Order on the Border

Apparently there are an awful lot of decent Americans who just can't wait for the day to come when we are treated to nightly reports on the evening news of this hole being discovered and that tunnel being found under our shiny new Mexican border fence. Well I can certainly wait, just like I can wait to deal with all of the pressure to weaken Americans’ freedom with national identity schemes, employment regulations, and God only knows what else that will come about when the border fence fails to deliver the security promised by it’s proponents. Exactly what makes these proponents think it will be effective? The last tunnel found, which had been operating for years, was dead in the heart of San Diego, the most secure and fortified part of our southern border.

People like Charles Krauthammer, ordinarily exceedingly thoughtful, cling to the idea of a border fence as if it were some kind of philosopher's stone, magically transforming their tired, ahistorical ideas into gold. Surging through America's right wing is a wave of emotional denial of our impotence in the face of the laws of supply and demand simply doing what they always do. Anti-immigration forces have latched on to this fear of impotence, and are riding it furiously from coast to coast, screaming at the top of their lungs, "the Mexicans are coming, the Mexicans are coming!" all in a desperate plea to Americans to, as Churchill once urged, "Arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time"—against peaceful people seeking to pick our lettuce, clean our toilets, dig our swimming pools, and roof our houses for affordable wages.

For the record, I don’t oppose a southern border fence because of any humanitarian instinct or empathy for illegal Mexican workers, although I do possess both. Nor am I ambivalent about America’s national security. I oppose a fence for precisely the opposite reason, because it will utterly fail to perform as advertised and produce no order whatsoever along our two thousand mile long southern border with Mexico. And that is what’s missing along that border: not razor-wire or raked sand, predator drones or attack dogs; what’s missing on the border is security-producing order. In any permanent security situation, order is a non-negotiable, necessary prerequisite. And our current foreign worker rules have produced an economic disequilibrium so profound that it will thwart any attempt to use the brute-force powers of the state to secure it.

For any attempt to secure our borders to work, we must first correct the situation that has overwhelmed them. We must create rules that are consistent with the economic reality we face on the Rio Grande. By disentangling work visas from citizen-track immigration, we can relieve the economic pressures that prevent us from controlling our borders. It’s 2006, and we now know that our national prosperity is about the efficient creation of wealth, not preventing people from taking jobs. We need to ditch the punitive paradigm which only allows a handful of foreign workers to work specific jobs at specific times of the year and commit to senseless traveling back and forth between the US and Mexico. In it’s place we need to erect a simple, quota-less, renewable admissions system where for a few hundred dollars a Mexican worker can legally live and work in the US for two years. Such a system would quickly end all incentive for any honest Mexican worker to cross the border illegally, making the border patrol-able and any border jumpers easily detectable and apprehend-able. Customs will find itself with a new revenue source, business will find itself with the labor it needs and government will find itself with a new tax base. This isn’t merely the best way to secure America’s southern border, it’s the only practicable way.