Thread: Threat or promise? 2 views across border(op/ed-NYTimes)

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/23/news/mexico.html

Threat or promise? 2 views across border
By James C. McKinley Jr. The New York Times
Thursday, March 24, 2005

MEXICALI, Mexico When U.S. Customs officials discovered the latest tunnel under the border here, they were stunned.

Complete with a cement floor and an intercom system, the passage found last month ran nearly 200 meters, or about 650 feet, from a house on one side of a rusty metal fence, under two streets and an apartment complex, to an unassuming tract home in California.

Though more elaborate, the tunnel is not unlike the 15 others found during the 1990s, built by drug cartels. But everything in the world after Sept. 11, 2001, has taken on a different hue. Today tunnels like this one are where the failures of drug policy, border control and immigration reform meet ever-pressing issues of national security.

U.S. officials fear the tunnels could be used just as easily to smuggle terrorists and explosives as cocaine or illegal aliens.

That confluence of worries forms the backdrop for a meeting on Wednesday in Texas of President George W. Bush, President Vicente Fox of Mexico and Prime Minister Paul Martin of Canada. But where issues converge, the interests of the United States and its neighbors may not.

For Bush and the Republican-led Congress he must work with, security is on top of the agenda. For Mexico, it is immigration changes that would open the border to a freer flow of migrant workers.

For liberal Canada, it is the imperative of foreign and domestic policies that increasingly diverge from Washington's conservative consensus.

Senior Bush administration officials said Tuesday that the three leaders were not expected to announce any concrete agreements after the one-day meeting at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which will be followed by a lunch at the Bush ranch in Crawford.

Instead, the three men will announce a new framework and timetable for resolving a host of sticky trade and security issues, among them letting more workers cross borders legally for jobs and improving cooperation against terrorists.

A year ago, Bush proposed greatly expanding a guest-worker program for Mexican laborers. But to Fox's great dismay, the idea has faded.

In the past two weeks, U.S. diplomats have made it clear that Congress is unlikely to act unless Mexico does more to tighten up the border and reduce the rampant crime on its side.

"What Mexico needs to understand is that migration is viewed largely as a security issue in the United States, and they appear to think that that is not as important as we do," said Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who has taken a lead in the debate on expanding a guest-worker program.

Perhaps nowhere is the inexorable nature of the northward migration of Mexicans - and the vulnerability of the United States to infiltration, whether by migrants or by terrorists - more apparent than in Mexicali and in its sister city, Calexico, California.

Investigators say they doubt that the builders of the elaborate tunnel would have spent an estimated $1 million just to smuggle migrant workers headed for jobs picking grapes or working at convenience stores. It is more likely, they said, that the tunnel was built to smuggle lucrative drugs like cocaine and heroin, but another line of investigation is that its builders might have intended to sell passage to terrorists or other criminals.

"You have this gaping hole that could be used for anything," said Michael Unzueta, the acting special agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Meanwhile, the alarms have been sounding in Washington about the dangers post-9/11 of a porous border, 2,000 miles, or 3,200 kilometers long. James Loy, the deputy secretary of homeland security, said last month that intelligence reports showed that Al Qaeda terrorists were likely to try to enter the country from Mexico, across whose border at least 300,000 people flow every year virtually untraced and with impunity.

Porter Goss, the director of central intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the United States was vulnerable to terrorists who infiltrated through "its back patio."

But a tighter border that keeps Mexicans from desperately needed jobs in the United States is not necessarily in Fox's interest.

Last week, in a sharp divergence from Washington, he publicly decried a measure passed in the House of Representatives that would mandate the completion of a long-stalled security wall between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego.

Far from being completed, he said, the wall should be knocked down.

"No country that is proud of itself should construct walls," he told reporters in Mexico City on March 15. "No one can isolate oneself these days with a wall."

He and other proponents of immigration reform and the guest-worker program argue that higher walls and tighter controls will do more harm than good, by forcing more migrants to take illegal routes, and thus making it easier for terrorists to cross illegally as well.

But opponents, like Representative Tom Tancredo, a conservative Colorado Republican, say a guest-worker program makes no sense unless there is already a tight border.

"Porter Goss, the director of central intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that the United States was vulnerable to terrorists who infiltrated through "its back patio." "

Hold the presses....we found somebody in Washington who is awake!
Unfortunately, he isn't in the White House.