If you believe that political calculation can’t
trump reason indefinitely, you haven’t been paying attention
to the illegal immigration debate in the United States, which
hasn’t, actually, been a debate. It’s been a
disingenuous shouting match, something like the banter between
competing barkers at the county fair as they tout the relative
virtues of the ring toss and the dart throw.
Traditionally, the immigration shill-fest has followed a sordid
pattern:
Some clever cadre within the paleo wing of a
border state Republican Party cooks up an immigration proposal so
nativist as to approach race-baiting perfection. The proposal is
then put forward — either in state legislation or a ballot
measure — as a “wedge issue” to attract the votes
of xenophobic and/or racist Democrats. (Viz., California’s
Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative to deny most state benefits to
illegal immigrants.)
In due time, more or less in
response to the paleo proposal, a clever cadre of leftish Democrats
puts forward an immigration initiative that is such an obviously
unworkable pander to Hispanic voters as to induce political nausea.
(Think: California legislation to give illegal immigrants
driver’s licenses.)
Recently, though,
counterproductive immigration politics has spread beyond the border
states, most notably to Colorado, where, in less than a year, a new
law banning state spending on illegal immigrants has cost more than
$2 million to enforce, while saving the state precisely no money.
Immigration pandering has even turned bipartisan, with
Congress and President Bush working across party lines last year to
give America the dumbest immigration policy proposal of my
lifetime: The Secure Fence Act of 2006, calling for the government
to build a supposedly impermeable, $50 billion wall on hundreds of
miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. (Which, of course, will be about
as impermeable as the border fence at Tijuana, where, the last time
I looked, thousands lined up at sunset every day, waiting to climb
through holes and dash into the U.S.)
There are real
reasons the U.S. needs real immigration reform, and you can see a
lot of them all at once in “One Nation, Under Fire,”
John Dougherty’s look at the Tohono O’odham Reservation
along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona. As smugglers of
immigrants and drugs battle with tribal police and the Border
Patrol, the Tohono O’odham Nation has become a real-life Mad
Max, crazed vehicle chases and wild gun battles routinely
shattering the desert calm. A longtime Arizona investigative
reporter, Dougherty has a habit of revealing unsettling realities,
and in this case, what he finds isn’t just unsettling. It is
absolutely chilling.
In the wake of the November
elections, there’s been much talk about newfound Western
political power. One hopes it can soon be used to fling the Secure
Fence Act into the dustbin of history, and to begin legislating our
real immigration needs: 1) a guest-worker program that reduces
pressure at the border by giving immigrants a legal way to enter
the country and perform the work American business needs from them,
and 2) broad amnesty for the millions of undocumented but otherwise
law-abiding immigrants already living among us.
Until we
begin tracking most of the honorable migrants who have crossed and
are crossing our southern border in search of a better life, plans
for dealing with the undocumented remainder will continue to be
exactly what they are now — a costly and political game of
Whack-a-Mole.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Border Patrol Whack-a-Mole.
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