Illegal Immigration: More Than Mexicans : Case involving 263 Chinese shows breadth of the issue

If nothing else, this week’s incident in which 263 Chinese were discovered trying to sneak into the United States aboard a steamship that ran aground off one of New York’s most popular bathing beaches illustrates at least two important truths. One is that illegal immigration is not just a problem of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The other is that we need to get better control of all our borders and ports of entry.

Along with several other recent incidents in which boatloads of Chinese were intercepted off California’s coast, the New York incident should prod the Clinton Administration to take a fresh look at how this country tries to control its borders. If U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who oversees immigration enforcement, gives border issues the attention they deserve, we suspect she will come to the same conclusion a recent Times series on the U.S. Border Patrol did: Just tossing more money and manpower at the problem may not necessarily help. Such quick and easy answers have been tried--most recently by the Reagan Administration under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986--and found lacking.

What is really needed is a thorough reassessment of all the agencies that share a responsibility for controlling this nation’s borders and ports of entry, with an eye toward streamlining their operations to make them both more efficient and more sophisticated. In other words, more capable of monitoring and controlling the international movement of people and goods in a world of instant communications and modern transportation.

That means reorganizing not just the Border Patrol (an arm of the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service) but the U.S. Customs Service (an arm of the Treasury Department), the U.S. Coast Guard (part of the Transportation Department) and other, more obscure, federal agencies.

Since at least the 1950s--when this country began phasing out the bracero program but the migration of Mexican workers continued illegally--most of this country’s border enforcement efforts have been focused on the 2,000-mile-long border with Mexico. That strategy must also be rethought. For if a pending U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement is approved, and helps stimulate the Mexican economy as most reputable economists predict it will, we may see a day when Mexican migration to this country decreases while illegal immigration from other countries, like China, increases.

The recent surge of Chinese boat people, some of whom paid organized criminal gangs as much as $50,000 for voyages aboard old steamships, shows just how lucrative and sophisticated such smuggling has become. That calls for sophisticated intelligence gathering and anti-smuggling operations in response, not just more cowboy-style patrols along the Mexican border.

Since the Nixon Administration the General Accounting Office has repeatedly called for the consolidation of the federal agencies that work the borders and ports of entry into a single border management agency. Reno should dust off those old GAO reports and give them a careful reading before she and President Clinton decide who should be the new Administration’s INS commissioner.