Thread: BORDER CHALLENGES HEIGHTENED WITH INCREASE IN IMMIGRANTS

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BORDER CHALLENGES HEIGHTENED WITH INCREASE IN IMMIGRANTS

By Georgie Anne Geyer Thu May 5, 8:06 PM ET

DOUGLAS, Ariz. -- Ray Borane, mayor of this sleepy deep-border town blooming with yellow wildflowers and surrounded by purple mountains, remembers well when his happy valley began to change.

"Oh, it was six, seven years ago, maybe a little more," he reminisced with me, the stranger from "El Norte," as we sat in his modern mayoral offices next to the historic 1880s Gadsden Hotel. "You'd go to the border and you'd see one wave of immigrants walking right down our main street; we'd have 45 to 50 huddled in our back yards. They scared older people, but they were more of a nuisance than anything else."
In the decades before "the waves" started coming, this community, like so many along the 2,000-mile-long border, was amenable to both gringos and Latinos. Many were intermarried. Most of the Latinos who lived and worked on one side or the other of the border never had any intention of going farther north, only mingling on the border, buying at the Wal-Marts and big stores for those on the Mexican side, and living out their lives.

But then that border -- along with the values and principles about immigration appropriate for a regional area -- changed completely.

"The high came in 2002," Mayor Borane, a sturdy man who seems eternally angry about the border, went on. "Suddenly there were 30,000 immigrants a month in Douglas, and the picture changed quite a bit. At worst, they were coming right through the streets and neighborhoods of Douglas. So I met with David Aguilar, who was then the chief in Tucson and who is now the national border chief, and he promised that within two months he'd have the traffic out of the middle of Douglas. They were: They made them go out into the desert."

Today, you have bizarre situations like the one only a few weeks ago when a group of 77 illegals, preparing to cross through one of the vast deserts around Douglas and Bisbee and Nogales, overcame a particularly cruel "coyote," or immigrant smuggler, and SOS'ed the Border Patrol for help. The Border Patrol located them, gave them food and water and saved them -- before sending them back.

The Border Patrol station in Douglas, which used to house about 45 men, is now a huge, modern building, with night scopes to catch immigrants and chart their course by television screens, and with more than 500 agents. With this physical change has come a bigger, philosophical change, the imprinting of the national need on a small place like Douglas.

The problem here is both very simple and immensely complicated: The old values of neighborliness between gringos and Latinos could work just fine when there were not illegal immigrants who want not to remain on the border and raise a family, but to head north, to get good-paying and preferably permanent jobs and to stay.

Today those values don't work, with up to 11 million illegals in America in what critics of immigration policy call an "invasion." This other, bigger America needs values that protect not the housewife from Agua Prieta going across the border for an afternoon at Wal-Mart, but that protect the integrity of the nation's laws, institutions and intentions.

And there is still another change today. In Mayor Barone's earlier years, the immigrants, most of them from Mexico, came across on their own. They were ambitious young men, usually looking for work to support their families back home; most of them went back and forth, and many would eventually return to Mexico for good. That is far from the situation today.

Mexico, as a state, is publicly encouraging its people to go to America -- in effect, to break its neighbor's laws -- so that 1) it can rid itself of its egregious overpopulation and bring its approximately $12 billion in remittances home every year, and 2) thus also rid itself of ambitious dissidents who politically could threaten the corrupt and inept state they come from.

The Bush administration wants to form a guest-worker program for the estimated 500,000 Mexican workers who cross the border every year. Sidney Weintraub, one of America's most cogent Latin American scholars, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently pointed out in the Financial Times that what America would really be doing with a guest-worker program is subsidizing companies who can get away with paying foreign workers pittances of what they pay Americans.

At the same time, he pointed out -- and these figures can be backed up endlessly with examples of the Mexican government's corruption and haplessness at development -- federal tax revenue in Mexico is now less than 12 percent of gross domestic product, one of the lowest ratios in even Latin America. So one can argue that U.S. taxpayers are not only relieving Mexico of its excess and potentially politically tricky population, but also making good the shortfall from the failure of the country's own tax collection efforts.

No longer the pleasant regionalism that Mayor Barone grew up with along the border, the problem today is one of one nation urging its people to break its neighbor's laws. No longer an individual against a state, today the problem is one state against another state. Once we look upon it as that, we can begin to think of different ways of controlling the problem.

If we don't have a clue how many of them there are how do we know of an increase?