In the frustrating economic transition we're slogging through, politicians are prone to lunge for a vulnerable target to focus public anger away from themselves. It's becoming apparent this political season that illegal immigrants may be getting the political short straw.
Some of the rhetoric in the current election has already gone past what is just and decent to say about another human being in the United States regardless of how they got here. It will get worse unless ordinary people demand decent and rational debate about the issue.
It's simple and popular (do one of those things ever show up without the other in American politics) to scream for a better fence and troops along the Mexican border. However, the 9-11 terrorists didn't swim the Rio Grande. The Christmas underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber didn't march through the desert of Arizona either. A single minded focus on the Mexican border misses of lot of what is necessary to secure access to the United States, which in our modern age covers a lot of places nowhere near our physical borders.
It has been estimated that an iron curtain type barrier between Mexico and the United States would require 100,000 guards, five times the 20,000 border patrol agents on the job there today.
That is as many troops as we have in Afghanistan. We have no troops to spare.
The very people complaining loudest are often the same people violently protesting the effort to upgrade our national identity system. Federal requirements to upgrade the patchwork of state ID systems has been resisted by conservatives. There is no comprehensive reliable list of American Citizens and identifying data for them compiled. Eight years after 9-11, we don't know who belongs in the United States today and who doesn't. The social security system was never designed for this purpose. Police are often unable to identify the people they arrest.
Many of us remember the breaches in security that allowed some SC DMV offices to become night and weekend fake ID factories a few years ago. An audit of the Bush era computer system used to clear people for employment had a 50 percent failure rate.
A fancy fence and a huge show of force on the Mexican border will get people elected and look like action, but it won't solve the problem. A superficial, draconian crackdown will drive 10 million people underground, providing a place for crime to hide among frightened people who won't communicate with the police. It's most likely to catch illegal immigrants who are working and paying taxes.
We need thoughtful, comprehensive immigration reform. Everyone in the United States needs to be enrolled in a reliable identification system so we know who is here and so everyone can pay their taxes. Then we have to take the difficult step or sorting out who should be allowed to begin the journey towards citizenship and who needs to be returned to their country of origin, an issue which will provoke heated debate.
We have to enforce laws against employing illegal workers and make sure the advantages gained by doing so are eliminated.
Reviving the iron curtain on our Southern border won't resolve our problems. For over 20 years the United States has been unable to deal with the reality that we need some labor and immigration from Mexico, but that it needs to be limited, regulated and fair.
It's more complicated than guards and a fence.
(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On Village.)