U.S. Border Control: Holes in the Policy? : Best way to reduce flow of illegal migrant workers from Mexico into this country: Concentrate effort at the border

In the last several days, news stories in San Diego and Los Angeles came together, quite coincidentally, to remind us how difficult--perhaps even impossible--it is to stop the flow of illegal migrant workers from Mexico into this country. All of the stories involve what is arguably the federal government’s most unappreciated agency, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is surely the most underfunded and overworked.

The most dramatic story occurred at the busy San Ysidro port of entry, where Interstate 5 ends at the international border north of Tijuana. There, agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, an arm of the INS, are struggling to cope with the latest tactic used by alien smugglers.

‘CATCH ME IF YOU CAN’

It’s a hair-raising game of catch-me-if-you-can that begins with large groups of people congregating on the Mexican side of the line, then running north into highway traffic on the southbound lanes of I-5. By sprinting as a group into oncoming traffic, the migrants hope to eventually reach the relative safety of a freeway median and outrun the Border Patrol.

In an effort to stop the practice, Border Patrol officials announced that they would close four of the six southbound freeway lanes and station extra agents on the two remaining lanes. That would have created a traffic bottleneck, and the possibility so frightened Tijuana civic leaders, whose city is heavily dependent on tourism, that Mexican officials asked the Border Patrol to hold off while they tried to prevent people from congregating near the freeway. So far the Mexican crackdown has worked, so the Border Patrol has suspended its bottleneck plans.

On Sunday, the INS also announced that it will put 300 more agents along the border--a big help to the 2,500 agents currently stationed there--but the agency ought to be thinking about far more comprehensive changes.

Because, let’s face it, unless the Mexicans keep up their enforcement effort, eventually migrants desperate for jobs, and smugglers who profit off them, will find another way to try to get across the border. And while many will be caught, others will get through to continue their northward journey.

Which brings us to another news story, involving a crackdown by INS investigators on special hiring centers set up by the City of Los Angeles to keep day laborers from congregating on street corners. Many day laborers are immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their practice of congregating on public sidewalks hoping to be picked up for temporary jobs has become a nuisance, even a hazard, in many neighborhoods. Los Angeles and other cities hit upon the eminently reasonable solution of setting up hiring centers where day laborers could congregate instead.

INS GOES EVERYWHERE

But Los Angeles officials also thought they had an informal agreement with the INS that its officers would not raid the hiring centers. If so--and local INS officials dispute that--it was violated last week when immigration inspectors followed workers from hiring centers to their work sites and questioned them. City officials have expressed concern that weeks of effort spent trying to persuade day laborers to use the hiring centers could be blown by overzealous law enforcement. That is not an unreasonable concern. And given the relatively insignificant results of the INS hiring-center crackdown--only two illegal immigrants were arrested--the agency should reconsider the strategy.

While officials are at it, they should also start asking themselves some bigger questions about how the INS works along the border--and they should bring INS headquarters in Washington, and even Congress, into the discussion. Because five years after major reforms were enacted to halt illegal immigration, the problem isn’t even close to being solved. And the situation doesn’t look to get any better. It’s possible that an out-of-date U.S. strategy for border control is one reason.

The INS still can’t seem to decide where it wants to focus its limited manpower. Despite its name, for example, the Border Patrol has offices as far away from the border as Monterey County. Perhaps the one best known to L.A.-area residents is the checkpoint at San Onofre, along the busy I-5 freeway, 66 miles from the border.

FAR-FLUNG OUTPOSTS

Does it really make sense to keep such far-flung outposts open when the greatest need for agents and equipment is clearly along the border? For that matter, does it make sense to have INS inspectors running around U.S. cities questioning Latinos and other “foreign-looking” residents, most of whom are legally here and often even citizens, when they, too, could better be deployed at the border?

There has long been a school of thought within the Border Patrol itself that argues for concentrating INS resources at the border and other ports of entry like international airports. With enough manpower and logistic support, the argument goes, the flow of illegals into this country could be slowed much more effectively.

There are reasonable arguments on the other side. INS officials say the I-5 highway checkpoint also stops a lot of illegal drugs, an infinitely more dangerous problem than illegal migrants looking for work. But that does little to calm the fears of south Orange County residents when automobile chases that begin at the checkpoint wind up on the county’s freeways and even residential streets. And what of the traffic fatalities that occur when pedestrians run from U.S. agents at the checkpoint?

PUT RESOURCES ON BORDER

Consider this: Mexican border officials believe alien smugglers began urging would-be illegals to run across the freeway at San Ysidro because a new border fence under construction nearby is working so well that it funnels all pedestrian traffic toward the freeway area.

A chain-link fence that used to mark the border is being reinforced with a sturdier metal material normally used to build aircraft runways. Soon that new fence will run all the way from the Pacific Ocean to the border crossing at Otay Mesa, about 12 miles inland. Who’s to say it won’t be even more effective when finished? That suggests to us that innovative technology, backed up with sufficient manpower, can reduce illegal border crossing.

Of course the U.S.-Mexican border has been open so long to the flow of people and goods that it can never be completely closed. Nor should it be--for the only long-term solution to illegal migration is free and open trade that eventually equalizes economic opportunity in the two countries. But meanwhile the flow of people across the line must be better regulated so it is not the chaotic, and often dangerous, free-for-all it is now.

It’s time for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Congress, to start asking some tough questions about our old border-control strategies.