“The endless, futile work of the Border Patrol”

Filmmaker Malia Politizer recently spent time with the Border Patrol’s Tuscon Sector.  She argues in the conservative (libertarian) magazine, Reason, (April 2007) that more stringent border controls will only increase immigration. 

In 2005 a Tucson-based activist group, the Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Coalition for Human Rights), recorded 282 bodies recovered in Arizona alone. The 2006 GAO report recorded 472 bodies found across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California at San Diego, says the U.S.-Mexico border has been about 10 times deadlier to immigrants in the last 10 years than the Berlin Wall was to East Berliners in its entire 28-year existence.

Besides making crossings deadlier, the increased risk of entry and higher coyote prices are keeping people from going back to Mexico even if they’d like to. Massey, the Princeton sociologist, finds that “illegal immigrants are less likely to return to their home country, causing an increase in the number of illegal immigrants remaining in the United States.” In “Backfire at the Border,” a study published by the Cato Institute in 2005, Massey reports that before the current enforcement policies return migration was highly likely and predictable.

Massey’s research finds that if 1,000 migrants were to enter the U.S. each year with the former rate of return, 45 percent annually, then 950 (95 percent) would return home within five years, staying an average of 1.7 years. But now, of 1,000 entrants, only 760 or so will return home in five years. In addition to the decrease in the rate of the return (from 45 percent to 25 percent), the average stay per person has increased to 3.5 years.

More people are now staying permanently as well. Before, migrants from Mexico tended to be young male seasonal workers who would return to their families after the work season was over. As the risk of crossing increased, more chose to bring their families along and settle permanently in the United States.

A larger permanent illegal population leads to greater anxiety from an increasingly xenophobic native population, leading to more attempts to beef up security at the border, leading more illegals to stay here permanently. Which brings us back here, to the desert, searching for people who don’t want to be found but whose lives might depend on it.

A seemingly unrelated story from the Raleigh North Carolina News & Observer, contends that drunk driving is part of “Hispanic” culture. The obvious weakness in the data presented is that the “hispanics” under consideration are young men, away from home without family responsiblities and with money in their pocket. And who normally haven’t been driving before.

Fraternity boys come to mind as fitting the same demographic, but they’re not being compared to that group. Or soldiers. Maybe the News and Observer should have made their comparison to those demographics instead of the general driving public.

There’s a relationship between the two stories. Both show that stricter immigration regulations are causing more problems, and not cutting immigration.  If anyting, they’re leading to more immigration, and more social problems. 

Until recently, migrant workers mostly intended to return, and saw their stay in the U.S. pretty much like doing Army service, or some other short-term, not too pleasant task. But, by making it impossible to retain family ties (the real social control of Mexico and Latin America), we want to PUNISH the worker for taking a job, and keep him from having a normal life.

Our choice: a better worker’s program (I don’t want a return to the Bracero days, but I do think we’ll have to look at some kind of formalized temporary worker program… which is what NAFTA was supposed to do in the first place), or more drunks, and more dead bodies in the desert.