Guest Column
Bush’s Border Militarization Foible
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
OW Contributor
In a run up to his nationally televised address on immigration reform,
President Bush took great pains to reassure Mexican President Vicente Fox
and skeptical Senate Democrats that dumping thousands of National Guard
troops on the border was not a move to militarize the border. If Bush is as
good as his word, and the deployment is only a temporary measure to assist
beleaguered, overworked, and short handed border patrol agents better do
their job, it still won’t do much to stem the tide of illegal immigrants
entering the country.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, nearly three-quarter million illegal
immigrants enter the country each year. That number hasn’t changed in the
past decade. During those years, the Clinton and Bush administrations spent
more to arrest, detain and deport illegal immigrants. The increased spending
also included the construction of bigger and stronger border fences along
more than 100 miles of the border in California Arizona and Texas.
The fences and the added agents didn’t stop the thousands of desperate
foreign workers from south of the border from getting in. And it certainly
didn’t stop smugglers, and labor contractors from bringing them in. They
found and dug unguarded crossing points, trails, roads, and tunnels to
enter. It would take thousands of National Guard troops to fill up the
700-mile stretch of mostly open land that illegal immigrants can enter the
country through. The troops would have to be deployed on the border for more
than a few months to have any real impact on immigration control. Neither
Bush nor Congress has said where the money is going to come from to maintain
a prolonged troop presence there.
But even if the Bush and Congress bankroll guard troops for months on the
border, the number of illegal immigrants that get into the country still
wouldn’t appreciably drop. That’s because a sizeable percent of the estimate
11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. didn’t trek across the Mexican
border. They came in on planes and on boats as tourists with student and
work visas. They came from Asia, Africa, and Caribbean countries, Canada,
Ireland, and Eastern Europe. When their visas expired they simply stayed.
An impregnable brick and mortar border wall, space age sensors, and more
border agents, and National Guard troops wouldn’t have stopped the 19
hijackers that rammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
September 11 from getting into the country. They were all here with
legitimate visas, and in a slap at Republicans that say tough border
security would stop terrorists from getting in, 13 of them did not break the
law by overstaying. Their visas hadn’t expired.
The millions of others that enter the U.S. legally or illegally come to work
and escape poverty in their countries. Businesses, trade and manufacturing
associations put the welcome mat out for them. They openly boast that they
will continue to hire undocumented workers. They also make veiled threats
that their industries, indeed the economy, would collapse if they didn’t
hire them.
Despite the recent showy raids Homeland Security and INS made on a few
employers, mostly for political and public consumption, there is still no
evidence that federal officials will mount a massive crackdown on employers
that hire illegal immigrants. The figures point in the opposite direction.
In 2004, a grand total of three employers were sanctioned for hiring
illegals. That was a steep plunge from five years earlier when the feds
served “intent to fine” notices on more than 400 employers for hiring
undocumented workers. Federal officials, in defense, say that they have
shifted their focus from fines and raids to criminal prosecutions.
Criminal prosecutions, however, haven’t done much to stop the flow either.
The issue is still jobs and poverty. Mexican President Vicente Fox has taken
much heat for not doing more to improve the economy in Mexico to provide
more jobs. In response, he publicly pledged that government and industry in
Mexico would create more than a million jobs in the next few years. But with
Mexico’s continued high population growth that would be a bare blip on the
country’s employment chart. The U.S. Agency for International Development
would have to radically increase the amount of investment it pumps into the
country in the next five years to create the millions of new jobs that would
keep more workers in the country. The agency has given no public indication
that it will spend those added billions.
Bush has latched onto the troops-on-the-border issue in part to show that he
can get at least one policy initiative through Congress, and in greater part
to appease conservatives who are furious at him for backing a too-soft
immigration reform bill. Bush’s tough talk on border security might cool
some of their anger, but it’s a fool’s paradise measure that won’t put a
dent in the illegal immigrant problem. And Congress shouldn’t con itself
into thinking that it will.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator,
and the author of The Crisis in Black and Black (Middle Passage Press).
TheHutchinsonReport blog is now at
www.earlofarihutchinson.com
Our Week article at: http://www.ourweekly.com
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