TRYING to stop the flow of migrants crossing the border into the United States is like trying to enforce a 25-mile an hour speed limit on the interstate. It’s going to take a lot of police officers and the chances of success are almost nil.
That’s how Tamar Jacoby, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, describes the problem of illegal immigration. Last month, a bunch of volunteers calling themselves the Minuteman Project devoted themselves to proving her wrong.
Some 857 men and women traveled to a 23-mile stretch of Arizona desert that borders Mexico to monitor the flow of humanity trying to get into America, and call the Border Patrol when they spotted illegals on the U.S. side. Each volunteer completed a 4-hour training session and spent at least one 8-hour shift in the field. The group’s Web site says that, through the end of April, its volunteers directly facilitated 335 Border Patrol apprehensions. Indeed, the Minutemen claim their efforts led to a “98 percent reduction in border crossings in the area monitored from April 1 through April 26.”
But the group patrolled less than a tenth of Arizona’s 261 miles of Mexican border, and some 39,000 migrants a month are apprehended after crossing that line (which is less than 10 percent of the total U.S.-Mexico divide) – and, by most accounts, far more get through. A conservative estimate of illegal aliens now in the United States is 10 million; some say it’s nearly 20 million.
So the Minutemen didn’t even scratch the surface.
Andrea Zortman, spokesperson for the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, insists that law enforcement doesn’t need the help. Since March of last year, a new federally funded initiative has nearly tripled the number of officers, plus provided new equipment and technologies to make the Border Patrol much more effective at catching illegals.
Poppycock, says a veteran border patrolman with 17 years experience in Arizona and California (who, for obvious reasons, requested anonymity). The border is porous, he says – but he also believes there’s a solution, it’s just not one anyone wants to hear.
“Yes, [illegal entry] can be stopped, but it does not seem to be politically correct to either [political] party. More resources would be great, but only if they would remove some of the impediments to the Border Patrol agents doing their jobs. As time goes by, the paperwork involved in processing illegal aliens constantly increases so that agents spend more and more time in the station instead of out in the field catching aliens,” he explained in an e-mail.
He pointed out that something as basic as fixing the dirt roads used to patrol the border is nearly impossible because of environmental regulations. Why doesn’t President Bush just sign an “executive order exempting these type of border improvements from any [Environmental Protection Agency] regulations in the name of national security?” he asked.
The problem goes far beyond the border, says Michael Cutler, a former senior special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Without agents devoted to finding illegals in the interior of the country, he says, there is little hope of properly enforcing the law.
Cutler notes that there are now some 2,000 immigration agents whose job it is to track down illegal aliens. But with at least 10 million illegals here now, those are nearly impossible odds.
Why so little enforcement? As the border patrolman sees it, the problem is America’s appetite for cheap labor.
“The truth is that illegals provide labor for a large number of huge corporations in the U.S. for low wages,” he says. He names a nationally known food-processing company that “would go out of business tomorrow without illegals providing labor.” He goes on, “Do you think it is a coincidence that the congressmen from the states where illegal aliens provide labor for large corporations, campaign and vote against enforcement of immigration laws? Unfortunately, we need cheap labor in the U.S. if we want to keep the prices down for certain commodities.”
In other words, while Americans would like secure borders, what we really want is cheaper chicken and cleaning ladies. The vast majority of illegals, meanwhile, are just looking to build better lives for their families.
It’s not that simple, Cutler warns. He notes that neighborhoods where lots of illegals live tend to breed businesses that cater to those residents – check-cashing joints, wire-transfer places, Mailboxes-R-Us, etc. These are just the sorts of businesses that bad guys and terrorists like to use, and just the type of neighborhoods where they can hide in plain sight.
In essence, the illegal-immigration problem breeds a national-security problem, says Cutler – and Washington isn’t handling the problem well.
Since 9/11, Congress has folded immigration agencies into the Homeland Security Department and provided a few more resources. But it hasn’t changed the perverse rules of the game.
President Bush, meanwhile, has proposed a new guest-worker program – to legally satisfy our demand for cheap labor. “Our nation needs an immigration system that serves the American economy, and reflects the American Dream,” he said in January 2004. But his plan seems to be going nowhere, in part because it’s coupled with a move to “regularize” current illegals which looks a lot like past amnesties that failed to change much.
(I must also add, as someone who’s spent nearly five years in the bureaucratic nightmare of immigrating legally, that I’d resent seeing those who didn’t obey the law suddenly get to jump the line.)
Today’s border mess is the result of a longstanding deadlock between “open border” folks who argue that everyone should be allowed in and “secure border” types who want the limits on immigration strictly enforced. In practice, that means we’ve gotten some effort at control, but not enough to check the growth of a huge illegal-labor underclass.
As the Minutemen see it, the attacks of 9/11 should have blown that compromise to bits – it’s time to renegotiate. So far, there’s not much sign that they’ve changed things – but they’re headed for the California border next.
