What you haven’t heard about immigration reform and border security

Agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), do not have an easy time patrolling the international line separating the McAllen Border Patrol sector from Mexico — there are nine Border Patrol sectors along the southern border, — especially not when this sector is now the site of the largest number of apprehensions in recent years. Apprehensions are now the highest here than anywhere else along the Mexican border: in one July night alone, agents caught more than 400 undocumented workers illegally crossing the Rio Grande. It is not known how many undocumented immigrants escaped apprehension.

So while there is little question that the CBP in the McAllen sector, with the help of an expensive wall at more than $1.1 million a mile, more agents than ever before, and new surveillance technologies, makes it more difficult than ever before to illegally enter our country, those politicians who claim expertise in border security could enhance their credentials and their legislation by actually visiting the Mexican border for more than just photo opportunities. And, as well, studying our Mexican border and its different regions, rather than stereotyping its people, its culture, and its geography. Diversity along the Mexican border is one key to understanding what better security might mean.

Border security is a real issue, but it is not the only issue. We should understand that even though there are now the same number of Border Patrol agents in the McAllen sector as the total number of all agents prior to the events of 9/11, the Mexican border remains porous. The fact that in some sectors the CBP is extending the area of surveillance to 100 miles into the interior — as it can by statute — allows some critics of CBP to talk about the “militarization” of the borderlands.

Undoubtedly, border apprehension rates have increased in some sectors, but at what cost to the quality of life of American border residents, tourists, and a business community which recognizes that trade with Mexico is a vital stimulant to our economy? Does real border security mean 40,000 Border Patrol Agents, 60,000, 100,000, more? When should we begin to see all these agents — now the largest federal agency in the land — as an infringement upon our democratic rights?

These are very real questions too frequently unasked, and thus never unanswered. At the same time, members of both parties seem to discount these and other very real security issues as if all we need are more agents or bigger technological fixes, while others focus on border security as if it were the most important issue, even the only issue, in immigration reform. It is not, and was not, until it became the new normal in 2006.

One issue that continues not to be on the radar these days is the plight of the thousands of children from Central American countries who cross Mexico at great risk, frequently suffer immeasurably all along the way, then find themselves stopped by Border Patrol agents. Adjudicated by a system they rarely fathom, most are deported to their respective countries from which they fled in the first place. These are not children wildly seeking American citizenship before the border closes; in fact these children, who are so desperate to escape their own countries that they risk their lives just to reach our border, do not qualify as Dreamers under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Immigration reform is indeed complex. But for politicians of either party to pretend that this is not an individual and human story, that we are not, in fact, a nation of immigrants, that human suffering continues in all its ugly forms because of IRCA, is certainly not in our American tradition of welcoming, nurturing, and in the end greatly benefiting from our immigrant heritage. 

Our Senate and House must find a way to resolve our current immigration dilemmas. We owe a fairer, more just system of laws to all our immigrants, both illegal and legal. And, yes, we must find ways to address issues of national security as well. It’s not going to be easy to shape such legislation, but we should demand no less from both Democrats and the Republicans. 

Various legislators on both sides of the aisle have it all wrong when it comes to immigration reform to improve IRCA. In a democracy like ours, it is not political compromise that deserves the expletive, it is the more than three decades of gridlock on immigration laws that simply haven’t worked.

¹The complexity of immigration to our country has been captured, described, and explained in the scholarly work of Douglas S. Massey, in books like his Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project, co-edited with Jorge Durand (Russell Sage, 2006).

Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University, is the author of The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border. He blogs at leemaril.com.