggling area.’”

In some ways, whether these claims can be backed up doesn’t matter: As the Obama administration looks for a way forward on immigration reform, it will likely continue to face claims from the right it needs to “secure the border.” Finding a way to rebuff these statements will be a major hurdle for immigration reform.

For now, the Obama administration continues to tout its actions on increasing border security measures.

The troops in California will be stationed across San Diego County to deter criminal activity along the border, the Los Angeles Times reported. They will not make arrests of illegal immigrants, instead acting as “a visible deterrent … and additional eyes and ears in the field,” a spokeswoman for the National Guard told the LA Times.

The Obama administration has made a concerted effort to show its commitment to border security, a prerequisite for Republican cooperation on comprehensive immigration reform. Last week, Congress passed a $600 million border security bill,  aimed in part at moving the conversation on immigration reform beyond the border. But so far Republicans are still arguing more needs to be done at the border before comprehensive immigration reform can go forward.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday deployment should not be used as an alternative to immigration reform:

“We must find a permanent solution to our broken immigration system,” he said.

“We need the federal government to step up with even more manpower and funding, and I will continue to push President Obama and Congress for action.”‘

Beyond comprehensive immigration reform, national security experts argue Congress should push for more funding for the Drug Enforcement Administration and other efforts to fight Mexican drug cartels. As Bob Killebrew, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told TWI: “We can react to crises with pinpricks, like sending more National Guard troops, but the real solutions are more complicated,” he said.

- Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law had its first day in court Thursday, when a judge heard a challenge of the law from a Phoenix police officer but issued no ruling. District Court Judge Susan Bolton will hear the case brought by the Justice Department against SB 1070 next week. Arizona will have support in the form of “friend-of-the-court” briefs from nine state attorney generals — three of whom are Republicans running for governor — and a group of House Republicans.

- Immigration enforcement is at a new high, with 4,145 cases referred to federal prosecutors in March and April, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That was the largest number of referrals for any two-month period since the creation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

- Arizona’s immigration law convinced some migrant workers from Mexico to stay home, prompting observers to question whether unemployed Americans will take on the tough harvest jobs. (It’s what Stephen Colbert wants Americans to do.)

- A list of 1,300 accused illegal immigrants living in Utah and their private information was circulated early this week to government agencies and media. Utah launched an investigation into the source of the information and announced today that at least two state employees appear to be behind the list. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said the state does not plan to prosecute people on the list, but will move forward on possible privacy law violations by the list’s creators.

- Rep. Xavier Becerra, (D-Calif.), the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Tuesday the Dems could still tackle immigration reform this year. If they do, Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Mike Honda (D-Calif.) want to include provisions for gay rights.

- The Mexico-U.S. border governors conference is back on after Arizona’s Jan Brewer pulled out of hosting last month. Arizona was set to host the 28th annual conference, but Brewer canceled after Mexican politicians threatened to boycott. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Thursday that he will host the conference instead, but it still won’t be complete: Brewer and Rick Perry of Texas said they won’t attend.

- Haitians living illegally in the U.S. when a hurricane hit six months ago will be given additional time to apply to stay and work in the country legally.

- California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a deployment Friday of California National Guard troops to the border. The order will support Obama’s proposal to send 1,200 National Guard troops to the border, with 224 stationed in California. Schwarzenegger’s order said the troops deployed will not be used in a direct law enforcement role.

Underlining that gross domestic product measures are often not a good guide to an economy’s well being, the bank said in a research note its best guess is that the impact on the U.S. economy of BP’s Gulf Coast spill would be minimal.

“The spill clearly implies a lot of economic hardship in some locations, but given what we know today, the magnitude of these setbacks looks dwarfed by the scale of the US macroeconomy,” said chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli. If anything, he added, U.S. GDP could gain slightly from it.

The six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling may cut U.S. oil production by around 3% in 2011 and cost more than 3,000 jobs, according to J.P. Morgan’s energy analysts. Commercial fishing in the Gulf is also likely to suffer, but that’s only about 0.005% of U.S. GDP. The impact on tourism is the hardest to measure, although it’s fair to expect that many hotel workers who lose their jobs will find it hard to get new ones.

Still, cleaning up the spill will likely be enough to slightly offset the negative impact of all this on GDP, J.P. Morgan said. The bank cites estimates of 4,000 unemployed people hired for the cleanup efforts, which some reports have said could be worth between $3 and $6 billion.

The J.P. Morgan analysts are right that the oil spill will have outsize impact on a few industries, impacts partially offset or even entirely replaced by new economic activity. Vacationers aren’t staying in those Louisiana hotels, but clean-up workers and lawyers and the National Guard are.

My concern is for the hangover. Five years from now, there won’t be anymore clean-up workers, and the federal government and BP won’t be funneling millions of dollars to the Gulf Coast. But my guess is that the fishing industry and the tourism industry will still be suffering from the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. How long until you would want to swim on one of those beaches, or eat one of those oysters?

Obama’s move — seemingly an overture to win Republican support for immigration reform after meeting with GOP senators earlier today — earned a backhanded response from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and was likewise chided by the leading pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice.

“Americans are hungry for real leadership on immigration, but this move by the President serves only to reward those who are standing in the way of real reform,” Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, told me in an e-mail, alleging Obama has taken “one step forward and two steps back.”

McCain, who reportedly requested a deployment during the meeting, said he “appreciate[s]” the president’s intention but thinks the move is “simply not enough” to tackle Arizona’s border woes. McCain “called for 6,000 National Guard troops to be sent, and he asked for $250 million more to pay for them,” The Associated Press reports.

Still, Sharry considers Obama’s decision a major concession to anti-immigration forces.

“Caving in to McCain and Kyl on ‘border-only’ immigration policy echoes the Democrats’ cave-in on immigration in the health care exchange following Joe Wilson’s rude outburst,” Sharry said. “It even echoes the eyebrow-raising White House announcement of support for offshore drilling.”

Neither of those moves, of course, won much Republican support.

Sahil Kapur is Washington correspondent for Raw Story and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and The Guardian.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

[Security1]Obama is expected to announce a decision on an escalation of troop levels for Afghanistan shortly after returning from his trip to Asia on Friday, which would be the second such escalation of his young presidency. That decision follows a request issued in September from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in which McChrystal delivered the Obama administration with a palette of different troop-level options to turn around a faltering war effort. While White House officials have cautioned reporters that Obama has made no final choice on the size of a troop increase, a widely re-reported McClatchy story claimed that the administration was likely to send 34,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, which would raise U.S. troop levels in the eight-year war to an all-time high of 102,000. It is likely that Obama would include members of the other military services, especially the Marines, in any troop increase, but the vast majority of any new troop complement will come from the Army.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

Click to Enlarge: Army National Guard combat brigade deployment data. (Source: U.S. Army)

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

Click to Enlarge: U.S. Army combat brigade deployment information. (Source: U.S. Army)

Furthermore, not all brigades are the same. Some are built around heavy equipment like tanks, while others are primarily light, mobile infantrymen. According to a September report by the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-escalation think-tank in Washington, no so-called “heavy” brigades have been sent to Afghanistan to date, a condition likely owing to Afghanistan’s lack of paved roads, high elevations and uneven rural terrain, all of which are inhospitable to tanks and other heavy vehicles. But of the 14 brigades available as of December 2009, five of them are heavy brigades, according to the information provided by the Army to TWI, accounting for 19,000 of the available 50,600 active-duty soldiers. There is precedent in Iraq for re-tasking heavy brigades as light brigades by deploying them without their heavy vehicles, as the Institute for the Study of War’s report points out. But there is no precedent for such a thing in Afghanistan. If the Obama administration decides not to re-task heavy brigades as light brigades, the pool of active-duty soldiers immediately available for Afghanistan shrinks to 31,600 soldiers.

Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think-tank in Washington, told TWI that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops required an inescapable calculation of risk. “The worst thing in the world is to have these people over there getting shot at, not being able to make progress, and the situation [in Afghanistan] just sort of gradually eroding, so it’s that versus the risk of breaking the force, [or] the risk that you’re not prepared for another contingency,” said Krepinevich. “So how do you weigh those risks? There is no formula or algorithm that’s going to give you the answer. It’s going to have to be a judgment call.”

McChrystal wrote in a late August assessment that the U.S. faces a “decisive” moment in Afghanistan. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal wrote nearly three months ago. While deployment times vary, no brigade can be deployed to Afghanistan overnight, raising questions about how much time remains to turn the war around even if McChrystal gets the 40,000 troops that various news accounts have stated — without official confirmation — that the general wants.

Krepinevich testified on Tuesday before a House Armed Services subcommittee in favor of McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, and appeared to lend support to a troop increase of roughly 40,000. He said that recent steps taken by both the Bush and Obama administrations to increase the total size of the Army and Marine Corps would mitigate against prolonged deployments. “Even if Gen. McChrystal’s request is honored by the president, the combined total of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq would still be significantly below the levels reached during the Surge,” he told the panel.

But the 2007 troop surge in Iraq was a one-time increase of five combat brigades that ended with those brigades’ tours. By contrast, a troop increase to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is more likely to be a sustained escalation lasting beyond the tours of the initially deployed brigades. And the brigades themselves called upon to implement the troop increase will have already served numerous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 14 active-duty brigades that will be available for deployment in December, five have already served three tours abroad since 2002 and four have already served two. If either the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division or the 1st brigade of the 10th Mountain Division are asked to deploy to Afghanistan, it will be their fifth tour since 2002.*

Krepinevich said the stress on soldiers called upon to serve repeated tours was a problem for a troop escalation. “You really have to start worrying about greater incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder, [and] that we’re already seeing in terms of the the NCO corps,” he said, referring to non-commissioned officers like sergeants who play crucial leadership roles in enforcing soldier discipline and standards. “Yes, they’re experienced but they’re just so worn out. And that has to be a concern.”

That concern was echoed by Bing West, a Reagan-era senior Pentagon official who traveled to Afghanistan in October. “There is near-unanimous agreement that deployments on the lines over eight months are too long,” West reported for the blog Small Wars Journal on Nov. 1, citing interviews with “dozens” of soldiers and Marines. “Aggressive patrolling decreases as the length of tour increases. The troops wear down.”

Korb — who, like Krepinevich, supports the Afghanistan war — said a more realistic troop increase for Afghanistan would be 10,000 soldiers until the drawdown of troops from Iraq “begins in earnest.” There are currently 120,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, almost twice the total in Afghanistan, though Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told Congress in September that he plans to reduce that total to around 50,000 by August 30, 2010. Alternatively, Korb said, Obama could speed up the pace of redeployment out of Iraq in order to relieve the stress on the force, a point echoed by Krepinevich in an interview with TWI. But under current Pentagon policy, soldiers would still need to receive at least 12 months of recuperation time back in the U.S. before potential assignment in Afghanistan.

The chief of staff of the Army, Gen. George Casey, whose institutional role includes protecting the health of the force, endorsed a troop escalation earlier this month. “I believe that we need to put additional forces into Afghanistan to give Gen. McChrystal the ability to both dampen the successes of the Taliban while we train the Afghan civilian forces,” he told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Nov. 8. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, also has responsibilities for balancing the needs of the Afghanistan war with those of the overall military and threats to the U.S. worldwide. He told Congress in September that more troops were “probably” needed in Afghanistan as well.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate, has told Congress earlier this year that he would seek to lengthen dwell time for the Army in the coming years. In January, he testified that he and Army chiefs wanted to extend dwell time to 15 months at home for every 12 months deployed by October 2010, but in July, he revised that plan and indicated that the Army might be able to shift to 15-month dwell times by summer 2010. But Gates reiterated in July a commitment to ultimately giving soldiers at least two years of dwell time by 2011. The Army public-affairs officer who released this information to TWI clarified that no unit was available unless it had ended a previous deployment by at least November 2008, indicating a continued 12-month dwell time policy.

That proposal was devised before McChrystal’s request for additional forces, and it is unclear how the fulfillment of that request will impact the dwell-time policy, if at all. Spokesmen for both Gen. McChrystal and Sec. Gates did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

*Update, 4:35 p.m., Nov. 19: Maj. Stephen Platt, public affairs officer for the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, writes to inform me that the brigade has indeed been scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in “early 2010″ for what will be its fifth combat tour since 2002. I missed a press release from the Pentagon in July announcing the deployment, and word of the upcoming tour was not included in the information provided to me by the U.S. Army. I appreciate Maj. Platt’s clarification.

Recent congressional hearings have called attention to a growing culture of violence among Mexican drug cartels that has spilled into American cities near the border, like Phoenix, Ariz. and El Paso, Texas, while spreading fear as cartels increasingly reach into cities across the United States. U.S. lawmakers say much of the violence is in response to Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s serious attempt to reduce corruption and crack down on the cartels’ operations in Mexico.

That’s put real pressure on the United States, however, and the governors of Texas and Arizona have both asked the federal government to send National Guard troops to help secure the border. That, in turn, has raised fears among some immigrants’ rights groups that the National Guard would be used to crack down not on drugs or violence, but on illegal immigration.

The plan the White House will set forth today includes investing $700 million to collaborate with Mexican law enforcement, increasing the number of federal law enforcement agents along the border, and pledges to increase funds for drug treatment and alternative sentencing to reduce the demand for illegal drugs in the United States.

Notably, however, it does not include sending in the National Guard.

Update:  At a White House press briefing this morning, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, in response to questions about the Texas governor’s request to send National Guard troops, said she is still considering it, but needs more information about where and how they would be used.