Bringing the Border War Home

What will Americans pay to keep out immigrants

Glenn Garvin from the October 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 8)

We also know this: Despite America's national angst over the Mexican border, less than half of what most people think of as illegal aliens actually use it to enter the United States. Though the INS likes to terrorize the folks in Des Moines by speaking darkly of a million illegal border crossings a year, when pressed, officials will admit that most of those people eat a hamburger in San Diego or visit a shopping mall in El Paso and are back home by nightfall. (When Operation Hold-The-Line started in September 1993, the loudest complaints came not from Mexican nationalists or American civil libertarians, but from El Paso merchants. The drop in their sales was dramatic.)

The most widely accepted estimate of illegal immigrants who come to stay is about 300,000 a year. Roughly half of those enter the United States on legal visas as tourists or students, for instance and then stay. Another 5,000 or so cross through Canada, sneak into Puerto Rico, or enter via sea. So even if we gave the Border Patrol the billions of dollars it would cost to extend Operation Gatekeeper across every inch of the 2,000-mile Mexican border, and even if it succeeded in stopping 100 percent of the immigrants, at least 155,000 illegal aliens a year would still be getting into the United States.

And yet another thing we know: The border controls wouldn't be 100 percent effective. "It's enormously hard to control a border," observes Annelise Anderson, a former associate director of the Office for Management and Budget. Now a scholar at the Hoover Institution, she has studied immi gration extensively. "The classic case is East Germany. They fortified their border with dogs, barbed wire, search lights, land mines, and really mean guards who shot to kill.

"And people came anyway. They dug holes and tunnels and smuggled themselves in vehicles. They kept coming, and lots and lots of them succeeded.People who want to cross borders are very determined. It's really hard to shut them off."

This is not exactly news to Border Patrol agents, many of whom have mixed feelings about arresting people whose only crime is wanting a job. Though they dutifully swear to the effectiveness of Operation Gatekeeper, they do not pretend that they can close down the entire Mexican border. "We know we're not the solution," says Brazley. "We know the answer doesn't lie with the Border Patrol."

As he speaks, Brazley is standing in Goat Canyon, another of the border's busy spots. Mexico's Highway 1 is on the other side. All day long buses from the country's interior stop there, discharging passengers. They use a pedestrian overpass to cross the highway and then scramble down a dirt embankment to a clearing just a few hundred feet from the border. There they sit and wait for the cover of dusk before slipping into the United States.

While they wait, they can buy tacos, chimichangas, coffee, and soft drinks from a woman who sets up a vending stand each day. Originally she arrived on the bus herself, but business is so good that she's been able to buy a truck. And often she has to bring her two children to help with all the cooking. Eleven months into Operation Gatekeeper, she's still there.

Well, then, if we can't fight these invaders on the beaches, how about in the fields and in the streets? If they're coming here for jobs, let's go after the people who are giving them jobs. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 already makes it illegal to employ undocumented aliens to the tune of $10,000 apiece, but that's kind of a pipsqueak penalty for what amounts to lending aid and comfort to the enemy. What we need is a law with fangssay, the right to seize the assets of businesses that employ illegal immigrants.

In February, after an immigration war council with Janet Reno, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, and several Border Patrol officials, President Clinton hinted that he'll eventually ask Congress for an asset-seizure law. He made it sound quite reasonable: "If we turn off the employment stream for illegal workers, far, far fewer of them will risk the difficult journey here."

But why wait? Isn't this an emergency? It's a time for men of action like California's Joe Baca, a Democratic state assemblyman from San Bernardino. He introduced a bill that would not only seize the assets of businesses that employ illegal immigrants, but put their owners in prison for up to four years.

"We wanted to address illegal immigration, and do it in a way that was not an attack on the immigrants themselves, the way Proposition 187 is," explains one of Baca's aides, Eloy Garcia. (Garcia's statement, incidentally, shows why liberals who purport to be defending immigrants are actually often their worst enemies. Taking jobs away from immigrants is not an attack; taking their welfare benefits, as Proposition 187 seeks to do, is. Surely Peter Brimelow couldn't have expressed it more artfully himself.)

What Garcia means is, his boss is willing to attack the rest of us. Because "employer" doesn't just refer to the sweaty garment factories along Skid Row in Los Angeles, or the garlic fields around Gilroy. Kathleen Beasley, a California state government policy analyst, recognized the peril instantly when she heard about the bill.

"The guy who mows my lawn -- I've never asked to see that guy's credentials. It never occurred to me to ask," she muses. "But I do pay him $65 a month. He doesn't speak very good English, and now that I'm thinking about it, maybe he wasn't born in the United States. Should I ask?

"I've never asked my accountant, either, where he's from. As it happens, I'm pretty sure he's an American. But suppose I had just used the yellow pages to find an accountant, and the one who answered the phone spoke with a heavy accent. Should I ask to see his driver's license and his Social Security card? If this bill passes, would I be risking going to jail and having my home and all my money seized?"

Could be. In fact, Beasley's best defense against prison time would probably be that she's unlikely ever to repeat the crime, seeing as how she would no longer have a bank account or a house. Because state regulatory authorities react to a whiff of cash much the way piranha fish do to the taste of blood: They sink their teeth into the nearest living flesh and strip it to the bone. One reason, of course, is that it's lucrative, a way for agencies to expand their budgets without a lot of whining from spoil-sport taxpayers. Another is that it's easy.