Fencing with fellow liberals

B.S. detection, Topic B.

An immigration-lawyer friend of mine recently pointed out that even a good liberal like Eric Alterman [1] has fallen for a very dangerous bit of right-wing propaganda: that America needs a fence along the Mexican border:

Personally, I support a fence. The current system encourages the horrific abuses that take place against immigrants attempting to sneak in. Naturally, I support allowing generous numbers of immigrants into this country, but I support doing so legally, first and foremost. I also think it encourages contempt for the law, which is a net negative in any society. (I also support the legalization of pot for the same reason.) And certainly any nation has the right to determine to whom it wishes to grant citizenship.

Alterman writes in a spirit of hard-headed humanitarianism, tough but fair. And I see nothing wrong with that spirit. But he conversely presumes nothing but gauzy sentimentality on the part of the idea's opponents--

If a fence is the best way to enforce those choices, well, then, why not? For symbolic reasons? I don't care about "symbolic reasons." I care about reality.

--and this proves nothing more than my adage that if you want to be a corrective, the first thing you have to be is correct. Alterman is very, very wrong about the "reality." Some awfully fine citizens of the Reality Based Community have demonstrated just how wrong using very sound scholarly methods.

Read the work of Belinda Reyes of UC - Merced. She demonstrates in this [2] paper that the more money we spend on law-enforcement solutions to guarding the border, the longer undocumented immigrants stay in the United States. The immigration debate has made us stupid, and you may slap yourself on the head for not thinking of this yourself but: higher fences and more cops along the border don't just make it harder for people to get in; it makes it harder for them to get out. Enforcement expenditures tripled between 1992 and 2001. A 1992 survey showed that 20 percent of the unauthorized migrants who moved to the United States returned to Mexico within six months. "By 1997, this portion had declined to 15 percent. By the time of the Mexican 2000 Census, only 7 percent of those who moved 24 months before the survey returned to Mexico wihtin the first six months and only 11 percent had returned within a year."

People who want to get into the United States, as is well-known, will show extraordinary determination to do it. Why won't any fence stop them? One reason, while we're on the subject of reality--slap your head again, because this is obvious, too--is because the portions crossing water will have to be broken up to allow debris to pass through. Or else your fence becomes, well, a dam.

Getting out of a rich country to travel back to the poor one you came from takes a bit less motivation. The more cops, the more barbed wire, the more watchtowers there are to catch you for having broken the law for getting into the United States in the first place, the more likely you are to shrug your shoulders and not bother.

Responsible people who actually live on the border--the local governments who the fence law stipulates, logically enough, have to be consulted on the fencing’s “exact placement”—understand that it's the fence's proponents, not its critics, have taken leave of reality. That is why, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported [3], “Every single mayor from Brownsville to El Paso” thinks the fence is a bad idea.

If the proposed new fence is built, America will spend as much on immigration control as it does on NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, or the Environmental Protection Agency. So why do Republicans propose it? I suspect they are ignorant, or they are demagogues. Either way, they don't need liberals' aid and comfort.

It's very tempting to accuse liberals of thinking of their hearts instead of their heads without doing the research. Eric Alterman is a very smart man who shares my ideological interests, and I wouldn't be surprised if he finds his own research to support his position. I look forward to reading it. But he hasn't yet. Let's keep the dialogue going.