Border insecurity

‘OUR BORDER MUST BE SECURE,” Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) said Friday in Laredo, Texas, kicking off the second day of legislative field hearings on immigration reform. Only after this condition is met, he said, should we even begin to think about guest worker programs, visa policies and paths to citizenship.

This is a popular and seductive notion, one that is shaping up as the basis for a tenuous possible compromise between the enforcement-only immigration bill in the House and the comprehensive version in the Senate. It also is a practical pipe dream, one that fails to recognize the reason the border is so porous is that U.S. farms, construction sites, packing plants and restaurants have been relying on undocumented workers for years. To say you want to clamp down on the border before addressing the underlying labor issues is to vote for economic suicide. As New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg aptly put it at the Senate’s competing committee hearing in Philadelphia last week: “It’s as if we expect Border Patrol agents to do what a century of communism could not: defeat the natural market forces of supply and demand and defeat the natural human desire for freedom and opportunity. You might as well sit on your beach chair and tell the tide not to come in.”

An impregnable border cannot prevent illegal immigration. One statistic you probably won’t hear much during this silly season is that an estimated two out of five illegal immigrants residing in the United States came here legally, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. You could build a 2,000-mile-long wall along the southern border, as Royce has proposed; sentence ranchers to 10 years in prison if someone else builds a border-crossing tunnel on their land, as Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) has proposed; send the U.S. military down there, as Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Rancho Santa Fe) has proposed ... yet all you’d have to show for it is a crippled economy and an increase in other forms of illegal immigration.

As long as there are foreign tourists, border cards for Canadians and Mexicans and international enrollment at U.S. universities, there will be opportunities aplenty for some legal visitors to linger past their visa expiration dates.

Securing the border and ignoring the rest does nothing to reduce the legal thicket and interminable waiting lists facing those who wish to migrate by the rules. A sane approach would recognize that demand on both sides of the border is far outstripping the supply of legal visas; instead, House supporters of HR 4437 would choke off the number of annual employment visas at a nearly nonexistent 5,200.

House Republicans claim they want to first “certify” that the border is secure. To fully do that, they will need not just 2,000 miles of fence but another 3,145 miles for the northern border, untold thousands of new port inspectors, plus homing devices attached to every foreigner who dares set foot on U.S. soil. The border would be secure, but at the expense of the land of the free becoming a police state.