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Feds fail to see bigger picture on border
Ventura County Star
July 26, 2006
By Peter Schrag
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 compromises 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.
http://www.citizenstrade.org/pdf/ventur ... 262006.pdf