The Fence
Andrew Sullivan links to this IHT article about the border fence. To make it short, it’s pissing a whole lot of people off, but it also appears to be “working”:
The protests come as known efforts at illegal crossings – measured by the number of people detained at the border – have fallen 17 percent this year, after declining 20 percent in 2007, figures that Chief David Aguilar of the Border Patrol points to as proof that the overall approach to border enforcement is working.
Still, Aguilar and other officials acknowledge, the new fencing has mainly proved useful when it has been backed up with other enforcement methods, like electronic surveillance and aggressive prosecution of illegal immigrants caught by the Border Patrol.
Since last year, the steepest drops in illegal crossings along the 2,000-mile border were recorded here in eastern Arizona and in places in Texas where those combined tactics were applied, official figures show.
That’s certainly interesting, but could it be that there are other factors affecting how many people try to cross the border?
In addition to the border enforcement, immigrant traffic is influenced by a variety of social, political and economic factors; the recent drop in known crossings, for example, occurred as the economy began to sputter, drying up construction jobs and others that lure immigrants.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our sporadic, politically motivated attempts at immigration enforcement are something close to a crime against humanity. The fence, for example, just motivates more, less safe migration. The reason there are so many migrants crossing in the area of Texas that they’re currently building in is because they had already locked down the urban border crossings in San Diego, Nogales, El Paso and other cities. So, people started crossing in the desert, where not only do they have to pay coyotes to smuggle them across, they also face the risk of dehydration and exposure. Also, the immigration crackdowns on the other side of the border by ICE don’t meaningfully deter immigration or generally enforce immigration law, they’re politically motivated to make the Bush administration look like its doing something because they couldn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform. But the people who pay the price for the administration’s attempt to save face are the most marginalized members of society, especially children.
