Another Day On The Border
A handful of weeks ago I spent some more time on the Arizona-Mexico border. And let me make it simple: after millions of words and a couple of billion dollars invested in the new super-duper fence very little has changed. Secure borders? Right! Mission Accomplished. Here’s my feature report.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Bravo, Marc! I’ve linked to your article on Bender’s Immigration Bulletin – Daily Edition, http://www.bibdaily.com, under the headline, “Real Mexicans vs. Virtual Fence: Guess Who’s Winning?”
And the hits just keep coming: on June 6th Bush signed an Executive Order (published in yesterday’s Federal Register) commanding all federal contractors to screen new employees through the doomed-to-fail E-Verify system: http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1213039922523.shtm
As Wall Street Journal editorialist Jason Riley notes in his new book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders, it is passing strange that putative small-government conservatives are willing to bust the bank to fund such a losing proposition as this latest border fiasco. http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=4846
Keep the heat turned up, buddy.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I would feel pretty badly if I had helped this guy continue on his illegal journey into our country, but not as much as the child’s mother:
June 12th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Dan – I always turn to the Wall Street Journal and the Cato Institute for great ideas about total deregulation of the labor market…
June 12th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Here’s how the system should work. I think the last sentence explains why illegals from Mexico don’t qualify or choose not to qualify.
I don’t want another country within our country. Either play by the rules and join us or stay where you are.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:42 am
standing on a chair clapping wildly
Bravo! Superb article, Marc. Can we call it official? Our immigration policies have moved from the stupid to the sublimely pathetic, and are marching straight for slapstick. The Department of Homeland Security should be re-named the Department of American Theater. Whether it’s border security or airline security, it’s all for show. And, it’s an incredibly expensive show. Neither effort is capable of accomplishing much in the way of its stated goals, but does provide endless opportunities to satisfy the American lust for drama, albeit, staged as well as any grade school production.
Thanks for this, Marc.
Thanks for the links, Dan Kowalski. …it is passing strange that putative small-government conservatives are willing to bust the bank to fund such a losing proposition… Yes, it is beyond strange, but then these expenditures have no basis in any political ideology. This administration is unrecognizable in either American Liberal or American Conservative historical view points.
Reg, with all due respect, your views are well known to anyone who has read Marc’s threads for the past year. I sincerely hope you won’t attempt to defend DHS’ attempt to secure our southern border as Marc has described them doing it. (Insanity: doing the same thing over, and over expecting a different result.)
Until we can solve this:
And, this:
Our current approach is doomed to fail. But , I suppose, like Sisyphus, it makes for good theater watching us push that rock up the hill, only to have it roll back over us. Again. And, again.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:06 am
“your views are well known”
So are the supposed “progressives” who echo the “free-market’ crowd. If you think you’ve got a solution to this, more power to you. I know that “open borders” aint an answer. I’ve never supported a fence, have advocated a more liberal amnesty than the McCain nonsense and have never advocated putting the enforcement screws on poor people as the key to dealiing with this. But spare me the fucking CATO instutute and the WSJ on this, unless you’re a libertarian who believes that the labor market should be unfettered at any cost. “Their veiws are well known…”
June 12th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Incidentally, if you think I’m a likely supporter of the DHS fence, you don’t, in fact, have much of a clue about my “well known” views or what I’ve consistently advocated in these threads.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:08 am
“conservatives are willing to bust the bank to fund such a losing proposition”
As if liberals ever cared what anything cost. Yet, liberals want the following, which requires huge funding year-after-year rather than being a one-time capital project:
Now, that is busting the bank on a losing propostion. You let illegals in and then spend a fortune to get them around far and fast.
And, speaking of costs, consider the costs of not stopping illegals–to our hospitals, schools, social services, law enforcement…i.e., our taxpayers.
Did you think that maybe “the fence” would be more effective if you didn’t have do-gooders helping illegals across the border and fighting for them to beat the system? Maybe we need to spend even more on border security and to make it a crime to help illegals.
Of course, we could simply adopt Mexico’s system of dealing with illegal immigrants.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Woody at 7:08am:
“Either play by the rules and join us”
As a legal non-immigrant in this country (I have a work visa and am in the process of applying for my green card), I am absolutely sick of hearing many Americans talk about legal immigration in the US as if they know what they are talking about. People like Woody think that it is a question of legal vs. illegal when it is nothing of the sort.
I have been in the US for nine years now and am currently here on an H1B work visa. At the end of last year, my employers told me that they were going to cancel my work visa in two weeks’ time, because they no longer wanted the hassle of keeping me on the books (I was the company’s only employee). When your visa is canceled, you have to return to your country of residence within ten days after the cancellation or risk a ban from entering the US for up to ten years. Bear in mind that an employer can fire you without canceling your visa, thus allowing you to remain legal and search for other employment. However, if your employer decides on a whim, as mine did, that they don’t care whether you stay or go, you are screwed.
So in what possible parlance is this a system that rewards merit and hard work or adheres to Woody’s much-vaunted “rules”? As someone who has always remained legal here, surely there must be some recourse for me in such a situation? Not so. There is no provision for the fact that I was laid off for no fault of my own; that I have been fully employed for the entirety of my time in the country; that I have benefited the economy by paying more taxes than the average American (I pay for social security and Medicare without being able to claim them unless I become a citizen). There is no record to reflect these facts; once my visa is cancelled, and for whatever reason, I am out. Legal immigrants’ presence in the US is fully at the mercy of their employers’ decisions, whether they are rational, fair or neither.
I got very lucky – I found another employer within that two weeks’ notice period and have remained legal, but anyone who has ever been in such a situation knows that to have managed this is nothing short of a miracle. I have any number of friends who have returned home or become illegal under the same circumstances; I don’t know anyone else who has managed what I did. And my luck involves working for 2/3 of the salary that my fellow employees earn for the same work, because the company is “doing me a favour”. Also bear in mind that a work visa entitles you to work in one job for one company only – you can’t just change jobs if you find something better. For example, if I am an assistant editor, but I am offered a promotion to be an editor, I have to go through the entire visa application process again (different pay scales, different job description, different match-up with qualifications). Illegal immigrants actually have more job mobility than legal immigrants in this respect.
The hysteria surrounding illegal immigration in this country also makes it far more difficult to find an employer who is willing to sponsor your visa in the first place. Employers hear the anti-immigrant rhetoric and become fearful. Unless you are working for a multinational company that hires regularly from a pool of international labour, employers think that sponsorship places an unusual legal burden on them (it does no more than hiring an American would) and that it is expensive (I don’t know any legal foreign national who has not paid for the visa legal fees themselves as a way of persuading the employer to even consider taking them on.)
And I am relatively high on the immigration food chain. I am white, I am English (I can even speak the language), I have a masters degree from an American university and, failing all of that, am strikingly handsome. I am not from Syria, I have never participated in Nazi genocide and I have no links to terrorist organizations. Alas, however, I am gay, which means that even if I marry my boyfriend of seven years, I am not extended the federal immigration rights of straight married couples. Go figure.
Perhaps this post has already become a pity party (woe is me), but I hope it offers some kind of corrective to the sheer inanity of the debate about legal vs illegal immigration in this country. I never expected it to be easy immigrating here, but I also never imagined that the system would be so totally inconsistent and meaningless. In a decision-making environment distinguished as the USCIS/INS is by arbitrariness and indifference, it is insulting to hear people like Woody tell me that if only I worked hard and stayed legal, then everything will work out fine. It is simply not true.
As such, it is no wonder that many people make the decision to stay here illegally. And I wish them all the luck in the world, because whether you are legal or illegal, that’s what it comes down to – luck. Woody and your ilk, please try and remember this the next time you start bullshitting about something you simply do not understand.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:41 am
B.D., your exception does not justify others flaunting the laws. We are a nation of laws. For you, I’m glad that it worked out, and our exisiting laws made it possible for you to stay.
Yet, you criticize me and others for wanting laws obeyed and enforced. I don’t have to understand each individual hardship to know that laws should be respected. Those issues for needs and hardships were considered when the laws were enacted. If there are special circumstances, there are provisions to consider them.
If you have a problem with pressures on this issue, it’s because of those doing wrong rather than we who want to do right. It is the illegals who are making it tougher for you.
Now, if our laws need updating, then justify changes and get those changes. I don’t consider mob rule to be a justification. Until such changes, people should obey the currently existing laws, just as you have.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Boogie Doodle, if Woody served no other useful purpose in these threads, I could thank him for prompting you to comment. Thank you for that on the ground narrative. Too few who are on the front lines of this debate (employer or employee) ever show up here to offer that kind of window into the lunacy of our system.
And, Reg, you know, that I know, – and I know, that you know – open borders isn’t the solution. But it can be instructive to discover that even the bastion of Republican economic policy (ie; The WSJ) thinks this immigration approach is nonsense, and can’t be defended on Conservative grounds. It’s yet one more way in which our current administration (aided and abetted by a supine Congress) shifts the focus and the responsibility off themselves. It’s an elaborate and expensive means of sidestepping any effort to deal with the difficult issues presented by the intersection of immigration and labor economics under capitalism.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
“The WSJ) thinks this immigration approach is nonsense, and can’t be defended on Conservative grounds”
It can be defended on the grounds of cultural conservatism but can’t be defended on grounds of business conservatism – which is the WSJ bottom line, as well as CATO. This is one of those issues that has contradictory tugs on either end of the political spectrum, depending on what set of interests one feels most strongly about. I’m a firm believer in doing whatever it takes to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain with their employers. At this point, I believe that is best served by some combination of a very liberal citizenship path for folks who are already here, rooted in jobs and communities AND some sort of 21st Century identity verification program that puts the onus on employers to hire folks who adhere to legal residence or citizenship. I actually believe citizenship in a democracy means something – it’s the only access ot political power ordinary people have. “Workers of the World Unite” is a great slogan, but total bullshit in a world were capital crossing borders enhances it’s power and labor crossing borders tends to actually erode it, as labor markets are tattered and cheapened. As for what’s ideally fair, decent and humane in a world where nationality shouldn’t mean a hell of a lot on a human level, nationality (i.e. proximity) is as determinent in who gets to grab whatever brass ring illegal immigration offers as “nativism” is in reaping the benefits of the U.S. economy. When starving Africans have as much of a shot at settling here as the descendants of the conquistadors, I’ll rethink whether my lack of fervor for “illegal immigration” as an unalloyed good is somehow perverse and insufficiently “internationalist.” Meanwhile, when I see both the U.S. “free trade, free markets” crowd and the Mexican “kleptocracy” ruling classes aligned in support of de facto open borders – and so-called “progressives” stand with them – I assume something’s wrong with the picture.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Also – BD – thanks for the insight into just how absurd the immigration bureaucracy is – and loaded to feeding employers whims even at the level of legal greencards. The INS is one of the most bungled, erratic, cross-purpose operations as a piece of the larger Beltway bureaucratic entity famous for such.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I just want to point out to Woody that the leftist candidate for president of Mexico in 2006, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador made his position clear about immigration:
The right on both sides of the border supported his opponent.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Woody,
I appreciate your response very much (11:41am). I see why your opinion makes sense to you and so many others, but it doesn’t measure up with the reality of the current immigration system.
“your exception does not justify others flaunting the laws.”
I am really not the exception. Every person on a work visa in this country is subject to the same pressures, whether immediately or potentially and whether they know it or not.
“you criticize me and others for wanting laws obeyed and enforced.”
Any one of us, whatever our political views, can come up with some instance in history where we can argue that an unjust law can justify breaking that law. Of course, I am not arguing that a Mexican hiding in the trunk of a car at a US border crossing is a latter-day Rosa Parks, but I wish you could concede that it is pretty obvious why people do it and that, in the same position and given the right set of straitened circumstances, you would do it too. Having been through all this, being illegal here makes a great deal of sense.
“It is the illegals who are making it tougher for you.”
My thesis works without this assumption, so there is no reason to believe it is true. The existing laws are not a response to illegal immigration; they have been on the books since these visas were first issued.
As such, thinking about the current immigration system requires a paradigm shift. I confess that it took my brush with deportation last year to wake up to that paradigm shift. Until that point, I felt at least queasy at the thought of an amnesty after my having spent so many years and many, many thousands of dollars trying to do everything legally.
But – and, as Pee Wee says in his big adventure (I know you are a fan), “there’s always a big but” – as much as the existing laws allowed me to stay, those same laws would have been the reason for my departure, had serendipity not stepped in at the last minute.
I can imagine a system that rewards immigrants for work over time and that allows some kind of employment mobility (in place of the visa, a permanent work record that demonstrates sustained periods of work over a defined period; if you can prove your continued utility, you can stay.) But I cannot defend a system that ties hardworking, legal immigrants to a single job with a single company and leaves their fates in the hands of potentially whimsical employers.
“Now, if our laws need updating, then justify changes and get those changes.”
Now this gets to the heart of it! And I’m working on it.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Reg:
“absurd”, “bungled, erratic, cross-purpose” (at 12:16pm)
All the right words.
It irritates me when people throw around the adjective “Kafkaesque” without really knowing what it stands for, but for pure existential absurdity, USCIS/INS takes the cake.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I meant “Kafkaesque cake.”
June 12th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Randy, I was referencing how Mexico treats illegal immigrants into Mexico. Of course, the illegal beatings and bribes are not on books. Mexico’s Immigration Law: Let’s Try It Here at Home
This site also has reading of interest: National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers
B.D., thanks for your response. I’m going to think about it.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Woody,
I wasn’t responding to your post. I was merely pointing out that the Latin American Left has traditionally looked upon the flight of its citizens to greener pastures in the US as a tragedy, while the Right has viewed as the alleviation of a social problem.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Marc, excellent post. I may be the only commenter here who is both a native born citizen of the USA & a naturalized citizen of the USA.
Having said that, depending on a fence is absolutely stupid, the only way to discourage illegal crossings (or illegal aliens, or undocumented aliens, or undocumented temporary workers or what ever the hell you want to call them) is at the employment level. Yet, this is something that both Democrats and Republicans are reluctant to do, primarily because of the big bucks that employers use as bribes (aka contributions to election coffers). I hope no one here is stupid enough to say that this is strictly a Republican problem or strictly a Democrat problem, but it is for damn sure an American problem.
I’m concerned about porous borders, I’m concerned about ultra low wages paid to many illegals because they have literally no where to turn to address the minimum wage laws and I’m concerned that progressives aren’t more concerned.
Interesting connundrum I’m in.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Take the money for the fence and drop it in small bills from an airplane along Mexico’s southern border, drawing the potential immigrants away from our border.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Today, the guy who handles the engineering for the county (paving, dams, building construction, etc.) stopped by. He was checking on a crew in the neighborhood comprised of about fifteen blacks, three whites, and one Mexican, which is the opposite makeup of his last one. I asked him what he thought about using illegals, and he said that the Mexican workers were great but that they needed to come here legally and that he would only use them if they were legal. There are fines that are enforced here. In the meantime, he has had no problem completing his work with help from our citizens.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Woody has just become the James Watt of Marc’s blog.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I have a nasty feeling GMR and I aren’t that far apart in this discussion. That’s what I get for playing golf…
June 12th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Hey, I just shared a real discussion. Plus, I liked James Watt.