| March
6, 2004
Exempting Mexican
border residents from the USVisit mandate
is cost effective, good for business and
good politics.
By Patrick Osio,
Jr/HispanicVista.com
Most Americans know
that elected officials always have
political reasons when doing something
– that is the nature of the animal.
So of course, Bush keeps in mind
political consequences when acting on any
given issue. Exempting Mexican border
residents from the onerous border
crossing fingerprinting when entering and
again when leaving the US is one such
issue. Unfortunately the wire services
make it out to be the primary reason
– “Bush eager to boost his
standing in the U.S. Hispanic community,
the nation's fastest-growing voting bloc,
American politics were never far from the
agenda,” as one wire service
reporter called it.
This is sheer
nonsense. The reason why Bush so
gallantly pledged to Mexican President
Vicente Fox he would exempt the frequent
Mexican border crossers from the USVisit
required entry/exit fingerprinting is
because he either approved the exemption
or would paralyze the US-Mexico border
bringing economic havoc to both sides of
the border.
In theory the
USVisit program sounds good, and there is
a need to come up with a way of knowing
who enters and when the entrant leaves
the country. Though it takes some more
time to process each of the visitors who
enter with any one of the several dozen
visas the US issues, the waits at sea and
air ports are manageable – or at
least it remains to be seen. But it is
quite a different story at high volume
land ports of entry.
As any American
citizen who has traveled by air to other
countries can attest, on returning to the
US, one has to fill out a Customs’
declaration, and on landing passengers
proceed through immigration and customs
officials’ booths and baggage checks
while answering a number of questions.
Non citizens are put through the same
routine but with added questions and
sometime downright interrogations while
checking their Passports and visas. The
process cant take from 5 to 20 minutes.
Adding the USVisit fingerprinting
requirement would increase time by
another 20 to 30 seconds.
Not bad, and a small
price to pay for enhanced national
security. So that a jumbo 747 lands with
around 400 passengers, and say half are
non-US citizens, assuming the entire
process would take 10 minutes (yeah,
right), processing the 200 foreign
visitors would take 2000 minutes or the
equivalent of 33+ hours. If there are,
say, 10 inspectors the passengers would
be cleared in a little over 3 hours.
Obviously, the first ones in line less
time, the last ones the 3+ hours. And
what happens when several passenger laden
planes arrive within minutes of each
other?
Needless to say, the
waits could hamper US tourism and
business, so an exemption has been made
with over 2 dozen countries – mostly
of course reliable friends, like France.
So now we come to
the land ports of entry, Mexico being
soooo unreliable that it wasn’t on
the to-be-exempt list. But USVisit
officials began to travel to the
US-Mexico border to gain first hand
knowledge of the border’s special
needs - and came face to face with
reality.
Just the California
ports of entry handle over 95 million
annual crossings – San Diego’s
(San Ysidro) alone over 60 million –
either figure is more than the combined
population of California, Arizona, New
Mexico and Texas. That number translates
to over 260,000 daily crossings. The
economic flow coming from Mexicans in
retail and wholesale goods, and services
amount to over $24.5 million a day.
This is not an
airport with a few dozen airplanes coming
in to the country. In California alone
adding 20 seconds for the finger printing
translates to over 20 million annual
hours on top of the time it already
takes. That also means that US inspectors
would be paid for the additional 20
million hours – provided people
continue to cross, but the likelihood of
not would run high as border crossing
times would be extended from what is now
between 30 minutes to over 1 hour to 4
and 6 additional hours or more if all
gates are not manned 24 hours a day.
So Bush was reacting
to the tremendous economic downside the
entire border region would suffer where
the US to not exempt Mexican border
residents from the USVisit mandate, plus
the added cost of proceeding. Mexican
border residents have had for decades a
25 mile 72 hour visa card provided by US
immigration authorities – Bush
simply decided to allow that to continue.
If this is also good politics – so
be it.
________________________________________________________
Patrick Osio, Jr. is
Editor of HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com).
Email at: POsioJr@aol.com
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