A flawed plan for border / McCain, Kyl plan for Arizona ignores real problem

By Union-Tribune Editorial Board,
Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 12:04 a.m.

Let us be clear. We support the idea of enhanced border enforcement, but we support it as one ingredient in the recipe of comprehensive immigration reform. Enforcement only doesn’t work as a national strategy to control illegal immigration.

In October 1994, we supported the launch of Operation Gatekeeper, which helped secure the California-Mexico border and bring order to the San Diego sector. But when the Clinton administration cracked down on the flow of illegal immigrants into California, it squeezed more illegal immigrants across the border into Arizona.

Those illegal immigrants might have kept right on going to points north in search of work had Arizona employers refused to hire them. That didn’t happen. Cities all over the Grand Canyon State were booming, and there was a hunger for cheap labor. In fact, so many illegal immigrants wound up working and settling in Arizona that the state now has the most illegal immigrants in the country in terms of a percentage of the total population.

To reverse that trend and regain control of the Arizona-Mexico border, Republican Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl this week channeled the spirit of Operation Gatekeeper and announced a 10-point enforcement plan aimed at the border. The Arizona senators want the Obama administration to send 3,000 additional Border Patrol agents to Arizona, deploy 3,000 National Guard troops to the border, increase funding for programs that help local law enforcement agencies fight drug and immigrant smuggling and require that anyone caught crossing the border illegally more than once serve 15 to 60 days in jail. All this is needed, the senators said, because the federal government has failed to secure the border.

This is disappointing. McCain and Kyl know better than that. Representing a border state, they know that there is no shortage of personnel or resources on the U.S.-Mexico border. There are more than 20,000 Border Patrol agents, according to the Homeland Security. Four thousand – or 20 percent – are in Arizona. The senators should also know that it’s not wise to concentrate all your focus on the border and ignore what happens in the heartland or, in this case, even just the rest of Arizona. You can have all the Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops you want on the border and, if employers are still hiring illegal immigrants in Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff and other cities throughout the state, illegal immigration will continue. It would have been nice to see McCain and Kyl take a hard line against employers.

Be that as it may, even if the federal government were able to seal the Arizona-Mexico border, what good would that do? It might give politicians in Arizona something to crow about for a while. But, sooner or later, the problem would return. And in the meantime, all those illegal immigrants who are now entering the United States through Arizona would just go farther down the road.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010 ... or-border/