Experts find fault with U.S. border strategy

Several national security and U.S.-Mexico border experts criticized current U.S. border policy this past week, saying it inadequately deters drug trafficking from Mexico and pushes would-be immigrants into the arms of criminal organizations

In a teleconference Monday sponsored by the Immigration Policy Center — a think tank and immigration research organization — border and security experts analyzed current U.S. enforcement efforts along the frontier and blamed the government for what they called ineffective efforts to quell border violence at its source.

David A. Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, said the United States has unprecedented levels of federal enforcement activity along the border, with about double the number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents compared to just a decade ago.

The massive enforcement effort has produced two unfortunate side effects, Shirk said. Drug runners from Mexico have now evolved into “highly sophisticated organizations” to thwart increased border enforcement. At the same time, there have been no federal efforts to deal with domestic demand for drugs and cheap immigrant labor.

“As long as that demand is untouched, the ability and the desire of these organizations to get their product across the border is going to be unscathed,” Shirk said.

“We have this huge haystack of mostly harmless people,” he said, noting that roughly 1 percent of the undocumented immigrants apprehended crossing the border are dangerous and have committed prior criminal offenses, according to U.S. Border Patrol statistics. “In my view, that means we need to figure out how to get that other 99 percent out of the way.”

In other words, the federal government needs to find a way to place them in legal work programs or offer a legal path to citizenship, Shirk said.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, disagreed. The border must be secured and existing immigration laws must be enforced before any change in immigration policy can take place, Rector said.

“What they’re really saying is that because we have a lot of illegal people coming into the United States, what we should do is basically legalize that immigration flow,” he said. Instead of overhauling immigration policy, the federal government should be more focused on those existing laws and cracking down on businesses that hire undocumented immigrants.

“In a sense, I would sort of agree that border enforcement alone is not going to be very effective,” Rector said. “The solution is to actually enforce the law.”

Jennifer Bernal Garcia, a national security expert and researcher with the Center for New American Security in Washington, D.C., harshly criticized increased border security efforts that don’t work in tandem with an overhaul of immigration policy. With the current system, she said, “all you’re doing is driving these two groups (would-be immigrants and criminal organizations) together.”

“It doesn’t make any sense” from a security prospective, she said.

Benjamin Johnson, a researcher with the American Immigration Institute, said the immigration debate in the United States has become entirely fixed on the issue of “securing the border.” He cited the recently signed Arizona state law that gave police greater power to enforce federal immigration laws. Fear and uncertainty about the border led to the passage of that law, Johnson insisted.

“This appetite for enforcement at the border seems almost insatiable,” he said. “The focus of legislative efforts and debate seem to always come back to this question of border enforcement.”

But Michael Lytle, a national security expert and associate professor at the University of Texas-Brownsville, said the border remains porous and dangerous, even with increased enforcement.

Despite doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and almost tripling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel along the border over the past decade, “any determined aggressor can still make it across the border and do harm,” Lytle said.

In a statement Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended its efforts to continue to saturate the border with manpower, technology and security infrastructure. Department spokesman Matt Chandler said the federal government has continued to make “significant progress” in securing the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We continue to work with Congress on comprehensive reform of our immigration system,” he said, “which would provide lasting and dedicated resources at our borders.”

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Michael Barajas is a reporter for the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen.