Contentions
The Left Is Not Serious About Border Enforcement
09.01.2015 - 2:30 PM In the Summer of Trump, curtailing illegal immigration has become a much more important issue for Republican voters and candidates alike than it was only a few months ago. Following Trump’s lead, the GOP’s 2016 field has begun to satisfy their voters’ desire for tougher immigration rhetoric and policy. This is a virtue. Donald Trump is not capable of putting any policy meat on the bare-bones bombast that has typified his candidacy, but other candidates with the requisite faculties and expertise are starting to float smart reforms to immigration law enforcement. While the arguments that contend Trump’s rise has been wholly unproductive for the GOP are compelling, his candidacy has yielded one substantial good. A welcome side effect of this renewed focus on border security has been to uncover the extent to which the left regards almost any enforcement of American immigration laws as anathema.
When conservative immigration hawks incautiously accuse their ideological opponents on both sides of the aisle of being “open borders” activists, they are doing actual open borders activists a grave disservice. On the left, there is a semi-legitimate school of thought that contends extreme poverty is the primary force motivating émigrés to seek refuge in the developed world. Therefore, the dissolution of those borders would level the global playing field and reduce the incentive to cross the border illegally. They’ve diagnosed the problem but have utterly bungled the prescription.
Illegal immigration would dry up tomorrow if America were no more the land of wealth and opportunity than Honduras, but no one on the right has argued in favor of this outcome. American political discourse is best served not by misrepresenting the contentions of those who have differing immigration proposals but by dissecting and evaluating those plans’ distinctions. Donald Trump’s supporters are right to contend that he has focused the minds of the 2016 GOP field on the issue of illegal immigration, for good or for ill. In response to this inducement, Republican presidential aspirants have come out with varyingly hawkish immigration enforcement proposals of their own.
On Sunday, Scott Walker was asked about his record as a border state governor on the nation’s northern edge. Walker said New Hampshire voters, enamored with Trump’s proactive approach to securing the border with Mexico, who wanted to build a wall on the Canadian border, too, had approached him. “That is a legitimate issue for us to look at,” Walker said. It’s not — not really. The geography along the Southern border makes building an unbroken wall prohibitive, and the 5,525-mile Canadian border wall would be a similarly extortionate project both in terms of logistics and the expense to taxpayers. Walker was, however, addressing a perfectly valid issue: illegal immigration into the United States via the Canadian border is no myth.
The national security threat posed by a porous northern border is a real and growing one, according to both the Government Accountability Office and President Barack Obama’s former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Alan Bersin. “We have had more cases where people who are suspected of alliances with terrorist organizations, or have had a terrorist suspicion in their background – we see more people crossing over from Canada than we have from Mexico,” Bersin told a Senate panel in 2011. In 2000, an Algerian national was arrested and accused of plotting to infiltrate the United States through the Canadian border in order to attack Los Angeles International Airport.
“There are vulnerabilities along the U.S.-Canada border, and the government has worked to improve security there in recent years,” The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley observed. She noted that current Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske recently conceded “there are instances of potential terrorists trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada, but they are rare.” Those who do cross the border into the United States from Canada are more likely to do so via its porous and poorly policed waterways, particularly those leading into Michigan. Suffice it to say, border security in the north is a legitimate concern.
“Legitimacy might be in the eye of the beholder,” quipped a snide Amber Phillips in the Washington Post. She noted that, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2013 data, “A U.S.-Canada wall would save immigration agents from having to arrest 822 Canadians (compared to 424,978 Mexicans).” Philips is citing data pertaining to the nationality of the individuals detained and deported, not the border over which they crossed into the United States. U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 3,338 people attempting to enter America illegally across that over 5,000-mile long border in 2014 alone. “Needless to say, we’re not going to be talking seriously about a northern border wall any time soon,” Phillips condescendingly remarked. If the case against Walker must be massaged to delegitimize his claims, is there really a case to be made?
Walker isn’t alone in seeking novel and effective ways of enforcing American immigration law. Of the 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States, an estimated 40 percent of those did not cross over a border but entered the country legally and overstayed a visa. Not much is known of this group of immigrants, but a 2013 study revealed that they were much better educated and often had a stronger command of the English language than those who cross over from Mexico. Majorities of them are also not of Central American descent but are of Asian and European origins. To address this challenge, Chris Christie has advocated for the adaptation of tracking technology pioneered by firms like Federal Express to monitor and deport those who overstay their visas.
As if on cue, those on the left who appear to oppose any border enforcement at all began to attack this plan as “dehumanizing,” insulting to Hispanics, and possibly a violation of the Constitution. Don’t think too hard about how an immigration enforcement plan that primarily targets Chinese and Indian visa overstays “dehumanizes” Latinos, nor whether this plan would in practice lead to the implantation of subcutaneous GPS tracking chips for foreign workers or students. Christie has not fleshed out his proposal in broader terms, and he surely must. The speed with which his proposal was denounced, however, exposes the left’s antipathy toward the enforcement of any immigration law.
The alternatives to Christie’s proposal floated in the press were equally galling. “Some say the federal government could address the problem by sending visa holders text messages when their stay is ending and by recording their departures from all ports and border crossings,” Reuters reported. Is that a joke? The upwards of 4 million illegal visa overstays did not violate the terms of their residency by accident. They are not in need of a gentle reminder to kindly self-deport via text message; they are in need of policing. Christie is the only candidate that has even floated a proposal to do so that does not require massive new federal spending or regulatory powers.
The only permanent antidote to illegal immigration is to reduce incentives. That can only be achieved by first fostering economic development in those countries sending immigrants across the border, in the way that free trade agreements have substantially reduced the number of Mexican immigrants crossing into the United States from its 2007 peak (more border crossers originate from Central American nations than Mexico). The other prong of this approach will have to be a robust and realistic enforcement regime. The left’s over-the-top displays of effrontery and indignation at the very suggestion that American immigration laws should be enforced puts them on the wrong side of the American public.
For much of the summer, political observers have been contemplating the notion that Donald Trump had set a trap for the GOP field similar to the one that sprung on Mitt Romney in 2011. Maybe this time, the trap is on the other foot.
Mr. Rothman is completely mistaken when he says that no one on the Right has proposed measures to level the playing field. I for one have incessantly called for negotiating for the free movement of labor in the countries in the Western hemisphere with which we have free trade agreements–NAFTA and CAFTA specifically. Those negotiations would include the right for businesses to pay labor what they deem appropriate. In Mexico, for example, the “minimum wage” law in practice is a “maximum wage” law, meaning that businessmen control politicians to stop their competitors from raising wages to attract better workers, so Mexicans are condemned to a sort of peasant status indefinitely. No wonder they want to immigrate. Why do Mexican truckers have to stop at the boerder and unload? Because the Teamsters got the Democrats to block them driving in the US under NAFTA–a complete absurdity. Not even the most simple, logical, and reasonable allowances for free movement of labor. Democrats won’t even consider that, and Republicans are silent on that issue. And Mr. Rothman is a johnny come very lately in his failure to recognize that such as myself have been calling for exactly what he advocates here for 20 years. Just because no one will listen and no one wants to listen, does not mean such ideas have not been advocated by the Right. He can check out one of my posts in the comments section under BretStephens article in the WSJ today. Stop misrepresenting, Mr. Rothman. You are completely wrong on this point. I sent an article on exactly this point the the American Spectator years ago–which refused to even acknowledge the submission, of course. Cut the calumny. Learn something about what Conservatives actually think. By comparison, I presented a proposal to the Texas Medical Association on a Universe first party payor system (eg Medical Savings Accounts) over 20 years go, which was exactly the proposal that Ben Carson made at the national prayer breakfast. Just because the Beltway and Eastern Establishment commentariat has no idea what is going on doesn’t mean that they should keep making false statements like Mr. Rothman’s here.