I neglected to mention that my cover story for the latest edition of The American Prospect is online, about how by not passing comprehensive immigration-reform legislation, Democrats are at risk of losing the Latino vote. If there's one thing I want you to take away from the piece, though, it's the part about border security:
There's a reason for both parties' fixation on securing the border: It's very popular. In a May Gallup survey, 89 percent of Americans deemed border security "moderately" to "extremely" important. In 1993, President Bill Clinton shifted toward more aggressive border enforcement in order to prevent Republicans from siphoning off working-class white voters opposed to illegal immigration. Spending on border-security initiatives with names like Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Hold the Line, and Operation Safeguard went from $750 million in 1993 to $3.8 billion a decade later -- with little effect on migration. Between 1990 and 2007, the population of undocumented immigrants more than tripled from 3.5 million to a high of 12 million.
"Immigration is a Rubik's Cube really; in order to solve the puzzle, you can't just be focused on one side of it," Giovagnoli says. "What we've done is focus exclusively on one side of the puzzle, the interior-border-enforcement side of things."
Enforcement-only advocates have yet to learn the key lesson of the drug war: You can't eliminate a market by making it more illegal; you can only make it more secretive, more dangerous, and more lucrative for those without scruples. Border enforcement is good business for people who make their living by smuggling others across it. (Smugglers increased their average fee from $490 in 1995 to $2,000 in 2004 -- a testament to both the elevated risk of crossing and the amount of business they're doing.) In 2007 political scientists Wayne Cornelius and Idean Salehyan conducted interviews in Mexican communities along the border and found that the U.S.' border-control efforts were "unlikely to create an effective deterrent to unauthorized migration."
Pouring money into border security doesn't stop illegal immigration, which only leads to more demand for border security. The conditions for reforming the immigration system in a manner that allows the government more control and oversight over the migrant labor force are thus never reached. This is the enforcement paradox.
As with so many public-policy issues, we remain focused on the least important but most sensational element.
