By PHK
The W administration has yet to see a chance to play the “fear” factor card that it hasn’t used.
After 9/11, the search for Osama Bin Laden’s head competed with color coded terrorist alerts to raise the specter of fear in American minds. Yet, Bin Laden - remember him? – seems to have all but vaporized from the scene along with those orange, red, yellow and green Candyland alerts thanks to the administration’s decision to play down that policy failure and invade Saddam’s Iraq which harbored neither Al Qaeda nor WMD and thus embark the country on yet another policy failure.
Unfortunately but all too predictably, the administration’s adroit Bin Laden fear-factor disappearing act was obligingly bought by the MSM. After all, it’s harder to report on something that isn’t, than something that is – especially when reporters, columnists, editors and the like are bombarded by US government spokesmen and women touting the latest administration “successes” on an hourly basis.
Today, however, the administration’s queen of spades is neither Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein but illegal immigrants. The ride-em-cowboy vigilantes on our southern border who have attracted the media cameras – only to disappear in their gas-guzzling SUVs and souped-up pickups when those cameras fade into the sunset according to a friend who lives near the California border – have fueled the administration’s latest Furies. But let’s get this straight. Illegal immigration may be a problem – but is it any worse than it always was? And why should there be such a fuss anyway?
Have we made it worse by sealing off parts of the border like the popular crossing at Tijuana, for instance?
This action, which according to a New York Times op-ed several weeks ago, has forced the floating Latino workforce, which once upon a time regularly returned home from California’s verdant valleys to Mexico to visit families and retire, now remain in the U.S. The families move here because the US has made border crossings so much more difficult and dangerous. Our policies have just increased the hazards for those who now – at the mercy of unscrupulous border crossing guides or coyotes – attempt the trip across the dry, hot Sonoran desert to respond to the beck and call of higher paying jobs here rather than unemployment at home. And what’s in a border anyway? Aren’t they really artificial manmade constructs that as a Finnish friend once observed “are meant to be changed?”
If there’s a will, there’s a way
The Republican Congressional plan to erect a huge fence all along the US-Mexican border is one of the stupidest, most counterproductive approaches I’ve heard. Thus far, the administration has only decided to erect fences at strategic locations using presumably some of the 1.9 billion dollars it has just requested. Exactly how much does a section of barbed wire cost - gold plated or not?
Regardless, in my experience, there are always ways around, over or under fences – or walls. Just ask any terrier. Or ask those intrepid Soviets who made their way across the lengthy border from Russia into Finland, then on to Sweden during the Soviet Union’s darkest days.
Governing by “a wink and a nod” – to U.S. employers that is
I think Bill Richardson – New Mexico’s governor who has been concerned about the illegal immigrant problem for some time – has it far more right than most others seized with the issue: Its law enforcement stupid. If the administration would just enforce the laws already on the books that clamp down on employers as well as employees the difference would likely be profound.
This is documented, according to Dan Balz in Sunday’s WaPo’s report on a “new analysis by the centrist Democratic group Third Way.” The Third Way report on illegal immigration, says Richardson, “shows that the administration, despite their tough talk, is failing at border security and (failing to enforce) the employer sanctions provision.” A telling statistic: “federal data show that the number of U.S. agents more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, but border apprehensions have fallen about 31 percent.” Further inland, apprehensions have fallen by 36 percent.
I’d love to see the statistics on the employment demographics for companies like Halliburton and other W administration funders because it’s pretty clear that cheap labor from south of the border isn’t coming here to sit around and collect unemployment checks. And I doubt that their major employers are mom and pop groceries or 7/11 convenience stores either.
Where I don’t entirely agree with Richardson, however, is over his opposition to deploying the National Guard along the border to apprehend illegal immigrants as a stop-gap measure – in part because the guard is overstretched.
Maybe this proposal could be used to our advantage:
1. Yes, the Guard is way overstretched – thanks to Iraq. So redeployment of the New Mexico National Guard (not guard from elsewhere and not on a rotating basis) to our southern border might be a face-saving way to initiate a U.S. troop drawdown in Iraq. That is, if it means, the Guard is pulled out of Iraq to come home and not be replaced there. As much as 40-50 percent of the Guard is now in Iraq – and they’ve already served previous tours in that desert. We need them back in New Mexico to prepare for what is shaping up to look like a horrendous fire season in this desert.
2. Better the Guard than packs of self-styled pistol toting SUV driving vigilantes. At least there’s some semblance of control.
After W’s less than stellarly-received speech to the nation Monday night with yet more ill-conceived plans for effective border control which includes some bizarre features for use of the guard, the administration’s latest ploy is to suggest hiring military defense contractors to provide border security. Please.
President Eisenhower had it right
Yet more contracts to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and all the others that also enrich the so-called leaders of this ill-begotten administration? Even though Halliburton was not mentioned in the Times story, can you imagine that Cheney's favorite would be left out? I’m sorry, but I’m sick and tired of having my taxes support our out-of-control military-industrial establishment in yet another counterproductive venture. If this continues much longer, maybe we should change the name of the country to reflect its new “ownership” more accurately. Suggestions welcome.
Meanwhile, I think Richardson’s other comments hit the mark. "Those of us living along the border desperately need more law enforcement to protect our citizens from drug runners, smugglers and other lawlessness," he said. But he also added his skepticism to the federal government delivering on its promises.