Moving Past Bumper Stickers: The Complexity of ‘Border Issues’

As you may or may not know, this month’s Texas Monthly magazine is billing itself the immigration issue, “Eighteen Texans tell us exactly what they think about illegal immigration.” Some of these Texans include professors, radio talk show hosts, immigrants, Border Patrol agents, ranchers, farmers, attorneys, activists, etc.

Recently, the editor of Texas Monthly asked me what I thought about their coverage, and this is what I responded…

My honest opinion is that the conversation is superficial and fails to address key issues. I’ve been a close observer of the Texas border region since childhood. This conversation degenerated into one full of bumper sticker rhetoric that in my view is really a mask for xenophobia and nativism.

“Border security” makes for great talking points. But in a border as long as ours with Mexico, focusing so strongly on it is absurd. To date, no person who posed a potential threat to national security has ever been apprehended along the southern border. And virtually the entire border is not a geographic boundary, as such, but a very long political one drawn on a map. We aren’t talking about the Pyrenees for more than half of the demarcation line, but a border based on the course once charted of the Río Bravo del Norte, as Mexicans know it, or the Río Grande, as it is called here. And yes, it is a lot less grande than most people realize.

West of Texas, the “border” is even less enforceable since it is straight lines drawn across mostly barren land.

Were we to be able to seal the entire border and prevent people from crossing it without going through ports of entry — a totally impractical and enormously costly proposition — it would still solve little since about 40 percent of unauthorized immigrants entered legally and didn’t leave when their visas expired. In a country with traditional travel freedoms, are we to follow every visa holder — students, scholars, engineers, tourists — to assure they don’t overstay their visas? And who will pay for that? For that matter, who is going to pay for maintaining the border wall?

And hasn’t experience taught us that when you step up enforcement in one region, the unauthorized migration will move to another with less enforcement? Seal the entire southern border and they will fly legally to Canada and enter through there, or hop boats and swim to our shores.

The fundamental problem is economic and this drives two phenomena.

Americans are having fewer children and living longer, and their children aren’t willing to take on many economic activities their forefathers would — at least at prevailing wage rates. How many citizens, native-born or naturalized, have you seen tacking down shingles on the third floor roofs of high-dollar McMansions in late July and August, or picking fruit or tilling fields, dressing animal carcasses for meat processors or, as seems to be the case for Lou Dobbs, shoveling horse manure? I recall interviewing a lettuce producer who, when we spoke, readily admitted having 200 so-called “illegals” harvesting his lettuce.

I asked why didn’t he hire resident aliens or citizens and he said they wouldn’t work for his wages? When I suggested raising them, he told me that his contract buyer — the world’s largest hamburger chain — would drop him and get their lettuce from Mexico or Guatemala if his price increased two cents per pound.

In another interview, a demographer related how the United States needed about 1.5 million immigrants to fulfill its labor needs but we were only issuing 900,000 visas.  This created in Mexico — our most logical labor source — waits of up to a decade and left U.S. employers with labor shortages in certain fields. That given, there are many ready to ignore the line. Are expanded guest worker programs the answer? Perhaps, but if they guarantee minimum wages and basic benefits, and are mired in bureaucracy, as they are now, no. And without stringent enforcement of basic living conditions, they will continue to be rife with abuse because all are conditioned on staying employed by a single employer, or organized groups of similar employers.  Additionally, can we say with a straight face that guest workers won’t also produce “anchor babies”?

One old joke asks: “Do you know when a goddam Meskin becomes a Hispanic? When he marries your daughter.”

American ambivalence about immigration from the south has created this problem and reactionary, but futile up-scaling of enforcement, and this has seriously aggravated unauthorized migration. It used to be that Mexicans would come here to take menial, low-wage jobs and leave around the Christmas holidays, only to return in late January or February, and often return to work for their old bosses. But tough enforcement has made it so dangerous — and expensive — to come and go that, once in, they stay here.

The other phenomenon has been created by poorly thought-out international trade pacts.

Among the greatest differences between the European Union and NAFTA and DR-CAFTA, for example, is that prior to the EU’s formation, the wealthy European nations extracted fundamental changes in labor, legal, banking and environmental policies, and major improvements in both human and physical infrastructure in the poorer nations. Over more than a decade, the living standards rose in the poorer nations until they were close to those in the wealthier nations. Only then was the EU established, and two decades later, when immigration restrictions in the first round of EU nations were dropped, Europe’s “illegals,” most of whom were from poorer EU nations, returned home because they could now earn decent wages.

With our trade pacts, we extorted the elimination of poor countries’ subsidies on basic staples, for example, in exchange for investment in industrialization that would create high-paying jobs. But the elimination of Mexico’s agricultural import restrictions pitted that country’s near-marginal agricultural producers against Archer Midland Daniels, collapsing the Mexican agriculture sector and causing massive unemployment. Today, Mexico is a net importer of corn, its traditional staple, and now, its arable land is largely dedicated to producing not staples for Mexicans, but specialty crops for America’s foodie grocers.

As for the industrialization maquiladoras would bring, prevailing wages along Mexico’s northern border region are now that nation’ highest, but they are 10 percent to 12 percent of the prevailing wages just on the other side of the murky río, in Texas border zone, our nation’s lowest wages. But with the elimination of subsidies on Mexican staples, the price of 450 grams of non-subsidized hamburger is now roughly the same in Nuevo Laredo as a pound of hamburger in Laredo.

Worse is that the foreign-owned maquiladoras prefer women workers in a society that is traditionally patriarchal. Shamed at not being able to provide for their own families, men often seek incomes either abroad or in shady enterprises. And given the consumptive predilections of consumers across the trickling river and the line on the map, a powerful supply and demand model has been created and will continue to flourish.

I could go on and on.

Let me just say that Americans have the power to stop unauthorized immigration and drug violence in one year. Just don’t give “illegals” work or create a system that provides for immigrants to enter in an orderly fashion and provide protections so they don’t undermine wages here. Oh, and either quit using or legalize illicit drugs.  Can you put that on a bumper sticker for me?