Anyone for Adult Solutions to Mexico-U.S. Border Problem?

Two recent investigations have confirmed fears that corrupt Mexican officials are cooperating with sophisticated smuggling rings that import illegal immigrants into the United States. To their credit, Mexico City authorities have begun a crackdown. But however successful that effort proves to be, it won’t address the larger challenge--true and effective regulation of the flow of people across the open border.

OMINOUS CORRUPTION: According to a recent article by Times staff writer Sebastian Rotella, the regional chief of the Mexican immigration service in Tijuana and two of his deputies have been dismissed and charged with corruption. A dozen other Mexican border officials are also under investigation by the Mexican Interior Ministry, which oversees that country’s immigration agency. The government probe grew out of an independent investigation by the respected Tijuana-based Bi-National Center for Human Rights.

That activist group documented what one of its leaders called a “scandalous and ominous” pattern of corruption in which regional immigration officials not only tolerated people smugglers but, in some instances, actively aided them in delivering groups of non-Mexican illegal immigrants across the U.S. border.

Non-Mexicans account for only about 10% of the illegal immigrants detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in its San Diego sector. But they are the most lucrative clientele for smugglers. Chinese pay up to $30,000 for illegal entry to this country, for example, compared to the $300 or so charged an illegal Mexican immigrant.

One can only hope that the crackdown by Mexico City will nip this sleazy but profitable enterprise in the bud before it becomes as entrenched as drug smuggling.

THE LARGER ISSUE: Mexico City and Washington could help enormously by noting that the illegal traffic in non-Mexicans is a problem for both nations--because the despicable activity not only flouts U.S. immigration laws but also undermines President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s effort to end official corruption in Mexico. That understanding should propel them to cooperate more closely on combatting the people smugglers.

It should, but it might not: Getting any Mexican agency to cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service these days is highly problematic. The revival of illegal immigration as a political issue in the United States has led some U.S. politicians to be downright demagogic, and that has Mexican nerves raw. Even as popular and progressive a leader as Salinas would risk infuriating Mexicans if cooperation with the INS were seen by his countrymen as an accommodation to the anti-immigrant bandwagon.

What Washington could do for Salinas is to discuss a complex and admittedly controversial Mexican proposal that has gotten scant attention in the U.S. immigration debate, yet could be a solution to perhaps 50% of the problem: a treaty to legalize and then regulate the flow of Mexican workers into--but also eventually out of--the United States.

Call it a guest-worker program, a new bracero program--whatever. U.S. officials have been reluctant to discuss it in recent years, even as the historic North American Free Trade Agreement was being negotiated with Mexico and Canada, because of political opposition from organized labor and some of our more strident immigration restrictionists.

THE REAL CHALLENGE: Yet experts who have studied the flow of people between Mexico and the United States have long argued that it is largely, if not entirely, an economically motivated migratory flow of workers seeking jobs, not immigrants seeking U.S. residency or angling for social service or health benefits. If some way could be found to regulate that flow--making it aboveboard and legal, eliminating the exploitation that predictably comes with criminality--then it could be as efficient as the cross-border flow of goods and capital now regulated by NAFTA.

Sure, it’s a provocative proposal. But certainly it is no more controversial than some of the proposals put forward in this country to “solve” the illegal immigration problem, such as ill-conceived notions of denying health care, education and even citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Indeed, a bilateral labor pact has a far better chance of working than some of those far-fetched ideas.

At a minimum a “North American Free Labor Agreement” could help the United States control that part of its immigrant flow originating from Mexico--anywhere from 50% to 60% of the problem, if INS arrest statistics are accurate. Surely this is a goal well worth pursuing as a start on crafting a rational immigration policy.

If it is not pursued, all we have are divisive anti-immigrant panaceas and periodic crackdowns on officials on both sides of the border who succumb to the temptation of easy profit in the trafficking of desperate human beings. The laws of economics and human nature being what they are, that approach is likely to prove only partially successful at best. And that is just not good enough.