Bringing the Border War Home

What will Americans pay to keep out immigrants

Glenn Garvin from the October 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 8)

The captain's face crumpled in tears. All around the deck, uniformed Americans were crying. When she finished, they clapped and cheered, 50 men making a noise like 500. The captain sent for a crewman who spoke Spanish, and when he arrived, the captain spoke just one short sentence. "He says you have touched his heart," the sailor translated to Lizbet. The captain smiled and squeezed her hand.

Then he took her to a prison camp.

But who cares, really, about Lizbet Martinez? It's not like she has any rights. She's just another foreign kid, just another one of those "weird aliens with dubious habits" coming here prob ably to go on welfare or mug old ladies, as journalist and racial scientist Peter Brimelow is con stantly warning us. (And Brimelow should know; he's a Brit, married to a Canadian.) Or, worse yet, one of those dangerous multiculturalist agents his Firing Line ally Arianna Huffington has alerted us to, bent on destroying the English language and abolishing Christmas in favor of Kwanzaa. (And Huffington should know; she's a Greek who came here from London.)

So let's not waste a lot of tears over Lizbet Martinez or any of her little Third World friends who've been jailed at Guantanamo. If they've suffered, it's been in a good causethe preservation of an endangered species, Bill Clinton's electoral votes. Let's not freak out over the Romanian stowaways held in leg irons in New Jersey, or the Chinese women locked up for 14 months in a tiny hotel room at the Miami airport. We just don't have the time or the emotional capital to spend worry ing about their freedom.

Because we have to worry about ours.

In the rush to repair all the supposed damage to our economy and culture done by those perni cious Accented People, the Brimelows and Huffingtons want us to declare war on immigration. And to fight it, they're asking for some heavy new legal weaponry.

Hundreds of millions of dollars to build a McNamara Line along the border with Mexico? Pocket change. The ability to seize businesses, and jail the owners, that employ the enemy? It's only fair. Forcing every American to carry a national ID card and submit to the whims of a computerized Federal Work Permit office? True patriots will be proud to do it.

And if some civilians get caught in the crossfire, well, war is hell. Remember what they used to say in Vietnam: Sometimes you've got to destroy the village in order to save it.

Does the military analogy seem strained? It shouldn't. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California advo cates mobilizing National Guard troops and stationing them along the border with Mexico. And although that hasn't happened yet, the Border Patrol has been quietly militarizing the border. The canyons south of San Diego now bristle with high-tech surveillance devices supplied from the Pentagon, and patrolmen zip over the craggy terrain in surplus military vehicles. Even the metal fence that snakes 23 miles from the Pacific Ocean to Otay Mountain came out of a Pentagon store house: It's made of old portable landing strips that were used in Vietnam.

If that has any infelicitous connotations, they're lost on the Border Patrol agents themselves. "This stuff is great, and I can't tell you how happy we are to have it," says Bryant Brazley, a seven -year patrol veteran, as he stands on a cliff overlooking the aptly named Smuggler's Canyon. "We were trying to plug this border with chewing gum, hammers, nails, and bailing wire."

Not any more. Along with the new 12-foot-tall fence, there's a 4.5-mile strip of high-intensity stadium lights, backed in Kevlar to keep them from being shot out, their poles encased in metal girders to protect them from arsonists. There are half a dozen night vision scopes, $150,000 apiece, with more on the way. There are 222 new vehicles and two high-speed boats. There's an elaborate network of ground sensors to detect movement along the border; 300 encrypted radios to keep the patrol's transmissions secret from prying ears; a computerized fingerprint identification system that can tell if a captured immigrant has been stopped before. Not to mention 200 new agents.

This is all part of what the Border Patrol calls Operation Gatekeeper, one of three high-inten sity efforts to shut down sectors of the Mexican border. (The others are Operation Hold-The-Line in El Paso and Operation Safeguard south of Tucson.) How much it all costs is difficult to ferret out of Immigration and Naturalization Service budget documents, but it isn't cheap: Construction costs in the San Diego area alone will amount to $22 million during this fiscal year. Overall, the INS en forcement budget has grown from $933 million in fiscal 1993 to an expected $1.7 billion in fiscal 1996. What else is hidden in the Pentagon's budget, or the Justice Department's (Janet Reno is adding 65 more federal prosecutors to her staff, just to go after immigrant smugglers on the Mexican border), is anyone's guess.

There's no question that Operation Gatekeeper has salved the pride of harried Border Patrol agents like Brazley. "The Mexicans used to mass in a soccer field near the Chula Vista station, just east of San Ysidro," he recalls. "And then at dusk, they'd rush us. Hundreds of them, and we could catch maybe two or three. What kind of offended our dignity was that the soccer field itself was on the U.S. side of the border. So sometimes a couple of agents would drive over there as they were massing and tell them to at least do that on the Mexican side. And they'd just grab the vehicle and start rocking it back and forth, threatening to tip it over. You had to be a tough guy or gal to work the border here then."

The infamous soccer field was one of the first casualties of Operation Gatekeeper, annihilated by National Guard bulldozers. But aside from preserving Border Patrol dignity, it's hard to say just what we've gotten for all the money. During the first seven months of Operation Gatekeeper, appre hensions of illegal immigrants around San Diego were up 6.2 percent, to 331,000. Does that really means 19,000 Mexicans were stopped from entering the United States? Or does it mean that 9,500 Mexicans were stopped twice before eluding the Border Patrol on their third try? Consult your Ouija board for an answer.

But we do know a couple of things for sure. One is that a few weeks into Operation Gatekeeper there was an explosive growth in illegal immigrant traffic in Arizona. Even without any additional enforcement measures, Border Patrol apprehensions around Tucson jumped 50 percent. (That's why Operation Safeguard was set up in Arizona on January 1.) The immigrant flow is like a balloon; squeeze it in one place and it pops up in another.