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MEANWHILE A Paradox on Mexico's Border
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TUCSON, Arizona The desert along the southern U.S. border will soon be bristling with 1,000 blue flags. They will mark the places where Humane Borders, a Tucson-based coalition of church and citizen groups, will put water stations to aid illegal migrants on their dangerous crossing into the United States.
Each station will fly a flag visible for miles in the crystalline air of southern Arizona. The flags, intended as symbols of water, also stand as a symbol for the confused and contradictory nature of America's current border policy.
The water stations will be installed with the quiet approval of the same agency that is spending millions to deter migrants. In effect, they signal the moral impossibility of halting illegal immigration by focusing on the border alone.
The flags will be there because migrants have been dying. No one knows for sure how many, but the stories of women and children lost in the arid Sonoran desert are heartbreaking. The death count climbed from 231 in 1999 to 369 in 2000, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Other estimates are even higher.
Much of the responsibility lies with callous smugglers who drop off their charges in harsh terrain. But it is also partly the result of a stepped-up U.S. effort to slow the traffic. In seven years, the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled, to 9,335. The agency's budget has tripled, and should top $1.4 billion this year.
A recent trip to Douglas, Arizona, brought home to me the significance of that buildup. Six years ago, about 60 agents patrolled a 30 mile (50 kilometer) border section that is a major thoroughfare for illegals. Today, more than 600 agents are aided by miles of new fencing, stadium lights and high-tech surveillance hardware worthy of a James Bond movie.
Such law enforcement has been systematically applied to Douglas and other troublesome border spots, and it may be having an effect. Apprehensions of illegal crossers along the entire border fell 22 percent from Oct. 1 through January, compared with the previous year.
But success has come at a price. Migrants have moved to more remote areas and are taking greater risks. The preliminary findings of a University of Houston study, released to coincide with the recent meeting of President George W. Bush with President Vicente Fox of Mexico, blamed the stricter U.S. border policy for "the white crosses and unidentified graves lining the landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border."
The Border Patrol has greatly stepped up its search and rescue efforts, and is working with Mexican officials to warn migrants away from dangerous crossings. But the patrol then ends up making the border safer to cross.
Couple that with the fact that migrants know that most will simply be returned to their side of the border if they are caught, and more are encouraged to make the attempt - which then requires greater enforcement, which then leads to increased rescue efforts, and on and on. Although it could be argued that nobody crosses the border for a drink of water, it seems hard to escape the notion that water stations will only close this self-defeating circle.
Yet Americans are not going to leave people to die of dehydration and exposure, because Mexico is the United States' neighbor, not an enemy, and because Americans are, finally, not the kind of people to stand by and watch others die.
This means the southern U.S. border is, practically speaking, indefensible. It means the solution to the problem of illegal migration will not come from the border itself, but from the kinds of sweeping initiatives that might result from the dialogue that Mr. Bush and Mr. Fox started. Temporary economic migration into the United States must be regularized and legalized. Americans should work together to create more jobs in the parts of Mexico that send the most migrants.
A broader solution must be found, because Americans do not have the heart for the war we are waging. As those blue flags that will soon be waving over the Sonoran desert make clear, we are not willing to do what it would take to win. Maybe that represents a kind of surrender, but it is one we should be proud of.
Reed Karaim, a free-lance writer based in Arizona, contributed this comment to The Washington Post.
Each station will fly a flag visible for miles in the crystalline air of southern Arizona. The flags, intended as symbols of water, also stand as a symbol for the confused and contradictory nature of America's current border policy.
The water stations will be installed with the quiet approval of the same agency that is spending millions to deter migrants. In effect, they signal the moral impossibility of halting illegal immigration by focusing on the border alone.
The flags will be there because migrants have been dying. No one knows for sure how many, but the stories of women and children lost in the arid Sonoran desert are heartbreaking. The death count climbed from 231 in 1999 to 369 in 2000, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Other estimates are even higher.
Much of the responsibility lies with callous smugglers who drop off their charges in harsh terrain. But it is also partly the result of a stepped-up U.S. effort to slow the traffic. In seven years, the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled, to 9,335. The agency's budget has tripled, and should top $1.4 billion this year.
A recent trip to Douglas, Arizona, brought home to me the significance of that buildup. Six years ago, about 60 agents patrolled a 30 mile (50 kilometer) border section that is a major thoroughfare for illegals. Today, more than 600 agents are aided by miles of new fencing, stadium lights and high-tech surveillance hardware worthy of a James Bond movie.
Such law enforcement has been systematically applied to Douglas and other troublesome border spots, and it may be having an effect. Apprehensions of illegal crossers along the entire border fell 22 percent from Oct. 1 through January, compared with the previous year.
But success has come at a price. Migrants have moved to more remote areas and are taking greater risks. The preliminary findings of a University of Houston study, released to coincide with the recent meeting of President George W. Bush with President Vicente Fox of Mexico, blamed the stricter U.S. border policy for "the white crosses and unidentified graves lining the landscape of the U.S.-Mexico border."
The Border Patrol has greatly stepped up its search and rescue efforts, and is working with Mexican officials to warn migrants away from dangerous crossings. But the patrol then ends up making the border safer to cross.
Couple that with the fact that migrants know that most will simply be returned to their side of the border if they are caught, and more are encouraged to make the attempt - which then requires greater enforcement, which then leads to increased rescue efforts, and on and on. Although it could be argued that nobody crosses the border for a drink of water, it seems hard to escape the notion that water stations will only close this self-defeating circle.
Yet Americans are not going to leave people to die of dehydration and exposure, because Mexico is the United States' neighbor, not an enemy, and because Americans are, finally, not the kind of people to stand by and watch others die.
This means the southern U.S. border is, practically speaking, indefensible. It means the solution to the problem of illegal migration will not come from the border itself, but from the kinds of sweeping initiatives that might result from the dialogue that Mr. Bush and Mr. Fox started. Temporary economic migration into the United States must be regularized and legalized. Americans should work together to create more jobs in the parts of Mexico that send the most migrants.
A broader solution must be found, because Americans do not have the heart for the war we are waging. As those blue flags that will soon be waving over the Sonoran desert make clear, we are not willing to do what it would take to win. Maybe that represents a kind of surrender, but it is one we should be proud of.
Reed Karaim, a free-lance writer based in Arizona, contributed this comment to The Washington Post.
