Bush's Amnesty

Earlier this week, the Tucson Weekly featured a trip taken by Leo Banks along one of the most popular illegal immigrant smuggling routes in southern Arizona. The story, appropriately named "Following the Amnesty Trail", was a decent summary of the problems facing the people who live along the border -- often called a "war zone" in this article and countless others. The article touched on grisly issues of human and drug trafficking, trash, and guns and violence. The rhetoric -- and the message beyond it -- was frightening, culminating in the line "Each Of These Backpacks is a New American." The Americans who live on the border and who see their desert ravaged by illegal entrants really brought out the heart of the politics of the immigration debate.

Interestingly, the Weekly also published "Death, Life, Home", which cast illegal entrants in a positive light by focusing on Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera, a man shot to death by Border Patrol agents as he was trying to reenter the U.S. The story was more of a photo essay that showed what Rivera's hard-earned American dollars did for his Mexican family--it moved them from a one-room shack that was falling down about their ears to a brick establishment with tile in the bathroom. According to the captions, Rivera was visiting his family to see what improvements he'd made, and planned on sending more money from the U.S. to his family at home.

For me, both articles speak the same messages: First, South America's economy, and therefore its people, are in huge trouble, and if people were paid enough money to survive, they would have no reason to come across the border illegally. Second, there are real people with real intentions, bad or good, in the middle of the immigration debate. We have those like Rivera, who are just trying to make a home for their families, but then we also have people like Cindy, who represent the American taxpayer (and border-liver, if that's a term) being hurt in the process. We have smugglers and coyotes who are more motivated by the dollar than anyone crossing, and then we have border patrolers. There are real people being hurt on all sides.

I think it'd be best if we as Americans, in an effort to enforce our borders, started taking care of the people in Mexico in this way: Shut down maquilidoras. Be willing to pay more for our swiss cheese. Restructure NAFTA so that it lives up to its name. Do send more people and money into the border patrol to crack down on human trafficking. Overall, however, remove the market for a human trafficker, period.
They're not easy things to do by any means, nor are they the total solutions, but I think that giving people a reason to stay on their side of the line would be more effective than a fence.