Is there an end in sight for immigration battle?
America's war on drugs echoes in fight to halt illegal immigration.
By Bob Deans

WASHINGTON BUREAU


Saturday, June 10, 2006

WASHINGTON — In the pre-dawn hours of May 16, an international anti-narcotics team headed by U.S. agents swept the drug empire headed by Colombian-born Pablo Joaquin Rayo-Montano, arresting the kingpin while he lay sleeping.

The operation, the result of a meticulous three-year investigation in at least seven American cities and 10 countries, shut down a massive network that was smuggling tons of cocaine every month into the United States.

Similar to the war on drugs, analysts say, immigration policies should take the U.S. demand for workers into account. Above, illegal immigrants are taken into custody near Laredo earlier this week.

The billions of dollars spent on a drug war first declared by President Nixon have raised the cost and difficulty of smuggling drugs into the United States, but haven't dampened American demand for drugs or reduced their availability.

As 6,000 National Guard troops begin deploying to help U.S. border control agents get a grip on illegal immigrants pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border, some analysts are asking what lessons can be learned from the country's decades-long effort to thwart drug smugglers.

With perhaps as many as 800,000 illegal immigrants crossing the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, trying to fence out immigrants can stem the tide by only so much, experts say.

As long as there are migrant workers willing to risk their lives for good-paying jobs in this country, border controls can make it harder, more threatening and more expensive for illegal immigrants to sneak in. But, as in the war on drugs, improved border controls alone will never stop it.

"I don't think that strong border control by itself is going to do anything to eliminate either one of those problems," said Jack Riley, a border security expert with RAND, an international policy consultant firm in Santa Monica, Calif.

It was 1971 when Nixon declared war on drugs, calling the trade and abuse of illicit narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States." The effort has become a permanent part of the country's defense and law enforcement strategy. This year alone the federal drug war will cost American taxpayers $12.5 billion.

Battles have been and will be won — like the Rayo-Montano bust — but the war will not, analysts say.

"Three and a half decades of failure seems to demonstrate that," said Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, and author of the 2003 book, "Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America."

The root problem is that demand for illicit drugs remains steady in the United States. The State Department estimates that growing, processing and smuggling drugs is a $142 billion industry in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

That represents a huge incentive for people, especially those in the underdeveloped economies of Mexico and Latin America, to risk jail time smuggling drugs. Get-tough border control policies can only go so far toward countering that.

"Border control is going to lead to more drug seizures," said Riley, "but that market signal, that profit, is still going to be there."

Similarly, he said, illegal immigration can't be stopped by border watchdogs alone, so long as millions of American companies small and large — not to mention tens of millions of American homeowners — are willing to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration if it means saving money on wages or contracts to paint houses and mow lawns.

"Border control will help to some degree with illegal immigration," Riley said, "but until there are programs in place that help deter people, to help reduce the demand for illegal immigration itself, border control won't stop that problem either."

However, a commitment to better police the border could have an important impact, said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington advocacy group that favors aggressive enforcement of U.S. border controls.

"We have not secured our border," he said. But it would be a mistake to think a porous 2,000-mile border could be sealed with a few thousand National Guard troops, Camarota added.

The Bush administration has stopped short of declaring war on illegal immigration. It has, though, stepped up the number of border control agents deployed along the U.S.-Mexico line to about 12,000, a 33 percent increase over the past five years.

They are aided by helicopter patrols, scores of miles of fences and roadside barriers and new technologies such as giant X-ray scanners and infrared sensors that detect human heat.

The National Guard soldiers won't be used to help police the border, but rather to help monitor remote areas, build new barriers and roads, and provide various types of logistics, communications and medical support.

But Camarota says a lack of coordination has hindered efforts. "The state and local governments are not on the same page. Federal agencies within the federal government are often not on the same page," he said.

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies approach drugs and immigrants differently. As many as 12 million illegal immigrants may be in the United States, many of whom easily evade laxly enforced federal and state tax and employment laws.

"It's one thing to go after the scum of the earth," Camarota said, in reference to drug dealers. "If you're trying to go after hard-working, church-going, tax-paying people who just want a better life, it's hard to get out of bed in the morning."

Still, analysts hold out hope that strengthened border controls, even if the system is not perfect, will to some extent reduce illegal immigration.

"Even a broken clock is right twice a day," Carpenter said. "Maybe this is one of those times."