What Price a Secure Border?

America is a nation of immigrants, with a uniquely rich and varied mix of cultures blending to make a complex and flexible whole. Yet American immigration policy has been broken for decades. All efforts at reform have foundered upon the subgroup of Republicans that wishes to clamp down on unauthorized migration from our southern border at all costs, and the genuinely broad, but shallow and ill informed, support for that position.

Much of the dysfunction of our current immigration system comes from the tension between an unwillingness to commit crimes against humanity and an unwillingness to abandon goals that can not be achieved any other way. 

Discussions on immigration through our southern border are constantly obfuscating the key question regarding that immigration. That question is not whether we want to deter and stop unauthorized immigration through Mexico. 

That question is, "What are we willing to do to stop it?" How far are we, as a country, willing to go? 

Human beings are hard to control. The less people have to lose, the more desperate they are, the more extreme the actions you need to take to control them. If we shot everyone who tried to cross our border without authorization, it would doubtlessly reduce the number of people who try to cross. 

Once we determine the limits of what we’re willing to do to deter and stop immigration, if those limits prevent us from achieving the goal of zero unauthorized migration, we logically need to turn to the question of what our other options are. Allowing authorized migration cuts down drastically on unauthorized migration. Given legal options, people prefer them to the illegal. As an illustration, the glitchy and unreliable CBP One smartphone app that the Biden administration rolled out to allow migrants claiming asylum to make appointments for processing caused an enormous reduction in attempted unauthorized crossings. 

What is not realistic is reducing unauthorized immigration by spending more money on additional patrols of the border or imposing harsher penalties on those who try to cross (that are short of inhumane). 

Conservatives and liberals have different values. Immigration conservatives believe that closed borders, i.e. very restricted legal immigration and heavy policing to prevent unauthorized crossing, is a morally justifiable position and beneficial, while liberals believe that it is immoral and detrimental to the national welfare. While these moral distinctions are important and can be debated, focusing on those debates misses the compelling reason the conservative position fails. It’s not relevant who "wins" that complicated moral debate when it obfuscates what kind of profoundly immoral tactics the goals of one side require. The majority of American conservatives are unwilling to tolerate the only possible actions that could achieve their stated policy goals. They are, when push comes to shove, not vicious and brutal enough. So Republican  administrations commit atrocities that, when brought to public attention, horrify even their base. 

Separating kids from their parents. Denying water to people dying of thirst. Pushing young women back into the water of the Rio Grande. Deaths, squalid conditions and inadequate food in detention camps. Yet, absent a commitment to medical care and humane treatment of anyone desperate enough to cross deserts, what else can we expect?

Most voters are not familiar with either the current or historical facts at the border. People mostly decide their immigration policy preferences based on gut instinct and vague feelings, based on what they see in the mass media and hear from their politicians -- which often has very little to do with the facts. 

People who focus on what will happen and how things will turn out are called policy wonks and technocrats and accused of missing the point. However, there is nothing complicated about drawing straightforward conclusions. If the only way to eliminate witchcraft is burning someone at the stake and your voters are not willing to burn someone at the stake, running on a platform of eliminating witchcraft without mentioning burning anyone is deceptive and immoral. 

When we live in a democracy, we are responsible for what we demand our politicians do. We must bring it to voters’ attention what demanding a “secure” border, above and beyond the ways it is currently secured, means. 

There are two fundamental truths that are key to understanding our policy options on the Mexican border. First: a long land border is impossible to completely secure against individual stealth crossings. The total length of the continental border between the United States and Mexico is about 2,000 miles. It is the tenth-longest border between two countries in the world. It will always be possible to sneak through somewhere. People are very inventive and relatively small. One would need 24/7 monitoring of every square foot to prevent this, which is not possible. Second: A person without the ability to feed their kids, or in imminent danger of being killed, will flee. The dangers people are willing to risk are proportional to the threat they are facing. If the threat is certain death there is nothing that will deter them. 

It is instructive to take a look at the history of our management of the Southern border. Towards the end of the 1980s, fear of immigration became a popular political topic. In response, during the last four decades, America eliminated legal programs for Mexican guest workers, increased the number of Border Patrol Officers by 500% and built many miles of very expensive fences and barriers. The barriers prevent large groups of people or vehicles from crossing the border in areas where there is an urban center on the U.S. side, because urban centers are uniquely easy to disappear into. This has predictably pushed those seeking to cross to remote desert regions, which gives Border Patrol Officers more time to track them down and capture them and results in more deaths. Both Republican and Democratic policy makers who had counted on the deterrent of having to cross dangerous remote terrain underestimated the desperation of the people seeking to cross. 

Migrants from Mexico before 1980 were mostly seeking work, desperate to provide for their families, and once they were able to earn sufficient money they chose to return to their families and country. This worked well with the seasonal nature of agricultural work in the U.S. Once crossing the border became more dangerous and expensive, frequent crossings no longer made sense so more migrants settled in the U.S. and had their families join them. 

Since the 1980s we have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into “securing” the southern border. This resulted in a change from the prior circular migration from and back to Mexico into more permanent immigration. The added border security also caused coyote services, professional smugglers, to become more expensive and significantly contributed to organized crime growth in Mexico. 

While frequently suggested and promised as a solution by Republicans, additional fences and barriers are both incredibly costly and difficult to construct due to the geographic terrain, and would need constant monitoring, maintenance and repair to prevent dismantling and sabotage. So conservative politicians who propose more border walls are arguing for spending billions of dollars to build those ecologically ruinous barriers, and then trillions to monitor and repair them. Taking these proposals seriously would mean the Border Patrol would be the largest employer in the country, something nobody cares to point out. No politician dares to make that logical consequence clear - because it sounds ridiculous and no one would support it. Yet, there is no other way to make sure no individual makes it through the 2,000 miles of the border but to turn our currently heavily militarized border into our number-one national priority. All in order to prevent people who just want a future for their children from doing what we and our ancestors have done since the dawn of time. 

Immigrating is a very difficult thing to do. It means leaving a culture and area that you know and are comfortable in, for a new home where you know you will never entirely, wholly, belong. Immigrating to a country with a language you don’t speak fluently means always being cut off from full participation in public life. While there are some small percentage of people (young and single) who are driven to leave seeking novelty, ambition or the love of adventure, even they would prefer to be able to return home. Immigration is traumatic. 

This is why undocumented migration into the U.S. through Mexico was at net zero between 2008 - 2012, with unauthorized entries and exits roughly equal. Conditions in Mexico stabilized and demand for young male unskilled labor decreased with the U.S. recession. 

People are rational and if there is no realistic chance at earning a living in the U.S., fewer people who are driven by poverty will come. The U.S. could easily pass laws that would make employing undocumented immigrants ruinously expensive, by imposing stiff financial penalties on companies that are caught doing so, which would affect demand for that labor. Unlike “securing the border,” this is a straightforward strategy that would have a straightforward effect - the issue is a hypocritical lack of political will to impose significant costs on businesses, not physical impossibility or the difficulty of thwarting human nature. 

In any discussion of illegal immigration in the U.S. it is worth noting that almost half of the "illegal" immigrants in the U.S. are here on overstayed legal visas. There is no mechanism for finding them. Nobody, including conservatives, much seems to care about this group of illegal immigrants. There are no passionate speeches calling for the U.S. to track down and deport these people. Any examination of this discrepancy will point to what really fuels all concern over the southern border crisis: Xenophobia, that very human and persistent impulse, coupled with the equally stubborn human impulses of disgust and fear of the poor. So many of us, from all walks of life, immigrants ourselves, share it. However, when confronted with where that impulse takes us, I believe that most Americans would flinch and choose differently. We must make it clear where the Republican position takes us. 

Immigration at the southern border has climbed back up from net zero. However, it is no longer Mexican citizens who make up the majority of migrants. In 2019 we had a surge of migrants from the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) crossing by land through Mexico, as violence rose in those countries and pushed people to flee. That wave of refugees has also abated with time and we are no longer seeing large numbers of people from those countries. Potential immigrants are not such an inexhaustible supply as many Americans assume, because immigration is difficult and traumatic, and crises fade and countries stabilize. 

Today, most of the would-be immigrants at our southern border are from Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela. People crossing large distances are less likely to be driven by purely economic forces and are much less likely to return home. Domestic political and economic crises have caused people to judge their homes to be so dangerous as to no longer be an option. 

Any immigration policy that doesn’t acknowledge, or is not informed by who is actually coming to our border, and why, cannot possibly be successful because it is not engaging with reality. Who is seeking refuge changes over the years as conditions in other countries, and our own, change. A sensible policy would be to reassess every couple of years who is coming and why. An indiscriminate policy of stopping all comers at all costs is not realistic or moral. 

The U.S. is not alone in its double bind of not wanting refugees but not being willing to shoot them on sight. Europe has struggled in a similar manner with its neighbors. There have been upswells in right-wing nationalism, xenophobia and racism, prison-like refugee camps and many deaths of would-be refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, none of which deters yet more desperate people from trying to reach safety. 

In June of 2023, more than 700 refugees were attempting to reach Italy on an overloaded fishing boat. The boat foundered off the coast of Greece and the majority of them drowned. The Greek Coast Guard has made some contradictory statements about what exactly happened and it’s impossible to know, yet, if they breached their duty to rescue. However, what is clear is the tension within Greece, where a majority does not want to admit any more migrants, no matter how compelling their claims to asylum, but also does not like the idea that their Coast Guard will watch and do nothing as people drown.

People have always fled war and violence and hunger and tried to find hope and a future for their children. That’s how we’ve spread across the Earth as a species. That’s how Jews tried to seek safety during the Holocaust and mostly did not find it, as countries closed their borders and refused shelter. There was a moment in time when Europe and the U.S., having seen the horrors suffered by those thus rejected, acknowledged and enshrined the human right to movement and asylum in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As decades have passed, we’ve reverted back to preferring very much to ignore those rights in favor of our desire to "close" our country's borders. 

The specifics of our asylum rules differentiate between being targeted because of your race or religion (or other belief) and simply living in a violent place where anyone is at risk. But the person afraid for their family’s lives, who has seen people they know get hurt and murdered, does not experience much difference. While we denigrate “economic migrants” as being unworthy of refuge, there is nothing I can imagine as desperate as a parent who cannot feed their child. 

People act rationally based on their situation. When there is no legal pathway to immigrate to earn money for a hungry family, people will pay money to coyotes, who will form organized crime rings, which then prey on border communities. When unaccompanied minors are the only ones who are allowed in because turning away desperate 15 year olds turns our stomachs, desperate families will send their teens to cross by themselves. Fifteen-year-olds, alone and broke, at the border of a country whose language they don’t know is not anyone’s preferred outcome (see news stories about kids as young as 12 employed in dangerous and exploitative working conditions in the U.S.).  

It is primarily climate change, (for which the United States bears enormous responsibility), and violence (some of which we’ve had a hand in fomenting) that are currently pushing people to migrate from Central and South America. That the United States is a beacon of political and economic stability and safety for everyday citizens is America’s greatest strength. America’s shining achievement is our ability to integrate immigrants. Second generation immigrants, no matter where they are from, are fully American, something other countries struggle to replicate. 

America is currently facing a very tight labor market that is limiting our economic growth. We have an economically problematic aging population and declining population growth. We have a significant shortage of labor in the construction industry (as well as in health care and senior care and others) and we need to build more housing as fast as we can. An easy and ethical path forward that is beneficial to all is to welcome those that wish to make their home here and have taken significant risks to do so, after escaping terrible circumstances. Giving legal status to these workers will prevent exploitation and any negative wage pressure. 

People think that if we increased pathways for legal immigration there would be no limit to how many people would want to move to the U.S. This is not true. Most people will not abandon even a small level of comfort for the unknown. All prior waves of immigration have peaked and receded - every prediction over the last 100 years about unstoppable immigration has been wrong. 

More importantly, it is simply a plain fact that if we do not welcome people with a legal pathway, people will try to cross illegally. What shall we do to deter them? Tell them how much we do not want them to come? The much maligned DHS Secretary Mayorkas, Vice President Harris and even President Biden have broadcast this message many times. “Do not come” they say, leaving unspoken, “Stay and die.” Should we keep capturing unauthorized migrants and deporting them to Mexico to try again and again? Put them in concentration camps? 

When Trump started separating children from their caregivers at the border in 2018, inflicting horrific lifelong psychological scarring, deliberately planning not to allow reunification, the nation was sickened. Girls as young as ten were taking care of younger kids ripped out of their caregiver’s arms, in terrible conditions. Yet, that’s still pretty far short of shooting kids on sight. The pictures of the dead toddler with her arm around her dead father’s neck who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande river, took our breath away that year, and not just that of committed liberals. However, those are the entirely predictable consequences of attempting to inflict such pain on migrants that they are deterred from coming. A comfortable majority of U.S. voters don’t like these horrific images and policies. Furthermore, there was a spike in border crossings during Trump’s administration despite all of that. 

Do we really want to make our treatment of hopeful immigrants worse than what Salvadoran gangs offer? Do we want to convince the world, even those in remote villages, that we will treat migrants, human beings, so badly that they are better off taking their chances staying in a failing state?

Only if we acknowledge that we are not willing to mistreat human beings for the crime of wanting to live and feed their families can we then engage in figuring out an immigration policy that will be acceptable to Americans and good for America. Those who are willing to imprison and subject refugees to inhumanity need to stand up and make that argument explicitly, loud and clear. We have had and always will have monsters among us who are willing to inflict any crime against those that are “not us.” 

However, there is a majority that can be led down that path willfully, but unknowingly. Those who, if confronted with the suffering they’ve voted for, will flinch and repent. We must point it out to them, before atrocities are committed, and make the choice clear and stark. There is a range of practical immigration policies that can be implemented. There is a debate that we can have on numbers. However, we must start with a clear commitment one way or another: will we kill the people at our borders? Torture them or imprison them in inhumane conditions? If not, we will not deter repeated, desperate attempts to cross into the United States when conditions in countries adjacent to our neighbors are sufficiently awful. 

Once we acknowledge what can not be done and discard the popular and impossible, we can make a plan to deal with reality. We can ask Republican politicians what their plans truly are once no one is willing to take “I will secure the border” as a serious answer. We can clarify if they mean to emulate Saudi Arabia, where Saudi border guards have killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants, including children, at the Yemen-Saudi border over the last several years. We can see how many Americans are willing to vote for murder. 

Perhaps we can reject crimes against humanity, decisively, as a price that we are not willing to pay. And then, maybe, finally, we can move forward with immigration reform. We could set up a modern, sensible system that’s reasonably fair, reasonably easy to navigate and is a boon both for the desperate people at our border and America.