Thread: Feds fail to see bigger picture on border

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/10244


Feds fail to see bigger picture on border

By PETER SCHRAG
Sacramento Bee
26-JUL-06

As the fight over immigration gets ever hotter both in Washington and in many states, one thing seems obvious: Neither of the pending congressional bills is broad enough to deal with the basic issues.

Even in the unlikely event that there were some compromise between the hard-nosed, punish-'em-all House bill and the bipartisan, more comprehensive McCain-Kennedy Senate measure, the issue wouldn't go away. Without a more comprehensive approach, the immigration fight may never end.

The critics of the Senate bill are right: It smacks a lot of IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which also combined legalization, a guest worker program, tougher border enforcement and sanctions for employers of illegal workers. It didn't succeed for many reasons _ the proliferation of fake identification documents, a lack of government will to enforce the sanctions, a secondary wave of illegal relatives joining the immigrants granted amnesty, among others.

But tougher border enforcement hasn't worked either. In the past 15 years, as the feds increased manpower for the Border Patrol, built more miles of fence and installed more electronic gadgets, the number of illegal residents quadrupled to the current 12 million.

Because crossing north became more expensive and dangerous, more illegal workers simply stayed here instead of making periodic trips home and, as de facto permanent residents, sent for their families. So far, all attempts to toughen border enforcement have backfired.

Nor, of course, could tougher border enforcement reduce the number of visa overstayers, who represent almost half of the nation's illegal immigrants _ people from every corner of the globe who never waded across the Rio Grande.

It's hardly a secret that what brings nearly all those immigrants is the huge disparity in wages and job opportunities between there _ meaning primarily Mexico and Central America _ and here, and by the appetite of both business and individual Americans for cheap immigrant labor. For millions of young Mexicans there's only one destination _ El Norte. More than 10 percent of the Mexican population is in the United States.

But our own policy misjudgments have contributed mightily. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, designed to ease the movement of goods and capital across borders, never contemplated the effects of free trade on labor.

The most obvious of those effects was the displacement of Mexican farmers squeezed by cheaper competition from capital-intensive U.S. growers. Another was the flow of people from the interior to the maquiladoras, the multinational manufacturing plants along Mexico's northern border, from which a move across the border seemed increasingly attractive and feasible.

NAFTA was supposed to stimulate development and thus reduce the incentive to immigrate, but the prime beneficiaries were the urban, educated and the already well-off. And as every Californian knows, the rapidly growing Latino population, much of it in families composed of both citizens and legal and illegal aliens _ and often of non-Hispanic whites and Asians as well _ is rapidly generating a new cross-border society unlike anything ever seen before in this country.

Mexico's largest source of foreign income is in remittances, the billions of dollars sent home every year by Mexican workers to their families and by hometown associations funding schools, roads, churches and sports facilities in Mexican towns.

In addition, there now are hundreds of multinational institutions _ business, labor, environmental, health, educational and artistic organizations, among others _ attempting to deal with countless common issues and/or celebrating an evolving common culture.

"North America is no longer just a geographical expression," said Robert Pastor, director of North American Studies at American University in Washington. "It has become a formidable and integrated region."

That prospect, of course, is one of the things scaring a lot of Americans.

Pastor, a former national security adviser on Latin America, has been a prime advocate for a North American Community _ Canada, the United States and Mexico _ to create institutions and arrangements to deal with common problems of security, customs and trade, crime, drugs and a range of other issues, and to foster investment that promises better opportunities in Mexico.

Pastor wants an intensive 10-year program to improve Mexico's infrastructure. That would involve about $8 billion annually from the United States _ for a total of $80 billion, about a third of what the United States has spent in Iraq _ plus another $12 billion from Mexico and Canada.

With management by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, he said the other day, there'd be enough transparency and accountability to "side-step" problems of Mexican corruption. But because the program also requires Mexican investment, it demands thorough reform of Mexico's inadequate and inequitable tax system. Private investment, he said, will take care of itself.

All of that involves countless ifs on both sides of the border, not least of them the fractious U.S. debate about immigration itself. But for all its heat, the debate is also the best evidence that a lot more has to be considered than what's presently on the table.




(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, http://www.shns.com.)

But tougher border enforcement hasn't worked either. In the past 15 years, as the feds increased manpower for the Border Patrol, built more miles of fence and installed more electronic gadgets, the number of illegal residents quadrupled to the current 12 million.

Enforcement doesn't just mean border enforcement, it should also include interior enforcement and labor law enforcement.

When people say enforcement alone won't work, they can't know that, because it's never been tried.