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August 13, 2009
Exclusive: Alternatives for the U.S. Should Mexico Face the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ (Part Four of Five)
Mexico’s Endemic Problems
On the one, hand Mexico has shown remarkable progress over the last 15 years, with a growth in GDP per capita that has risen to the highest in Latin America and five times that of China, the world economic power house. Similar booms, however, have occurred in the history of Latin America but always with the countries enjoying the boom slipping once more into a depressed cycle. The assault now underway, as the Mexican state threatens to repeat this cyclic process. A major factor in the current situation is the level of corruption endemic to Latin American societies, and the deep distrust on the part of the citizenry of formal institutions.
Corruption and weak, distrusted institutions are associated with state failure. Both are chronic problems not only for Mexico but for Latin America in general, having led to state failure in that region time and time again.
One source of the problem of weak institutions and political corruption, the whole problem according to some, lies in the fact that in Latin America the economy and the state have never been properly separated, thereby turning public service into a vehicle for private gain, a condition that diverts the purpose of institutions and creates a culture of laxity, inefficiency and dishonesty. This inherent weakness also has a depressing effect on economic development.
Hernando de Soto, economist and former director of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank, calls this lack of separation “mercantilism,” defined in his book The Other Path as “bureaucratized and law-ridden state that regards the redistribution of national wealth as more important than the production of wealth.” By “redistribution,” De Soto means “the concession of monopolies or favored status to a small elite that depends on the state and on which the state itself is dependent.”
This pattern has led to a situation that Peruvian born intellectual and journalist, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, summarizes in his book Liberty for Latin America,as corporatism, state mercantilism, privilege, elite-driven wealth redistribution and what he calls political law (laws designed to protect the elite and the way it does business rather than for the general good). Under such conditions (which development economist Peter Bauer calls the “politicization of society”), everyone seeks favors from the government. Public service thus becomes a vehicle for patronage in which appointments, the awarding of contracts, granting licenses, etc. are seen as opportunities for profit, and where corruption finds easy access from low level bribes, the mordida, “the bite,” as it is called in Mexico, to major accommodations between the political and economic elites who dominate the country.
Also, under such a system the proliferation of laws imposes a cumbersome burden that retards the growth of small business, the kind of enterprise that in capitalist societies accounts for employment and job creation and economic growth. In such an encumbering and parasitic state, says Vargas Llosa, the mechanisms of government become instruments of predation against productive individuals, thus constituting the most important inhibitor of development in Latin America
This traditional arrangement, going back to colonial times, was not mitigated as the world economy developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century and as wealth from international trade flowed into Mexico. Instead, the traditional pattern was reinforced, for private interests had to accommodate to the proximity of their enterprises to the state and to those who profited by the arrangement. Thus the positive effects of economic growth were felt only by the elites, a situation that eventually led to revolution.
The Mexican Revolution, however, did not lead to the emergence of the kind of society and economy where opportunities were opened up across the population and up and down society; where wealth could be generated anywhere and could diffuse naturally through the population as it did in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Instead, a system was reconstituted in which the interventionist state closely interacted with new interest groups in an artificially constructed economy creating a subsidy-dependent system of rent-seekers rather than capital growth industries. The system was held together by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, by means of an elaborate system of payoffs to different interest groups in the form of subsidies or dispensations that kept the PRI in power for 71 years. Instead of releasing economic forces within Mexico the old system of patronage and corruption was reinstituted, an arrangement that has held the country back.
Thus, despite an enterprising population, vast natural resources and plenty of outside money, Mexico did not develop in the same way as did successful capitalist countries, especially as did Mexico’s northern neighbors, the United States and Canada. All the while, the redistributive system continued to funnel revenues from oil and foreign loans to the elite. Some people got rich. Many others stayed poor, corruption and poverty persisted and the economy stagnated.
Mexico exhibited all the symptoms of a blocked economy – budget deficits, high inflation, a mushrooming foreign debt, a burgeoning underground economy, high interest rates, heightened instability and a loss of confidence among the elites themselves who sent some $60 billion out of the country between 1974 and 1982. The social contract that supported the PRI regime was a guarantee by the party of a minimum level of subsistence and political stability in exchange for political support. It all worked – until the party could no long keep its end of the economic bargain.
When oil revenues fell and foreign loans dried up, Mexico could no longer pay the interest on her debt. President Lopez Portillo did what he said he would not do. In February 1982, he devalued the pesos by 40 percent, sending shock waves and panic across the country. In the process, the banks were nationalized. It was an election year and doling out subsidies for an electoral victory trumped budget cuts. By August of the same year, Mexico defaulted on international loans sending shock waves around the world. The United States had to bail it out. The Americans had to come to Mexico’s aid again with another rescue in 1995 (Mexico was too big to fail). In the next election cycle, 2000, the PRI was defeated in the first truly democratic elections in over seven decades.
Even before the change of administration, the Mexican elites had taken steps to adapt to the times. In response to the surge of globalization that swept the world, and after the debt default and the U.S. bailout, the policy of economic nationalism was abandoned and the government adopted the neo-liberal policies in vogue at the time. The political leaders sought an open market with the United States and Canada in the form of the North America Free Trade Association, and the state divested itself of top-heavy and inefficient state owned companies, except for Pemex, the government-owned oil industry that functions as much as a national symbol as an economic enterprise.
Divestiture, however, resulted in what Vargas Llosa calls “crony privatization,” in which state enterprises were sold to interests already within the system. Again, there was no transition to the kind of liberal open economy that would have allowed the takeoff of a sound economy. Instead, there was a reshuffling of elements along traditional lines. The state reaped short term profits in the sell-offs, while special interests acquired lucrative companies without the benefits filtering down to the rest of the population. Vargas Llosa remarks that the old pattern of corporatism, state mercantilism, privilege, wealth redistribution and political law “keeps recurring all the way into the twenty-first century.”
Reform, of course is possible. Vargas Llosa, among many others, suggests that the first step in meaningful and liberating reform is “cleansing the law” – that is, reviewing the cumbersome jumble of rules, regulations and laws that act as a bottle-neck to the establishment and the operation of small business so that entrepreneurial energy can be released on the local level that creates jobs, wealth and a more equitable distribution of incomes. And secondly, change the exploitative and unfair nature of the judiciary system.
Either the elites in Mexico do not believe such reforms are practical or they are afraid to take the risk; they regard any such reforms as a threat to their privileged position or perhaps ideas like this simply have never occurred to them: Whatever the reasons, the Mexican elites prefer to blame others for the poverty of their country rather than to explore ways out of the problem themselves.
For example, the Mexican government blames the United States for the present high level of violence in its country because of an American appetite for drugs and American guns. The fact is that drug addiction is like a virus, it infects individuals one at a time, expanding into epidemics regardless of borders, states or nationalities. Mexico is not immune. It has been reported that the number of known addicts in Mexico has doubled in the last six years to 307,000. Experts say that the number is dramatically undercounted.
As for the guns: Despite the blame laid at the feet of the United States for the gun violence in Mexico, Mexican authorities are reluctant to share necessary information with the United States. For example, in November 2008 a cache of weapons was found in Reynosa that was associated with the Zetas. Due to the reluctance of the Mexican government to allow the ATF timely access to the serial numbers of the weapons, a report on the provenance of the weapons did not appear until March 2009. Of the 540 rifles investigated by the ATF, 383 were from firearms dealers in the United States. The others were from elsewhere. Weapons submitted to the ATF are also highly selective. One wonders if it is to emphasize those guns that come from the United States while keeping in the shadows the many more that arrive in Mexico from other sources or from corrupt military and police officials.
This selectivity is well known on this side of the border. In an April 2009, field hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in El Paso, Texas committee chairman Sen. John Kerry said, “Only about one out of every four weapons seized by Mexican authorities last year was submitted to the ATF so they could be traced back to the purchasers and sellers in the United States. The Mexican government should provide the ATF with fuller access to these weapons.”
Another example of the “blame others” attitude is the recent flu scare that began in Mexico and spread from there to other countries. In April 2009, when a Mexican citizen visiting Hong Kong proved positive for the swine flu, all the guests in the Hong Kong hotel where he was staying (200-350 people) were quarantined for seven days along with 100 members of the hotel staff. Foreign minister Patricia Espinoza complained of “discriminatory measures” and the Mexican embassy in Beijing sent a circular to all its citizens in China telling them that China had imposed “measures of unjustified isolation” in response to the epidemic. It is not known how many of the guests in the quarantined Hong Kong hotel were Mexican, but it is highly unlikely that they all were, as it is also far from likely that the hotel staff that was also quarantined was from Mexico.
The Chinese government quarantined travelers from other nations as well. One should also keep in mind that the World Health Organization had raised the threat level for the possibility of a pandemic, and that that Hong Kong was badly hit by the bird flu SARS virus in 2003. The bird flu is endemic in Asia, and viruses have a way of borrowing from one another when they come in contact. World health officials worry that a combination of the swine flu, the bird flu and the ordinary flu might increase the ease of transmission of the bird flu and the ordinary varieties, along of the deadly effect of the bird flu and the swine flu, resulting in a potentially deadly epidemic. Perhaps the Chinese response was excessive in its caution, yet the reaction by the Mexican foreign minister did not reflect the potential seriousness of the situation.
Espinoza also criticized China, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Cuba for suspending commercial flights to Mexico for fear of bringing the epidemic to those countries. And President Felipe Calderón went so far as to say “some countries and places are taking repressive and discriminatory measures” in response to the epidemic, and that “there are always people who are seizing on the pretext to assault Mexicans, even just verbally.” All the while, the Mexican government was closing down schools and universities, businesses and restaurants, cancelling the largest Cinco de Mayo celebration in the country along with other holiday events, while soccer teams played before empty stadiums as ordered by the government – all in an attempt to contain the virus which was also the same motive of China and the five Latin American countries criticized by Mexico.
The Mexican government took the spread of the virus so seriously that it allocated $15 million for detergent, bleach and soap to clean school buildings, a difficult task since 12 percent of Mexico’s schools (30,000 out of a total of 250,000) have no running water or bathrooms. The Mexican government’s reaction to other countries’ attempts at containing the pandemic by quarantines and travel bans is a political response mouthed with political clichés; a reaction to what is seen as a personal offense, rather than as way of trying to deal seriously with a potentially dangerous public health problem. This personal and political reaction to a public health problem of potential global proportions reveals an attitude that underlies the way the Mexican political elite thinks about, and deals with, other important matters as well.
Mexico’s Safety Valve
One way out of the problem of an “excess” and “dangerous” population, as the Mexican elites see it, is to export that problem to the United States in the form of the massive illegal immigration. This has been described by American and Mexican critics as a safety valve for the Mexican elites. The “excess population” they are exporting was produced ironically by economic advancements during the latter half of the 20th century. Advances in agriculture, mechanization and “the green revolution,” dissolved traditional agrarian ties and dislocated vast numbers of unskilled, uneducated rural dwellers who migrated from the country-side to the cities, a process seen not only in Mexico but in the rest of Latin America and in throughout the Third World, indeed a pattern that also characterized economic development in the now wealthy countries in the course of their own histories. Growing industries in Mexico, however, were not able to absorb those people. Sprawling slums grew up around the cities filled with a population that was not able to participate in the benefits of economic expansion whose benefits they saw around them.
Some, like De Soto and Vargas Llosa, argue that along with the problems of rural-urban migration there are also opportunities. After all, the developed countries got through similar phases in their own histories of economic development. Despite the humble origin and low skills and educational levels of the migrants, there is resilience and energy in that population. De Soto, looking at migrants from the Peruvian highlands to the coastal cities shows that, on their own initiative, many have build the kinds of networks and associations that can lead to a vibrant civil society – and that within their ranks entrepreneurs have emerged to develop the opportunities for economic success, small at first but with potential for growth, even despite the bottle-necks of the current regime that choke off opportunity. If the system were more open, say those observers, natural forces would be released that could benefit the society as a whole and the economy.
The Mexican elites (as well as their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America) do not see it that way. For, as Vargas Llosa puts it, they perceive the migrants as “dark-skinned intruders” with predatory instincts that threaten their privilege and wealth. Thus, instead of fashioning new policies to adjust to new realities – thereby harnessing its energy for the betterment of the nation as a whole – the elites chose to exclude those sectors of their population by avoiding meaningful reform and in the case of Mexico, by preferring to export their problem to the United States. In so doing, the elites in Mexico have turned on its head the old adage, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” This failure to address the fracture in society, says Vargas Llosa, is “the greatest flaw of Latin American reform.”
In 1981, economist Niles Hansen predicted in The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest that with increasing economic development in Mexico, the government would eventually regard the emigrating population as a resource that should be retained. This, he said, is what happened in post-war Western Europe when Mediterranean countries, at first eager for guest worker programs in northern Europe eventually took steps to keep their workers home.
This, of course, did not happen in Mexico, even though the growth in the Mexican population has fallen. Instead Mexico took steps to facilitate the outflow of those “dark skinned intruders” by organizing a special police force, Grupo Beta, to protect the migrants from predatory Mexican police and from the hostile natural environment on their way to violating the immigration laws of their neighbor. The government has even issued manuals on how to make the illegal crossing into the United States, thus violating both bilateral and multilateral treaties designed to curb the smuggling of drugs and people. Former President Vicente Fox has extolled those Mexicans fleeing the failure of their own country as “heroes.” Many ordinary Mexicans, however, know very well what is going on, saying that Mexico is a rich country, rich in natural and human resources that could be developed with the right kind of leadership which, unfortunately they do not have.
There is a certain element of adventurism in this policy as well, for the Mexican elites are attempting to employ the Mexican expatriate population in the United States to influence American policy. In 1990, Mexico’s Five Year Plan declared that the Mexican nation extends beyond its borders into the United States. The government has begun to treat the large population of Mexican expatriates accordingly. Also, Mexican consulates have been charged with advancing this policy in a way that would be bitterly condemned as an infringement of sovereignty if it were the other way around.
Mexican support of NAFTA is also an instrument to consolidate and expand the power of the Mexican elite. On numerous occasions, former President Fox extolled the virtues of the European Union and called for the creation of such a borderless association in North America, a “North American Community.” Such an arrangement would assure the outflow of Mexico’s “dangerous” population by “regularizing” illegal immigration into the United States, while placing the Mexican elite in a power position that extends beyond the borders of a struggling Third World country.
Enablers in the United States
The United States is also complicit in the creation of the destructive criminal enterprise that has developed along its border with Mexico, both by tacitly accepting violation of American sovereignty, and by accepting the Mexican elites’ safety-valve solution with no thought of the eventual consequences for both countries. Mark Reed illustrates this complicity in his congressional testimony delivered on May, 2005 (the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship and the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security). Reed is a former INS commissioner for the central states, with jurisdiction at that time over the Mexican and Canadian borders and within all the states between within his district.
Reed told the senators about a high level strategy meeting he attended in the mid 1980s along with representatives from federal law enforcement, the State Department and the Department of Defense. The meeting had been convened to discuss the urgency of sealing the Mexican border to stop drug smuggling in response to the president’s widely touted War on Drugs. The Department of Defense representatives said that the DOD was capable of detecting and interdicting any intrusion across the border but could not distinguish between groups of migrants and drug smugglers until interdiction. At that point “the dialogue became difficult,” said Reed. “When the DOD refused to entertain the idea that they should only detain drug smugglers upon interdiction, the meeting was abruptly ended.” Reed added “The safety valve that illegal immigration provided toward the stability of Mexico seemed to be a more compelling national security priority than drug smuggling.” As we now know, “drug smuggling” has evolved into a larger geopolitical problem than they had imagined at that time.
In 2005, Reed said that “Alien smuggling organizations and networks are well established and prospering,” that “identity fraud has exploded with the proliferation of document vendors in virtually every community” and that “It is easy to enter the country unlawfully, gain a false identity and move around among us without threat of detection,” adding that, “It took us a long time to dig ourselves into a hole.”
One might argue that the problem began, in incremental fashion, with the dishonesty, or short-sightedness or mistaken assumptions – or all three – that led to a historic change in immigration policy in the 1960s, a change in the terms of legal immigration and a shift in attitudes on the part of a growing number of American elites, a shift that would later feed into and support illegal immigration.
In 1965, Congress passed an immigration act that reversed a policy that had been enforced since the 1920s. That policy had restricted immigration, and dictated the nature of the flow by means of quotas that favored Europeans. That system had kept immigration relatively low, and as economist George Borjas shows in his book Heaven’s Door,had maintained a high level of education and skills levels among the newcomers. The ending of high volume immigration in 1922 and 1924 also gave the offspring of the immigrant millions time “settle in” and assimilate.
In the 1960s, the country went through a period of reevaluation and social experimentation, a part of which was the government initiative known as the Great Society. One of the revolutionary changes made at that time was a revision of the immigration laws. Quotas favoring immigrants from Europe were ended and, under the rubric family unification, immigrants, once they had attained citizenship were allowed to bring in their relatives, thus initiating a pattern of increasing immigration that historians and social scientists call chain migration. The results were a change in the kind of immigrants entering the country and their relationship to the economy and to the national culture. Above all, it meant the increase in the inflow of immigrants which, in the 1990s, reached historically high proportions. In the process decisions on who gets in had been taken out of the hands of the authorities and placed in the hands of the immigrants.
An observer in 1982, Theodore White, no conservative, said in America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President 1956-1980, “The immigration Act of 1965 changed all previous patterns, and in so doing, probably changed the future of America … [it] was noble, revolutionary – and probably the most thoughtless of many acts of the Great Society.” The bill’s Senate manager Ted Kennedy was either thoughtless in his support or disingenuous when he said at its signing that this “is not a revolutionary bill,” that “our cities will not be flooded with millions of immigrants … the ethnic mix of the country will not be upset,” it “will not inundate with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated or economically deprived nations …” President Lyndon Johnson repeated these claims at the signing ceremony assuring the nation that it “is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives...” Not only did it work in the opposite manner, but the growth of immigration on that scale also created conditions that would eventually play a part in the increase of illegal immigration.
The United States has an enormous absorptive capacity, having absorbed millions from abroad in the past. Conditions, however, change over time and with it the kind of immigrants needed for the national economy. Today there is no longer an advancing agricultural frontier or a growing smokestack industrial complex that require a massive number of unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Such workers are still needed to some extent in certain sectors, but the center of gravity has shifted to the need for workers with higher skill levels.
The unrestricted importation of low-wage workers thus exceeds the need for this kind of labor, depressing the wages of workers at the lower end of the pay scale (including the children of immigrants). This fact was clearly seen by the legendary founder of the United Farm Workers union, César Chávez. Such a steady influx into the labor market also discourages innovations in agriculture and industry. In this regard, Phillip Martin, agricultural economist at the University of California Davis, has observed that innovation has historically occurred at times of labor shortage, and economist William Hawkins warns that an addiction to cheap, exploitable labor tends to depress an economy.
Democrat Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who challenged Johnson from the left in the 1968 presidential campaign, saw the economic consequences of the historic 1965 revision of the immigration laws when he wrote, “The United States cannot regain its competitive standing in the world by importing low wage workers from other countries.” Such a policy, he adds, “engenders conditions this country cannot and should not tolerate” for “in the modern age a nation’s wealth and prosperity is secured by high productivity and capital investment, not by the availability of low-wage labor.”
There is also a price to pay in national cohesion, for given the sheer numbers, the reduced economic opportunities and a “multicultural” mentality among the American elites, we are building with the current flow of immigration a permanent underclass at the same time we are working so hard to incorporate the native underclass into the mainstream. By accepting the Mexican elite’s safety valve, we are creating economic and social problems for ourselves, and as Samuel P. Huntington clearly shows in Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s Identity we are also placing in jeopardy our collective identity and national cohesion.
At the same time that legal immigration was changing the nature and the size of the influx from abroad, mass illegal immigration was also getting under way creating a chain migration of its own to compound the effects of the 1965 Immigration Act.
Mexican migration into the United States is a 20th century phenomenon, although its beginnings were discernible near the end of the 19th century. Mass migration, however, only took off in the late 1970s or the early ‘80s, gaining momentum and reaching historically high proportions in the 1990s as millions illegally crossed the border.
In August of 1942, the United States and the Mexican government agreed on the terms of a guest worker program designed to fill the labor needs of the United States during the Second World War. This arrangement, known as the Bracero Program, familiarized many workers from Mexico with the United States, partially laying the groundwork for later illegal immigration. The Bracero program was ended in 1964. Soon afterward the Mexican government, in an attempt to absorb the excess labor, put into effect a plan to development the border.
Under that plan, United States firms could establish subsidiaries on the Mexican side of the boundary in order to take advantage of the cheap labor there. Those plants, called maquiladoras, took advantage of provisions in the U.S. tariff code that allowed American-owned plants abroad to assemble materials and parts from the United States then import the finished product to American consumers with duties imposed only on the value added. Proximity to U.S. markets made this arrangement more cost effective than locating such plants in Asia where labor costs were even lower.
By 1985, maquiladoras were Mexico’s second source of income after oil and by 2006, although many plants had closed in the face of competition due to globalization, maquiladoras still accounted for 45 percent of Mexico’s exports. The industry was originally intended to absorb workers from the Bracero Program. The majority of the workers, however, are female – since women are said to be more manageable in that kind of work than men and since their wages are lower than those paid to men. One result of the economic growth in border cities was that development leapfrogged other areas of the country. The borderlands thus became a magnet for internal migration like the urban centers of the interior.
A thriving economy in the United States and American business’s thirst for cheap labor drew the internal migration further northward across the border and into the United States. By the 1980s, immigrant enclaves had become established in the United States adding to the magnet by creating daughter communities in this country. People in the home communities received news about employment opportunities in the United States from the daughter communities, and newcomers found support in the U.S. enclaves upon arrival. Thus bridges developed between home towns in Mexico (and later Central America) and the daughter communities in the United States in a classic pattern of expanding mass migration well known to historians and social scientists.
By the early 1980s, the stream of illegal entrants had increased to the point that the public and policy-makers had become aware of it. The solution, it was thought, lay in a one-time amnesty and subsequent strict enforcement of the immigration laws in order to keep the problem under control. In 1986, the Reagan administration enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act that granted amnesty to some 2.7 million illegal residents.
Officials were surprised at the number of people applying for amnesty, far higher than they had expected, partly due to their lack of knowledge about how many were really here and also due to massive fraud. Also, the enforcement provisions were unworkable, for Congress refused to require the INS to develop a verification system to insure the identification of the legal status of job applicants. This could have done by using Social Security or INS data bases for verification. Instead, employers were expected to verify themselves the legal status of employees from false documents submitted. At the same time, companies stood in danger of civil rights law suits if they asked too many questions. The 1986 amnesty thus increased the pull of the magnet, and the flow of illegal migration not only continued but increased.
In 1990, Congress created a commission, the United States Commission on Immigration Reform, to carefully examine immigration and to make recommendations for subsequent legislation. The Commission was chaired by respected former member of Congress the late Barbara Jordan (D-TX). The commission submitted and published a series of interim reports from 1994 until the final report was presented to Congress in 1997.
The recommendations were summarized by Congresswoman Jordan in testimony before Congress on March 29, 1995. Among the recommendations that she emphasized at that hearing were improvement of border management to prevent illegal entry, enhancement of the enforcement of immigration laws in order to reduce the magnet that draws people across the border illegally, and removing eligibility for public benefits for illegal aliens. Taxpayers, she said, should not be responsible for supporting people in the country illegally. Also, aid should be given by the federal government to local and state governments to help them deal with problems in their jurisdictions caused by illegal immigration. The Jordan Commission and its recommendations were ignored.
Mark Reed told the Senate committees in 2005 that the “call to arms” to secure our borders after the amnesty, led to no sustained effort to do so. In 1995, the American side of the border south of San Diego became virtually a part of Mexico as squatters moved in, soccer field and all, along with a massive influx of transient migrants. Border crime increased. Migrants, more than the American residents of the area, were the primary victims. The Border Patrol has a video of a rape committed on the U.S. side of the line, in which a man is beaten to death in front of the U.S. authorities when he tried to protect two women from assault. A picture of what it was like then is painted by Joseph Wambaugh in his 1984 book Lines and Shadows, the true story of San Diego Police Department undercover squad that tried unsuccessfully to deal with the problem.
The San Isidro port of entry, San Diego, where I-5 begins, was the scene of nightly “bonsai runs” when as many as 200 people would gather and simply run through the port of entry into the United States. Signs were posted on I-5 warning drivers to be careful of people running across the freeway, as signs are posted warning of deer crossings. Press coverage was too much for the government to ignore. Eventually measures were taken to close off such embarrassingly easy entry points at highly visible place. “Operation Hold the Line” was initiated in El Paso in 1993 and “Operation Gatekeeper” in San Diego the following year. The result was to push illegal immigration away from visible points of entry and further into the countryside and more and more into the hands of the growing smuggling industry that would eventually be absorbed in part by the drug cartels.
Authorities devised a sound plan to take control of the border sector by sector in what Reed describes as a “marching strategy.” The plan, the Southwest Border Initiative, was to be backed up by attacking smuggling corridors and by aggressively enforcing the immigration laws in the interior to stop the northward pull of the magnet. Attention to smuggling corridors never materialized and under the Clinton administration, work place enforcement dwindled and under Bush virtually disappeared. Eventually the Southwest Border Initiative was abandoned.
In its place a passive policy was initiated that prohibits agents from pursuit, “sitting on Xs” as they call it, along with a reduction, to the point of ineffectiveness, of check-points on roads beyond the border, while retaining a showy Border Patrol presence at visible heavily traveled border crossings. Instead of “a comprehensive law enforcement strategy [that] must be part of our national security strategy,” as Reed describes it, we have an expensive exercise in political theater creating a situation that Reed says is “inherently dishonest, and in today’s world dangerous.”
This obvious undermining of proper border management is the result of determined interest groups which influence both political parties. One such group consists of business interests that want to keep the stream of cheap exploitable labor flowing whether it is legal or not. In fact, the Chamber of Commerce, among others, strongly resists the E-Verify program now ready for operation, a program that would keep track of worker eligibility the way private companies now keep track of your credit card account. Such business interests are supported by backers at the libertarian extreme whose interest in open borders is ideological, the flip-side of statists who want an open border for quite different reasons. There are also some, like the Council on Foreign Relations, that agree with Vicente Fox in calling for open-borders like those of the European Union. Their plan is called the North American Community and one of its elements is the free flow of populations across the border.
Left-wing political groups, immigration advocates and ethnic entrepreneurs see the influx as a way of increasing their client base and thus augmenting their power and influence. The motive of some on the left is eventually altering the nature of the population and thus changing the political culture of the nation in the interest of their own agendas. Labor unions seek new members and Democrat Party operatives want to encourage immigration – for they believe, and the statistics indicate they are correct, that once newcomers become citizens they are far more likely to vote for Democrat rather than Republican candidates. Both sets of open-border interest groups control the two political parties, thus leading to a gap between the electorate that wants border control and a rational immigration policy, and the politicians and their supporters who, for their own disparate reasons, do not.
Thus, both the United States and Mexico have allowed a thriving transnational criminal industry to grow in size and wealth, to expand geographically and to diversify to the point at which the Mexican state is fighting for its life, and to the point that the United States is faced with increasing problems of crime and heightened security risks. The primary duty of government is to protect its citizens from destructive elements both domestic and foreign. If the government refuses or is unable to perform that duty it loses its legitimacy. The United States by refusing to enforce its own law and Mexico by encouraging its citizens to violate the law of its neighbor, have both undermined the rule of law in general and have allowed a lawless zone to emerge on their common border. In that sense, both the United States and Mexico are failed states. Mexico, however, is coming close (and is in some places already arrived) to the condition most usually understood by that term, which brings us back to the Caroline Incident.
Part Five will conclude with a discussion of the historical precedence for military intervention, worst case scenarios, the Colombian example, and the continuing uneasy relations between the U.S. and Mexico.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Glynn Custred is professor emeritus at California State University East Bay (formerly Hayward), a member of the American Anthropological Association and the Association of Borderland Studies.
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