Immigration

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If the purpose of the bill is to open the door to legal immigration, this seems inordinately timid. Immigrants had a shock effect in 1980 because so many of them arrived unexpectedly in so few places. Regular, legal immigration is far less disturbing. If illegal immigration were more effectively limited, an increase in legal immigration might be tolerated; we would have less reason to fear that the situation was out of control. Relative to our current population size, total immigration of 800,000 a year would be one third the rate during the New Immigration; one million would be less than half as much. If immigrants add vigor to our economy and culture, can we not accommodate half as large an alien presence as our grandfathers did?

Still, as many as we choose to admit, more would desire to come. Somehow the flow must be controlled, and there would be no shrinking from the realities that implies. "Controlling immigration" means using the police and military powers of the state to thwart the desires of human beings whose only fault is having been born on the wrong side of a national border. There is no alternative to exercising those powers, but they should be effective and humane. Current practice is neither.

The main burden is placed on the Border Patrol, supplemented by sporadic campaigns by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detect pockets of illegal aliens in garment factories, restaurants, and other employment centers. The tools at the government's disposal are hardly fearsome to most. Although it is a crime to "enter without inspection," the punishment in most cases is deportation. For an immigrant from Nigeria or Korea, this is a serious sanction (and an expensive one for the U.S. government which pays the air fare back home). For Mexicans apprehended at or near the border, it is not. For them, deportation usually means a ride in a Border Patrol bus back to the river, and another attempt the next day.

Although illegal immigrants may be arrested if found in an American workplace, the employer who hires them faces no penalty whatsoever. The immigration code imposes a $2,000 fine or up to five years in jail on anyone who "conceals, harbors, or shields from detection" an illegal alien, but thanks to a clause known as the "Texas proviso," passed at growers' insistence in 1952, hiring an illegal immigrant "shall not be deemed to constitute harboring."

The Census Bureau estimates that 500,000 illegal aliens enter each year. That does not mean that the alien population grows by 500,000 a year, because a large but unknown number come temporarily as sojourners. Researchers from the University of Texas have attempted to estimate the number of Mexicans here illegally by seeing how many people (especially working-age males) disappeared unaccountably from the Mexican population between one Mexican census and the next. They determined that between 1.5 and 4.0 million Mexicans were illegally in the U.S. in 1980, which is a smaller number than has been suggested by "certain non-empirically based speculations on the subject."

Since the illegal immigrants themselves cannot be directly counted, the government pays attention to the things it can count—especially the number of people the Border Patrol manages to stop on the way in. This figure has soared. In 1965, the Border Patrol and the INS located about 110,000 "deportable aliens," mainly through efforts at the border. (The Border Patrol attempts to prevent illegal entry at the border; the INS supervises legal entry there and is in charge of "area control" in cities away from the border.) By 1970, the agencies found more than 320,000, and through the late 1970s they apprehended roughly one million illegal aliens per year, more than 90 percent of them from Mexico. After the peso devaluation of 1982, border stations reported another sharp rise in the number of people apprehended. In the Border Patrol's El Paso sector, for example, the number rose by 33 percent between August of 1981 and August of 1982. Through the first eight months of 1983, apprehensions were well above the 1982 levels.

Such increases reflect the increased pressures driving people out of Mexico and Central America. But the figures are also subject to bureaucratic distortions. As Border Patrol officials are the first to point out, a woman crossing for the day to work as a maid in El Paso looks just the same on the records as a young man from Nicaragua nearing the end of his thousand-mile pilgrimage north. The least significant immigrants—the thousands of day laborers who trudge across the Rio Grande as dawn breaks each day—are the easiest to catch. In border cities like El Paso, the Border Patrol can arrest virtually as many of these casual crossers as it chooses. When political attention is focused on apprehension figures, this is the way to build totals with less effort than is required to break immigrant-smuggling operations or to "cut sign"—that is, to track small bands of intruders through the mountains and desert.

Border Patrol officials also point out that apprehension totals omit the crucial return-migration figure. While visiting border stations in Texas and California late last year, I was told that northward activity might be light. The main flow would be to the south, back home for the holidays.

But even when all the limits to statistical precision have been noted, Border Patrol officials are unanimous in saying that more illegal immigrants are attempting to come. The conventional political wisdom is that the Border Patrol is doomed to impotence in controlling the flow. With 2,000 miles of unfortified border to survey and a total work force of 2,600, no more than 450 of whom are patrolling at one time, the Border Patrol is said to be hopelessly outmatched. "There is not enough money in the federal budget to have the Border Patrol stand arm in arm for 2,000 miles, which is what it would take," says Henry Cisneros, of San Antonio.

My own observations of border patrol activities left me moderately more optimistic about the patrol's potential. Yes, the border is vast, and no, it will never be sealed. When I asked Border Patrol and INS officials in El Paso and San Diego whether a very patient immigrant could be absolutely certain of penetrating, the answer was always yes. As I moved down the hierarchy, I heard increasingly skeptical estimates of how much of the flow was being stopped. The station chiefs and district directors said they thought that their men caught one illegal immigrant in two or three. In the vans patrolling "the line," I heard estimates of one in four to one in eight—and everyone was guessing. The old hands said that new patrolmen had to get used to the idea that it was just a job. You had to go out and serve your eight hours and do what you could. If you thought about all the ones who got through, you would soon burn out.

Nonetheless, it was also clear that the Border Patrol, however porous, made a big difference by its mere presence, much as highway patrolmen affect the speed of traffic even though they could never arrest everyone going over 55. Most of the activity is concentrated in a few well-known areas. Although the E1 Paso sector, second busiest after Chula Vista, south of San Diego, is responsible for 341 miles of border, 86 percent of the illegal entrants it apprehends cross in a ten-mile stretch around E1 Paso.

This is not the same thing as saying that 86 percent of all crossings are made in those ten miles, but it can hardly be surprising that immigration is heaviest in urban areas. In the El Paso sector, where the border arbitrarily divides one large urban population into the American city of El Paso and the Mexican city of Juarez, a Mexican who makes it the first fifty yards in from the border has the hardest part of his journey behind him. Once away from the river, he can mingle in street scenes dominated by Mexican and Mexican-American faces (300,000 of Juarez's one million residents have credentials to cross the border legally every day). The Border Patrolmen pride themselves on being able to pick out illegal immigrants by their dress and demeanor—everyone else will look at a Border Patrol car as it drives by, they say, whereas an illegal immigrant will suddenly stare at a lamp post—but the chances of blending in are better here than in the desert.

Perhaps because all sides realize that so many are getting through, there is a routinized, almost casual air to the Border Patrol's dealings with immigrants in El Paso. As I sat alongside the pilot in a Border Patrol helicopter, he relentlessly tracked a limping Mexican man and two Mexican women carrying string shopping bags, flushing them from a housing development where they attempted to hide, pinning them in a cul-de-sac as a van roared through the streets to apprehend them. The drama and terror of such a moment, or of the nighttime chases on foot through back alleys, seemed lost on the patrolmen—and on their quarry, as well. Each was doing his job; they would probably meet again, in the same way. Five minutes after tracking down the three, the helicopter pilot was chuckling as he buzzed a stocky Mexican man standing knee-deep in the Rio Grande. "We call him the old capitalist," the pilot said of the man, who had his trousers rolled up and was carrying others across the river piggyback. "He keeps regular hours, goes on vacation with his wife. As long as he stays in the river, we can't touch him."

There are higher stakes for both sides in Chula Vista, the busiest part of the border. Fewer of the immigrants are day-crossers. This is the northern terminus of a long migration path up the Mexican interior; a hundred miles farther north lie the incalculable opportunities of Los Angeles. In the Border Patrol's favor, the "line" does not split a city here. For at least a mile north of the border, open fields constitute a no-man's land. From a hilltop with a view of the border, patrolmen spend nights peering through infrared scopes, looking for the bright-green patterns that are would-be immigrants huddling in a riverbed or crawling through the grass. The scopes, originally designed for Army tanks, are probably more effective for the Border Patrol, since its targets can do so little to conceal themselves or to disrupt the Patrol's activities.

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