Fence just one piece of immigration puzzle (3rd in a three-part series)

BISBEE — Even when the government-funded border fence project is completed, the United States will still need to deal with the immigration problem.

When President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act in October of 2006, the White House said “this act is one part of our effort to reform our immigration system,” according to whitehouse.gov. It made clear that additional work must be done.

Bush pushed for an immigration reform bill that would secure the border, hold employers accountable for hiring illegal workers and create a temporary worker program, among other things. But Congress did not support it earlier this year.

“Legal immigration is one of the top concerns of the American people and Congress’ failure to act on it is a disappointment,” Bush said on June 28. “The American people understand the status quo is unacceptable when it comes to our immigration laws. A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn’t find a common ground — it didn’t work.”

Jennifer Allen, executive director of Border Action Network, said the government needs to do more than build a fence along the southern border.

“We have always been opposed to building a wall,” she said of her group. “Walls are simply not a solution. They never have been and they never will be.”

The United States is currently dealing with three issues regarding the border, including national security, cross-border criminal activity and immigration.

“All three of those are really different. They involve different people and have different root causes and have different impacts and threats to the country,” she said.

The wall will not solve all three of those problems, Allen said. In fact, she said, it will actually have a negative impact on people. The wall will make it harder to enter the country and, in turn, increase the desperation of the people trying to come in illegally.

“If there is no policy solution that gets at the root causes, then we are still going to be dealing with the same problem, but we will be dealing with it in a different shape and form. The trend is a more violent and desperate shape and form,” she said.

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps maintains the federal fence is the only viable and immediate solution for securing the border from the illegal alien invasion.

“MCDC’s citizen activism is essential, because meeting their constitutional obligations to protect and defend the sovereignty and security of the citizens of the United States remains far from the priority for far too many of our government officials,” said Carmen Mercer, vice president of the group.

Ray Borane, the mayor of Douglas, said the government has been effective in convincing the American people that the fence will solve the illegal immigration problem. But, he said, the fence is not enough.

“The American government is famous for when they don’t know the solution to something, they send in the troops. To me, that fence and Border Patrol is tantamount to sending in the Army,” he said. “They are addressing it in a military fashion.”

The government failed to recognize the issue of illegal immigration for so long that the problem is now so severe that no one can agree on how to solve it, Borane said.

The creation of a guest worker program would be part of the solution, he said. But some employers would illegally hire people who don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy of waiting in lines and filling out paperwork.

He noted that sanctioning employers that hire undocumented workers would affect all major industries in the United States, such as motels and hotels, agriculture, construction and landscaping.

One flaw of politicians is they tend to only listen to their constituents who have the most clout and impact, but they don’t listen to the common people who are affected by a problem, Borane said.

“Congress never brings all the people together at mass forums and symposiums to get input. Politicians are the world’s worst problem solvers because they do what is politically expeditions for them and they don’t do what is really right for the country or the community,” he said.

Borane said the fence is little more than a monument to failed policy on illegal immigration.

“When the fence is complete, they should engrave up there, ‘This is to acknowledge the fact that we couldn’t do anything about illegal immigration so we put up this wall,’ ” he said.

The Reform Institute, a non-partisan, nonprofit public policy group that works on issues such as immigration, recently partnered with Brickfish, an online marketing company, in an effort to engage the public, particularly youth, in the border issue.

The campaign was part of an ongoing effort by the Reform Institute to encourage Congress to pass much-needed comprehensive immigration reform.

“We came up with the concept of having people design this border fence as a creative way to get them to express what message they feel this fence sends about the U.S.,” said Chris Dreibelbis, communication director for the Reform Institute.

There were more than 1,700 submissions. And, at the close of the campaign, more than 460,000 interactions regarding the debate had occurred, including more than 16,000 votes and 450,000 views of the content.

Some of the entries sparked an online discussion about not only the fence but the broader immigration issue. Dreibelbis said people expressed “passionate” views.

The grand prize winning entry of the campaign was titled “What am I walling out?” The design, intended for the Mexican side of the fence, expresses the opinion that the wall should be torn down.

Another winning design intended for the Mexican side said “Is the grass really greener on the other side?” A winning design intended for U.S. side of the wall said “Boundaries don’t keep people out. They fence you in.”

Herald/Review reporter Jonathon Shacat can be reached at 515-4693 or jonathon.shacat@bisbeereview.net.

"Border Reality 101"

This is what most of our southern border looks like: there is no government-built fence at all. There is often just whatever is left over from some forgotten cattle fence, built privately to keep U.S. cattle from wandering freely into Mexico. For hundreds of miles there is not even a broken cattle fence, there is nothing at all.

For comparison, below the broken cattle fence photo is a sample of an inexpensive but highly effective double border fence system, with a plowed strip to reveal footprints. This type of system is very cheap and can be built with great speed.

Here is what some of San Diego County has: a wall made of rusty Viet Nam-era runway mats. The corrugations are even horizontal, (to make climbing easier?)

Here is what the border looks like where the runway mat wall exists. Mexico begins on the other side of the ineffective rusty wall, which actually helps the smugglers, by hiding their movements until the occasional USBP vehicle has driven out of sight.

This is how "the game" is played. Smugglers hide on the other side of the wall with their dope and/or their illegals, out of sight of the USBP. They wait for the highly visible white BP vehicle to drive over the distant hills. Lookouts with cell phones and walkie-talkies report on the current locations of the BP units. They know with certainty that "the coast is clear" for an hour or two, and the smugglers and illegals hop the fence and run into the scrub only 50 yards away. From there, they are out of sight, and they walk 1-2 miles to holding houses. Then they wait for nightfall, and are picked up and driven in vans to LA or San Diego.

Next, we see the Duncan Hunter 15' fence, which is already being built along a few "showplace" miles of San Diego, mainly near the ports of entry, where panderng politicians can conveniently show it off to gullible reporters. As you can see, the rusty runway wall is seen at the left side, Mexico begins on the other side. In areas with the 15 foot fence, dope smugglers and illegals will have to cross the open sand ("the government road" as it is called) before starting to try to get over the 15 foot fence.

This new fence is extremely tough, and resists cutting. Attacking the fence would have to be done right out in the open, in full view of cameras. This type of fence, on the U.S. side of the government road, will give the USBP a barrier to patrol, instead of forcing them to chase illegals around 100,000 square miles of wide-open frontier land, which is a fool's errand. Everywhere this modern multiple fence system has been built, crossings by illegals drop to almost nil.

This ain't rocket science, folks. We're not talking about something like the Hoover Dam project, (which we managed to build 70 years ago). The world's last superpower, which put a man on the moon 35 years ago, can build a couple thousand miles of simple and effective fencing.

This is how it's being built in San Diego county, along the last 14 miles out to the ocean. The total cost of the entire fence from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific would be about 5 billion dollars, or what we spend medicating, hospitalizing, educating, and incarcerating illegal aliens just about every month. In other words, the fence would pay for itself immediately.

Or, we can continue our current policy.

You are suggesting a single-threaded process...This is a multi-tasking application opportunity.

To steal one of Bill Clinton's most annoying catch-phrases, "Politics is the art of the possible".

We can build a fence now, because everybody agrees that a fence is a component of every possible solution to the problem. Unfortunately, we cannot pursue a comprehensive approach until the fence is complete, because previous decades of inaction have completely exhausted the public's goodwill and ability to suspend disbelief.

The electorate is convinced, and not without good reason, that if guest worker and amnesty is enacted in advance of the fence, the fence will never get built. This has been proven to them, over and over again, and they are not going to forget it now, just because President Bush asks nice and promises not to misbehave again.

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