The Border Control Illusion
Josiah Heyman
Adding more officers, money, and technology to U.S.-Mexico border control is
throwing good money after bad. Intensive border policing does not accomplish its longterm goal: to halt or greatly reduce undocumented immigration from the interior of
Mexico and Central America to the interior of the United States. Rather, there are
realistic long-term solutions if we look beyond the border.
The evidence is clear and irrefutable. There has been a massive build-up of
Border Patrol and related operations along the border since late 1993. The Border Patrol
has tripled in size since that date. Walls have been built along prime migration corridors.
Electronic sensors have been upgraded significantly, as have aerial operations. Budgets
have grown by many billions of dollars. What has this accomplished?
Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone in Beyond Smoke and
Mirrors found that the probability that undocumented entrants are apprehended actually
fell during the border build-up. Heavy border enforcement shifted the main flow of
migrants back and forth along the border. Prevented from crossing in safer urban
corridors, they spread out in the desert, suffering higher rates of death and injury. And
heavy border enforcement did not deter people from coming to the United States, but it
made them more likely to settle and less likely to return home.
We thus have irrefutable evidence from a real world test, right in front of our
eyes. Even if we assume that the measures taken up to now are insufficient, there is no
reason to believe that increasing them will work better in the future. We face a fork in
the road. Either we can do more of a failed policy, and hope it magically starts working,
or we can try something genuinely different.
What can we do when our current ideas don’t work? We can question our
assumptions. In this case, the assumption is that BAD THINGS come from outside of the
country and that WE inside the U.S. have nothing to do with them. The border could be a
safe protective wall that keeps all danger away, if we could just make it big, tall, and
tough enough.
There might be something to this in the case of international terrorism, although
even here we need to think carefully about long run solutions. But in the case of nonterrorist labor and family migration, this attitude is simply wrong. Migration is woven
into the interior of the United States. It is part of the construction, agriculture, and
services we all use, directly and indirectly. It is part of family reunification and
community consolidation. Migration cannot be stopped by the border because it is
already on the inside--not just the immigrants living among us, but part and parcel of our
own culture and economy. We must think differently, very differently.
We need a two-part comprehensive immigration reform. One part brings illegal
settlement and illegal employment into the legal light of day. The recent Senate proposal
for legalization of long-term, settled undocumented immigrants would do just this, as
would a temporary worker program with earned legalization. These measures would rob
the border smugglers and thieves of their businesses, and make the border much easier to
control against true threats. Efforts to postpone legalization by calling for no
immigration reform until the border is certified as “controlled” avoid confronting the
reality that there is and will be no prospect of controlling the border if we do not reform
the interior of the United States first.
We must also address the forces that drive people in Mexico, Central America,
and the Caribbean out of their beloved homes. While this will mean a significant
investment by the U.S. government, it is money better spent than on a failed border
control approach.
We need a North American Union, like the European Union, that will invest
money to improve roads, water, schools, medical services, and other infrastructure, as
well as financial stabilization through crop loans and insurance. We need to halt
NAFTA’s impending final elimination of tariffs and trade controls on white corn and
beans, so as to reduce displacement from Mexican countryside.
As Mitch, Katrina, and their siblings have shown, we should invest in disaster
relief and recovery funds for the areas surrounding the Caribbean and the Gulf of
Mexico. Finally, and most importantly, we should establish high quality cross-border
labor standards, uniform enforcement arrangements, and mechanisms to encourage joint
cross-border unionization of workers to end the “race to the bottom” in pay and labor
standards in North America. These measures will achieve what endless escalation of
force at the border cannot.
Josiah Heyman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, and a
Fellow of the American Anthropological Association.