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Firsthand look shows secure border to be a myth
© by Barbara Anderson
The Salem News
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
While Congress is
holding hearings on immigration, let’s learn about illegal
immigration from someone who just returned from a Rio Grande Valley
border tour.
My colleague Chip
Faulkner, who rarely takes a real vacation, surprised me last year
with enthusiasm for taking a weeklong tour of the Arizona border
with the Center for Immigration Studies. He found it so interesting
that he joined the center staff again this year to visit the Texas
border. Here are some of the things he told me when he returned.
As Obama releases his
own immigration bill with its “path to citizenship” for illegals who
are already here, we’ve been assured by
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano that the borders are
secure. Chip saw mostly open desert between Arizona and Mexico, and
mostly unsecured Rio Grande on the southernmost Texas border.
Meeting with local ranchers and other homeowners, he was told that
her claim was “absurd,” that there are still a lot of illegals
crossing the shallow river with its multiple S-curves that make this
relatively easy.
Substantially
increasing the number of Border Patrol agents has not solved the
problem. They were hired so quickly that adequate background checks
were not done; one of them was found to be an illegal immigrant
himself!
Locals say that most
Washington politicians/bureaucrats are “clueless” when it comes to
knowing the concerns of the Americans living along these borders:
They visit for a photo op, stay a day or two, ignore what people are
trying to tell them, and then fly back to D.C. to set policy that
doesn’t help. This was true of officials from both the Bush and
Obama administrations.
Chip missed his flight
to San Antonio because of the blizzard, so he didn’t get to the
earliest part of the itinerary, the city of Eagle Pass, directly
across the Rio Grande from the Mexican city of Piedras Negras,
“where Yee Haw meets Ole!” There the group had found a new border
fence near downtown, finally impeding what had been an easy illegal
crossing of humans and drugs from Mexico.
Chip caught up in
Laredo. Over the next few days, they drove along the border, walked
to the banks of the river, which was at most 200 feet across, saw no
fences, Border Patrol or anything else that would prevent a
crossing. They did see another fence at the University of Texas in
Brownsville and visited the immigration court in Harlingen where
thousands of cases are adjudicated every year. Farther on is
Falfurrias, the location of one of the most active Border Patrol
checkpoints in the country. Chip’s group met with local ranchers
there whose lands are routinely trespassed by illegals who seek to
circumvent the checkpoint.
One property owner said
that he’s seen a 500 percent increase in people coming through his
property since Obama announced the DREAM Act last summer; others
said that there are more OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) from Central
America now.
Though there’s still
some dispute over this, many Texans think that drug smuggling has
taken precedence over human trafficking for the cartel the last
several years. One official told of a 15-year-old Mexican caught
bringing drugs over the river; it was discovered that he made $5,000
per trip, making three trips per day.
None of this sounds
“secure” to me, Secretary Napolitano.
I have libertarian
friends who think that anyone should be allowed to come here. This
can’t work, logistically; we can’t fit in all the people from
Central and South America, then Africa, then Bangladesh, who would
find the United States a better place to live than where they are —
especially when you consider not just job opportunities, but various
welfare benefits that, incredibly, are available to illegal
immigrants.
Of course in a perfect
libertarian world, there would be little in the way of government
welfare for anyone, so that would itself be a strong beginner
immigration policy, similar to what existed when our grandparents
(as well as most Mexican-American citizens) emigrated from various
countries; only the strong would come and add value to the American
melting pot.
Until then, borders
must be tightly closed before there can be an immigration bill that
addresses the illegals who are already here. We hear about veterans
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who can’t find jobs in this
economy; why not assign or hire them to guard the border until more
fence can be built? In a libertarian world, there would be plenty of
Americans not getting extended unemployment benefits who can build
it quickly. They’d probably be also doing other jobs that we’re told
Americans don’t want to do, like picking crops.
The Mexican government
might be glad to cooperate with our returning National Guard in a
joint venture to wipe out the border drug cartels; with them gone,
Mexico might finally become a country that fewer people want to
leave, as I remember it when I lived there as an exchange student in
1961.
As the U.S.A.,
according to President Obama, loses all viability as an operating
entity (as well as its mind) unless it can tax itself into
prosperity, some Americans may be looking for a country that has
learned some hard lessons and is ahead of us in facing fiscal
realities. Mexico, Ole!
The comments made
and opinions expressed in her columns are those of Barbara Anderson
and do not necessarily reflect those of Citizens for Limited Taxation.
Barbara Anderson is executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation. Her
column appears weekly in the Salem News and other Eagle Tribune newspapers.
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