By Jeff Jacoby
Sunday, May 12, 2013
In the Clamor over immigration, the demand for more
border security has been unrelenting.
Immigration restrictionists have dug in their heels,
insisting that stronger border controls must come before any other change. The
Senate's bipartisan Gang of Eight, bowing to political reality, is proposing an
immigration overhaul that creates a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants
living in the United States, but makes it contingent on a series of
border-focused security "triggers." The bill they introduced last
month is styled the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration
Modernization Act of 2013" – the order of those terms is not random – yet a
majority of Americans doubts the government would actually secure the border if
the law is passed. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, one of the bill's sponsors,
publicly invited critics to suggest ways the security triggers could be made
even tougher.
Immigration hardliners are determined to prevent a repeat
of 1986, the year President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark immigration law
offering amnesty – it wasn't a fighting word then – to about 2.7 million
illegal immigrants. Yet the massive border strengthening called for in the law
never materialized, critics say. So they've learned their lesson: border
security first.
But suppose that in the years since then we had
undertaken a massive effort to secure the Mexican border? What if, instead of
largely ignoring the rising pressure to crack down on migrants entering the
country illegally, Congress and the president had responded to it to with a
will?
There is no need to imagine. They did.
Contrary to popular mythology, the federal government has
taken border security so seriously that it now spends more than $18 billion a
year on border and immigration enforcement – 15 times what it was spending at
the time the 1986 law was enacted. Washington now puts more money into
immigration control than into all other federal criminal law-enforcement
agencies – including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret
Service, the US Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives – combined.
The US Border Patrol has been dramatically built up, with
the number of agents at the border having doubled over the past decade to more
than 21,000. And in addition to "boots on the ground," America's
border is now being patrolled with radar stations, surveillance cameras, nearly
700 miles of steel fencing, and even Predator drones.
With our southern border quasi-militarized in this
manner, the number of aliens illegally crossing into the United States
plummeted. From a high of 1.6 million in 2000, Border Patrol apprehensions are
now at one-fifth that level, the lowest rate since the 1970s.
For all the complaints about insufficient enforcement,
the feds are now more pitiless about prosecuting immigration violators than
ever before – today a majority of all federal criminal prosecutions are
immigration-related. And illegal immigrants and criminals have been deported
with such growing aggressiveness in recent years, so much so that during
President Obama's first term, a record 1.5 million deportations were carried
out.
This is not a description of some alternative reality in
which border security had been taken more seriously. It's a description of how
seriously immigration and border enforcement have been taken in recent decades.
From the Predator drones to the record-high deportations to the vast increase
in Border Patrol agents, the last thing Washington can be accused of is ignoring
the ferocious public pressure to secure the border.
Though you would never know it from all the hyperventilating
and ginned-up outrage, net migration across the southern US border has now
fallen to zero – the number of Mexicans entering is now matched (or even
exceeded) by the number leaving.
Border security, of course, is a perfectly sensible goal.
An impenetrable airtight Berlin Wall of a border is not. Mexico and the United
States are democratic friends and indispensable economic partners, deeply
linked by ties of family, history, and trade. As Shannon O'Neil of the Council
on Foreign Relations notes, the border is legally crossed every day by more
than $1 billion worth of goods, 13,000 trucks, 1,000 railroad cars, and 400,000
people. It is mad to imagine that such a busy and important frontier could be
sealed so hermetically that no one without legal papers can ever get across. It
is even madder to insist that intelligent immigration reform should be held
hostage to such an irrational goal.
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