Challenging conventional wisdom on border security

Two new papers question received wisdom on the issue of border security. Former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard and anthropologist Josiah Heyman offer these questions in papers released lastweek.

Former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, in his “How to Fix a Broken Border: Hit the Cartels Where It Hurts (Part I)” (Washington, D.C.: Immigration Policy Center, 12 September 2011), argues that instead of building bigger walls or throwing more resources at empty enforcement efforts, the United States should adopt strategies that address real threats to U.S. border security — drug cartels.

Goddard outlines border strategies that involve dismantling drug cartels, starting with the money. According to Goddard, the U.S. Department of Treasury needs to go after money launders who move roughly $40 billion a year across the U.S.-Mexican border: “A more effective border strategy starts with the money; the torrent of cash pouring across the border into the cartel pocketbooks. Cartels are, first and foremost, business enterprises. Taking away the profit cripples the organization,” he writes.

In addition to stemming the flow of cash across the border, Goddard stresses the need to take down cartel bosses and dismantle their criminal organizations:

This country must break down the elaborate coordination required for successful smuggling. Arrest and incarceration of the bosses who coordinate the scouts, manage the money, and purchase the advanced technology will do just that. And we need to send a clear message that it will be extremely hazardous for anyone to take a fallen leader’s place. Such pressure, applied at the same time the cartel money is disrupted, will destroy the criminal organization. Without the organizations, the holes in our border defenses disappear.

University of Texas anthropology professor Josiah Heyman echoes these strategies in another paper released this week, “Guns, Drugs and Money: Tackling the Real Threats to Border Security” (Washington, D.C.: Immigration Policy Center, 12 September 2011). Heyman argues that the U.S. needs to stop wasting time, money, and manpower on undocumented border crossers and start targeting legitimate security threats — organizations which smuggle drugs, money, guns, and people across the border.

…security along the southwest border and across the whole nation requires that we focus on the critical role of targeted intelligence — slow, careful, long-term investigative work aimed at specific individuals and networks, focused on guns, money, and terrorism. This differs in crucial ways from the current approach to border security, which is unselective, inefficient, and massive: witness the costly and time-consuming, as well as inhumane, arrest annually of approximately 500,000 unauthorized migrants in the region, none of them terrorists and very few of them dangerous criminals.

Goddard and Heyman agree that anything less than focusing on the cartels responsible for smuggling drugs, guns, money, and people across the border will not do. Goddard warms that conflating undocumented immigrants with crime is just political pandering to those, as Goddard describes, “whose real intent is not to fix the border, but to stop and reverse all immigration in the United States.”