Published: 08.04.2008
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Immigration
Border Patrol should really focus on terror, not workers
REKHA BASU


The U.S. Border Patrol recently came to a Des Moines, Iowa, suburb to recruit.

Since Iowa is far from any national border, it begged the obvious question: Why here?

The agency that captures unauthorized border-crossers is being given the money and the mandate to double its force by 2010. So it's hiring all over the country for jobs along southern borders.

The rationale behind its expansion? Fighting the terrorist threat.

That's the purpose stressed by all the Border Patrol literature, the recruiting film and the recruiters. "We are waging a war on terror, and now more than ever this border must be guarded," says the film.

The Border Patrol was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 in a shift intended, according to its literature, to meet "the threat of potential terrorist infiltration across America's land and sea frontiers."

If only it were so. But neither logic nor the Patrol's own statistics support its claims. The Sept. 11 hijackers, Middle Eastern in origin, entered by plane and overstayed their visas.

The Patrol's Web site is full of apprehensions but not a single mention of a terrorist capture. Of the nearly half-a-million people caught between October 2007 and May 2008, even the fewer than 12,000 with criminal records were not linked to terrorism, according to statistics in a June recruitment newsletter.

Asked how many terrorists have been caught, the Border Patrol agent conducting the information session conceded, "Well, I've never seen one." She's had her job 3 1/2 years.

As funds have been diverted to terrorism fighting, missions have changed - or must.

Clearly the Border Patrol feels that to keep its funding up, it has to hitch its wagon to terrorism fighting. And it would be a welcome shift if the focus actually moved from nabbing job-seeking Mexicans or Guatemalans to fighting terrorism.

But that seems more myth than reality, given the lack of terrorists actually caught sneaking across the Mexican border. So the net impact of adding more agents will be that more poor, desperate people are pursued.
Postville, Iowa, is still reeling from the impact of the immigration raid on the kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors, on May 12. The raid cleared out a good chunk of the town and its school population.

Sister Mary McCauley isn't anyone's idea of a subversive, but she's starting to sound like one. White-haired and restrained, she has been working at St. Bridget's Catholic Church with some of the 389 undocumented Latinos targeted in the raid.

"I want our country to be as welcoming in 2008 as when my grandfather came in the 1880s. Why do we think we have such ownership of this country now, and it's our country and no one else's?" asks McCauley of those who would send undocumented immigrants back. "We were created to share the gifts that were given to us."

McCauley had listened as sisters Silvia and Maria Ruiz, both mothers, described walking and hitchhiking for more than a month across two borders from Guatemala to find work to feed themselves and their families. Since their arrests, they can't work and must wear electronic monitors to prevent their leaving the state.

"Listening to their story, hearing what they have suffered, these are the tired and poor and huddled masses," says McCauley, referring to the words of welcome engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

No one is immune to the stories of human suffering, not even Rafael Albuernes, one of the Border Patrol agents who came to Iowa to recruit.

He says more than half of the agents are, like him, Hispanic, and, "We are catching a lot of women with children in their hands, elderly folks. You feel bad for them, but you've still gotta do what you've gotta do."

He gives them his lunch. "It is heartbreaking," he says, "but regardless, we're here to protect our country."

But protect it from what? Why not really go after terrorists and leave alone the poor people who need jobs?

"People say to me they should not have crossed the borders; they were breaking the law," says McCauley. "Yes, objectively a law was broken. But when so many people are breaking that law because they cannot feed their families, then maybe we have to adjust the immigration law just as we had to adjust the suffrage law or the segregation law."

And if you have to enforce the law, raids are a particularly harsh way to do it, she says. "Selecting a small group of people causes such terror. It causes families to be torn apart. It causes people to lie, whether or not they are guilty. It deprives young people of an education ... I would never want another community to go through what Postville has gone through."

The saddest part, says McCauley, is when she tells the immigrants, "I'm so sorry that you're going to have to leave and they say, 'Oh, it's all right.' It means they've never been given much opportunity."

Silvia and Maria Ruiz are resigned to their fates. McCauley is not. And here's what she didn't know: It's for her that they pray every night.

Rekha Basu is an editorial columnist for the Des Moines Register. E-mail: rbasu@dmreg.com.

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