A Great Perspective on the U. S. Mexican Border

Our Borders, Ourselves   

www.claremont.org   -  Part II of IV  -  By Angelo M. Codevilla May 24, 2011

Immigration and Citizenship

Truth is, most illegal border crossers are not "immigrants." They do not come to stay, much less for American citizenship. They are overwhelmingly young men who have left their women behind, and who yearn to get back to them. They have no intention of living the rest of their lives without their families. Most do not come with any desire to take part in American life. Mexico has given them little if any understanding of "citizenship," and they do not have the time or energy to start thinking about it here.

Having run a farm in California for some years, I have come to know countless illegal Mexican workers. They scarcely imagine themselves citizens of Mexico, much less of the United States. Many from places like Oaxaca barely speak Spanish and have very little interest in anything beyond making some money for their families for a few years. The U.S. towns and cities where they live are dotted with shops that wire cash to Mexico. Other workers, who managed to come with their families before the border turned dangerous in the mid-1990s, have wider horizons and less pressure to return. Time and integration into non-seasonal trades have made some into de facto permanent residents. But even among these, few want to think of themselves as Americans. Unlike the schools that taught earlier generations of immigrants, their children's kindergartens, primary schools, and high schools don't try to assimilate them into an attractive culture. Some Mexicans so dislike the dissolute attitudes their children bring home from school ("they just learn to be criminals") that they send the kids (natural born U.S. citizens who travel legally back and forth) to school in Mexico. Although the American welfare state's agencies seek out Mexicans as clients, most—especially those just arrived—tend to rely on their own community.

In the past, generations of foreigners became Americans because they wanted to, and because American society demanded nothing less. True citizenship in America can only be based, as Abraham Lincoln put it, on becoming "flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood" with the American Founders by agreeing with "that old Declaration," which says "all men are created equal." Millions of immigrants—myself gratefully included in 1962—expressed the desire to be part of the founders' America, and passed an oral and written test, in English, on its history before we took the oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Today, America's ruling class wants to cheapen citizenship. It seeks not citizens but clients to whom it can grant voting rights in exchange for political support. For this elite, "that old Declaration" just gets in everybody's way. But most Mexican illegal aliens aren't interested in citizenship, whether cheap or expensive.

Fencing In and Out

Yet increased border control is turning some of these labor-seekers into de facto maladjusted immigrants. The United States Border Patrol was created in 1924 to enforce Prohibition. In the decades following World War II, border enforcement was basically symbolic: limited to major crossing points and based on labor union pressures to limit competition from Mexicans. Effectively, the border was open. Until the 1970s labor-seekers came north for seasonal work, went home with their earnings, and came back next season. As recently as 1992, there were only about 2,500 border agents. Today, some 18,000 of our 20,000 Border Patrol agents are stretched between San Diego and Brownsville. If all were there at the same time and spread evenly, they would be only 200 yards apart. Only in that sense is the border more secure than ever.

The current mess came about gradually beginning in the 1960s. In previous decades young Americans of nearly all social classes had done hard physical labor prior to entering their trades or careers. The fourfold increase in the rate of college attendance between 1965 and 1990 went hand-in-hand with a radical devaluing of manual work in middle-class America. Getting your hands dirty became uncool. Meanwhile, at the bottom of society, thousands of people adopted attitudes and lifestyles that made them unemployable. All this happened while the pool of working-age Americans relative to retirees was shrinking. Quickly, Mexicans and other Latin Americans were in demand not just in agriculture but in construction, landscaping, the food industry, hotels, and hospitals. Although many of these jobs were not permanent, they were not seasonal, either. Those who filled them had some incentive to bring their families, even as the border tightened. Meanwhile, America was building a welfare state to which these workers and their families could turn between jobs. All along, increased pressure from American labor unions meant more border enforcement. Because crossing the border was becoming more difficult, there was greater incentive to bring families and stay.

The U.S. government's 1986 grant of amnesty to illegal aliens did not produce many new citizens in the proper sense of the word so much as it produced "chain migration"—nominal citizens sponsoring the immigration of as many family members as possible, who crossed the border legally and became nominal citizens themselves. As the surging American economy's demand for manual labor continued to increase, the domestic supply continued to decrease. By the mid-1990s, border controls increased to the point that perhaps the majority of illegal crossings required the help of professional smugglers or "coyotes," and became too arduous to include women and children.

The post-9/11 border security measures tightened the border to the point of effectively putting the small-time coyotes out of business. More and more, illegal crossers had to rely on the people most expert in breaching the border—the drug runners, who have the very latest information on routes, the organization to move people and goods efficiently, and above all, the money to bribe the U.S. Border Patrol. Would-be laborers pay up to $2,500 in advance for a trip across, stand about a one-in-eight risk of being caught, and an unknown chance of being abandoned in the desert or of being held for ransom—all for the chance to work for $8 an hour while living on nothing so they can send money home for perhaps five years.

If two rows of what Senator John McCain called "the dang fence" were built all the way from San Diego, California, to Brownsville, Texas, across some of the world's most rugged terrain and were surveilled round the clock and "line backed" with helicopter-borne teams that could concentrate on breaches within minutes, the effect would be to increase radically the cost of moving large numbers of people across the border. The human smugglers would have to charge amounts that mere workers couldn't justify paying for the chance to work for minimum wage. Because the smugglers are in it for money, a fence and its massive infrastructure would merely protect us against people who just want to work here—and against nothing else.