A Great Perspective on the U. S. Mexican Border

Our Borders, Ourselves   

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

Drugs, Terrorism, and Crime

The reason why the "dang fence" and its infrastructure would do nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the United States is that America's millions of drug consumers have deep pockets. About half of the roughly $60 billion they pay for illegal drugs every year crosses the border into Mexico. A few thousand tons of cargo, worth billions of dollars are easy to move, and the drug cartels can easily pass on the cost of moving them to their rich American customers.
The very same changes that decreased the supply of domestic labor in American society at the same time increased its appetite for mind-bending drugs. Drug use was rare among the roughly 4 million Americans who attended college in the early 1960s, and truly exceptional in the high schools. Today, well over half of the roughly 18 million who attend college admit to having used illegal drugs in high school, and perhaps half of these continue to use after college. According to World Health Organization statistics, 16.2% of Americans admit to having used cocaine, and 42% marijuana. The world's second highest rate of cocaine use was New Zealand's, at 4.3%. Since the early 1960s American society has moved from harshly punishing users to considering drug use a treatable disease or a youthful indiscretion (we elected a president who admitted using cocaine). Few if any parents, upon discovering that their precious ones are using, call in the police, or even cut off their kids' funds. Congress crafted the Social Security Supplemental Income program, in effect, to relieve drug addicts of the burden of earning a living. Whereas songster Tom Lehrer's "old dope peddler" sufficed in 1960 to supply America's few, marginalized drug users, by 1980 multi-billion dollar cartels were needed to supply what had become a mainstream habit. The drug supply industry is clandestine and foreign-based strictly, exclusively, only because American society continues to pretend it is making "war" on drugs when in fact it is doing nothing of the sort.
Breathless commentaries by politicians and the media about the danger of Mexican "drug violence" spilling over the border ignore the fact that drug violence exists in Mexico strictly, exclusively, only because some Mexicans fight others for the privilege of supplying America's appetite for drugs, in exchange for which their American customers give them enough dollars to pay for thugs and officials on both sides of the border. These dollars, and nothing else, are responsible for the near collapse of law and order south of the border and for the insufficiently publicized corruption on the northern side. (The Border Patrol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau's internal investigations for corruption have risen threefold in the last three years.)
The Mexican people are confronting the unpleasant alternatives that these dollars force on them. They can—as they have done with increasing vigor since the election of the country's first conservative president in 2000—pursue drug traffickers on their side of the border almost as if Mexican policemen were adjuncts to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. But this has proved both costly and futile. The drug cartels have reacted to the pressure by fighting each other and the government for operating space, and have increased the money they spend corrupting officials. Tales of mayhem in Mexico are not overblown. The drug war has cost some 30,000 lives since 2006 and has made Mexico's northern states into a war zone, in which noncompliance with the drug cartels ensures a grisly death. The war has even disrupted and dispirited the Monterrey area, Mexico's economic engine and social model. And as transporting drugs across the border has become marginally more difficult, the traffickers have reacted by beginning to develop a domestic Mexican market.
Years of bloody effort have made no dent in the cartels' power because there is no sign that Americans will stop financing the cartels. Given the growing sense that Mexico is bleeding for the sake of an American problem while the Americans sit back and blame Mexico, the country's traditional leftist establishment, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), is quietly but surely putting forward another alternative, namely, withdrawing from the U.S. "war on drugs" and choosing mutual nonaggression with the cartels. As the PRI has absented itself from the "war" and expressed ever-harsher attitudes toward the U.S., it has risen in the polls. The party now holds a plurality in the Mexican congress and is poised to win the 2012 presidential election. Its old-style politicians argue that relieving pressure on the cartels will reduce the violence on the southern side by freeing the drug runners to concentrate their violence and corruption within the U.S. Why not let the gringos deal with the consequences of their own habits? Why suffer for them? Mexicans know that such a modus vivendi with the drug lords would lead the Americans to tighten the border some more. But the Americans are doing that anyway.
Heads nod whenever politicians and the news media point to pictures of Mexicans scaling the border fence or scurrying through the desert as evidence of how easily terrorists could enter the United States. Of course the 9/11 terrorists entered legally. So do thousands of students every year from Muslim countries. It takes little sophistication for any terrorist organization to put together identity packages that ensure legal entry. Going through the deserts of the American Southwest is the hard way. But even the Berlin Wall's visual surveillance, constant illumination, and death strips—measures far more stringent than any security conceivable at the Mexican border—didn't prevent about a thousand people from getting through. The "dang fence" will be irrelevant to terrorism.

For the same reason, it must also be irrelevant to serious crime. Criminals, like animal predators, are few in number and go where the pickings are easiest. Although an honest Mexican laborer who can look forward only to minimum wage will balk at paying the human smugglers' high rates, a criminal will not hesitate to pay the price of admission so long as he sees far richer victims and a far more permissive environment north of the border. What Mexican criminal would not prefer to prey on rich Americans, or risk apprehension, trial, and imprisonment among them rather than in Mexico? More border security is likely to increase the proportion (if not the number) of criminals coming across even as it reduces the number of honest laborers.