Border Patrol agents working from Brownsville, Texas, to San
Ysidro in Southern California arrested fully 25 percent more
undocumented border crossers in the first five months of this year
than in the same period last year.
Border Patrol agents working from Brownsville, Texas, to San Ysidro in Southern California arrested fully 25 percent more undocumented border crossers in the first five months of this year than in the same period last year.
If there’s a single reason for this, it mostly likely is the oft-stated desire of President Bush to give virtually perpetual temporary legal status to workers already in the United States at whatever time his proposed measure passes.
It is any wonder that the most pro-illegal immigrant position ever taken by a sitting president should prompt a flood of poor Mexicans trying to reach America and attain something tantamount to legal status merely by getting here?
One thing for sure: If the number of immigrants captured along the border has increased substantially, so has the number of those who made it without getting caught.
Word travels quickly among those thinking of coming to America. “People are thinking they ought to try to get into the country quickly because something may happen'” Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (now part of the Homeland Security department), told the Washington Times.
She points out that the mere word of possible acceptance once they get here would not by itself be enough to drive many of the Mexican poor to attempt emigration. “It is really a response not only to workers that are available in Mexico looking for better wages, but because of the demand in the United States'” she noted.
And there is no doubt about the demand in America. Roofers, car wash owners, restaurants, hotels, farmers – name the business using unskilled labor and chances are illegal immigrants already make up a good portion of its workforce.
Want to know the constituency to which Bush is playing when he advocates guest workers, eventual legalization and six-year stays for temporary workers? It is those business owners, all of whom seek the cheapest possible labor.
But the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies concluded earlier this year in a study of guestworker programs that “Unskilled immigrants and natives compete for the same jobs.”
In other words, many businesses prefer to hire the undocumented over unemployed U.S. citizens because they can be paid less.
Their advocates in Congress, led by Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, have pushed at least four years for a new bracero program to assure large supplies of cheap, exploitable labor – and never mind what happens to American workers who might take the same jobs at higher pay if they were available.
The increased numbers produced over this year’s first few months reflect a quantification of what Border Patrol officers and others observed from the first days after the Bush proposals emerged in his state of the union address last January.
Within less than two weeks, Border Patrol officials at the San Ysidro crossing near San Diego reported a 15 percent increase in use of phony documents over the year before.
One reason for the quick reaction: When an American President announces a policy proposal, the rumor mill in other affected countries often turns it into accomplished fact. It is therefore no coincidence that border agents report many of their arrestees believed new rules were already in effect.
Border agents are not happy with the Bush proposal. “It implies that the country wasn’t serious about (border enforcement) in the first place, in spite of what (we) were told'” wrote John Frecker, a vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union. He called the plan an insult to already-demoralized officers.
The real question, though, is whether Bush’s idea is good for America, regardless of what it means to would-be immigrants or agents of the new U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
That’s hard to measure. But one thing is sure: this new influx of undocumented will cost California money. That’s because it will be years before most newcomers become taxpayers, if they ever do. Meanwhile, some will commit crimes and land in prison, others will send their children to public schools, many will seek health services.
Governors from Pete Wilson to Arnold Schwarzenegger have tried fruitlessly to get the federal government to compensate California for all this. It hasn’t happened yet, and despite Schwarzenegger’s dubbing himself the “Collectinator'” there’s no sign it will happen soon.
For Bush seems determined to placate both his business and farming backers and his friend, Mexican President Vicente Fox, who advocates completely open borders. And never mind what his plan has already done to state budgets and workers who are already here legally.
