President Bush’s speech on immigration policy on Monday represents a major moment in the current debate. His position represents a compromise between those advocating for a strict enforcement-only approach (e.g., the Sensenbrenner bill passed by the House in December) and those open to providing a path toward citizenship for undocumented aliens (e.g., the McCain-Kennedy bill), in order to achieve what he really wants — a substantial guestworker program.
The rhetoric in his speech was priceless:
However, to mollify the enforcement-only wing of the Republican Party like Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., the President is willing to spend billions more at the border by adding 6,000 officers to the Border Patrol, increasing surveillance systems, building more fences, and deploying the National Guard for a year. The problem is that these ideas have been tried and haven’t worked; the result will be countless more unnecessary deaths.
Beginning in 1994, the Clinton administration implemented Operation Gatekeeper, a strategy of “control through deterrence” that involved constructing fences and militarizing the parts of the southern border that were the most easily traversed. Instead of deterring migrants, their entry choices were shifted to treacherous terrain — the deserts and mountains. The number of entries and apprehensions were not at all decreased, and the number of deaths due to dehydration and sunstroke in the summer or freezing in the winter dramatically surged. In 1994, fewer than 30 migrants died along the border; by 1998 the number was 147, in 2001, 387 deaths were counted, and this past fiscal year 451.
Motivations for continued migration call into question the likely effectiveness of the expansion of Operation Gatekeeper if the goal is to discourage border-crossers. Beyond the economic situation in Mexico, a socio-economic phenomenon is at play. The phenomenon is the long, historical travel patterns between Mexico and the United States, coupled with the interdependency of the two regions. Migration from Mexico is the manifestation of these economic problems and social phenomena. The militarization of the border does nothing to address these phenomena. Instead, it is killing individuals who are caught up in the phenomena, and we act immorally when we elect to continue them.
