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    Latin Leaders Balk at US "Wall"
    By Danna Harman
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Monday 27 March 2006

The proposed 700-mile barrier is to be a big issue at Thursday's North American summit.

    Nogales, Mexico - Some envision a wall. Others, a fence - or even a "virtual" fence of cameras, lighting, and sensors along the US-Mexican border. Whatever form it will take, the US is discussing, planning, and, in some places, already building it - much to the fury and frustration of neighbors south of the border.

    As Mexican President Vicente Fox prepares to meet Thursday with President Bush and Canada's new prime minister, Stephen Harper, in Canc n, the proposed 700-mile, $2.2 billion barrier is a major point of contention - not just for the US and Mexico, but for the US and the whole region.

    Regional leaders - whose countries in 2004 received some $45 billion sent home from immigrants in the US - have met three times recently to discuss how best to oppose it.

    "At a moment when relations between the US and Latin America are at their lowest point since the end of the cold war, this fence proposal is viewed as a terrible affront," says Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

    "It is hard to imagine any other symbol that more strongly reinforces the image of the "ugly American" and is more sharply at odds with the "good neighbor" concept."

    It's not just the barrier, but other issues as well in proposed US immigration reform legislation that irk regional leaders and caused hundreds of thousands of people to protest in multiple US cities over the past few days.

    The US Congress passed a tough immigration bill in December that would make it a felony for illegal immigrants to be in the US, impose new penalties on employers who hire them, and erect a fence along one-third of the border's total length.

    At present, just over 80 miles of federally enforced barriers and fencing are erected at strategic points on the border, mainly in Texas and California.

    This week, the Senate will debate a comprehensive bill that is expected to include guest-worker provisions and avenues for legal residency, while at the same time beefing up border security. So far, a draft of the bill calls only for expanding and reinforcing fencing in Arizona - the border state with the most illegal immigration traffic - and adding 200 miles of vehicle barriers there, but more extensive fencing elsewhere is still under discussion.

    "No country that is proud of itself should build walls," Fox told reporters when he last met Bush one year ago, and a month after the House began talks on approving a fence. "[I]t doesn't make any sense."

    Since then, as the debate has continued in the US over what kind of fence is needed and where, Fox has called the proposal everything from "stupid" and "discriminatory" to "shameful," and heralded illegal migrants as "heroes" who will in any event find ways to cross the border.

    Last year 1.2 million illegal immigrants were apprehended by the border patrol as they tried to cross into the US, and it is frequently estimated that close to the same number make it. Last year was also a record year for deaths. In 2005, 473 would-be immigrants died en route, many victims of thirst, heatstroke, exhaustion, or exposure when they tried to cross less carefully guarded desert areas.

    Currently, 11.5 million to 12 million illegal immigrants live in the US, according to estimates in a report released this month by the Pew Hispanic Center. Of these, an estimated 6.2 million, or 56 percent, are Mexicans. Another 2.5 million, or 22 percent of the total, come from other Latin American countries.

    The money these people send home is vital to the region's economy. In 2005, legal and illegal immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean sent home $45 billion in remittances, double the total of a decade earlier, according to the Social Outlook 2005 report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a UN regional body. Mexican workers alone sent home a record $17 billion.

    So while Fox might be the regional leader most concerned with, and vocal about, US immigration policy - he is far from the only one.

    Spearheaded by Mexico, and galvanized by the fence proposals, foreign ministers and other top officials from Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama as well as Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic met March 15 in Guatemala and vowed to coordinate their lobbying efforts against the US bill if it should pass in the Senate.

    Guatemalan Vice President Eduardo Stein, in turn, called the bill "an affront to Latin America by a government that claims to be our partner, but which apparently only wants our money and our merchandise, and that sees our people as an epidemic."

    This was the third time representatives from these 11 countries have gathered to discuss the US bill. In early January, they convened in Mexico City and put out a joint statement saying that "incomplete measures that only involve the stiffening of immigration policies do not represent an integral solution for dealing with the challenges posed by the phenomenon of migration."

    In February, the group met again in Cartegena, Colombia, and devised a plan to identify key US senators to reach out to on the issue. Both the Mexican parliament and the five- nation Central American Parliament have condemned the proposed fence and are calling on the Senate to throw it out.

    "Our message is that we are your neighbors, we are your friends. This is a common challenge," Carlos de Icaza, Mexico's ambassador to the US, told reporters in Washington last week. "And we are part of the solution, not only part of the problem."

    --------

    Ms. Harman is Latin America correspondent for the Monitor and USA Today.

Editor's Note: This is a slightly edited version of a story originally posted Sunday on MarcCooper.com.

    Go to Original

    Immigration Reform in Living Color
    By Marc Cooper
    Alternet.org

    Monday 27 March 2006

The half-million protesters who flooded Los Angeles this weekend are a glaring sign that Washington needs a rational immigration policy - not more walls and fences.

    Saturday saw the largest political demonstration in the history of Los Angeles, and one of the biggest in recent American history.

    A half-million people or more flooded two dozen blocks of downtown L.A. to give voice to some sort of rational, realistic immigration reform.

    For some months now I have been warning readers that the immigration issue would break wide open this season - and here it is in full living color. Similar demonstrations the past couple of weeks drew a hundred thousand or more in Illinois, more than that in Denver and tens of thousands in Phoenix and other cities. Similar protests are scheduled through April 10 as the U.S. Senate begins formal debate on reform this coming Tuesday. (If you have fallen behind in this story you can catch up by reading one of my overview stories here or here.)

    I'm struck by several aspects of this story. Primarily by the way neither party can properly get a hold of this issue. Demographics and global economics are simply racing ahead of any practical political response. The Republicans are deeply divided over the issue. Even as the half-million or so were marching in the streets Saturday, President Bush was on the radio more or less endorsing the protestors' two key demands: that a legal channel be created for the immigration already happening and that some legal acknowledgement be given to the 12 million "illegals" already living here. Viva Bush!

    The Democrats are less divided and generally more inclined toward reform. But can you name even two prominent national Democrats who have taken up this cause in a serious way? (One is Ted Kennedy who along with John McCain has co-authored the most sensible reform proposal currently under consideration).

    As I have argued previously, what we are currently experiencing is the greatest wave of cross-border migration in recorded history - a virtual "exodus" of millions from a failed Mexican economy and into a country where the wage level is 10-20 times higher. Politicians can only come up with after-the-fact gestures but policy itself (and walls and fences) will do little to nothing to alter the flow.

    My otherwise smart guy friends, Mickey Kaus and Bill Bradley have surely gone off the deep end on this one. They both conjecture that these giant marches, full of Mexican flags and Mexicans chanting 'Mexico! Mexico!' are inviting a virulent nativist backlash. They point to increased voter turn-out in favor of the restrictive Prop 187 in California after a similar (and smaller) protest march in 1994. That was then. This is now.

    The current situation is not analagous to 1994. There is no hot-button ballot prop up for a vote this season. And the nativist backlash is already here. The media suck-up to the miniscule Minuteman show of a year ago established an ugly frame for the national debate. The House has already acted in a toxic manner when last December it passed an outrageous and impossible-to-implement measure that would make all illegals (and their employers) into felons. While that bill will not become law per se, the Senate is considering some measures almost as Neanderthal.

    It seems to me that when an entire population - who, after all, cleans our offices, cuts our lawns, serves our food, makes our beds, tends to our children and pays taxes but gets no refunds - is threatened with criminalization they have the right and necessity to politically mobilize. It's asking them a lot, don't you think, to remain silent and impassive as their arrest and deportation are actively being debated?

    One other point: the white backlash of 1994 was immediately followed by a counter-backlash. An enraged and energized Latino constituency accelerated its entrance into citizenship and onto the voter rolls and within four years it steamrollered the California GOP - a flattening from which California Republicans may never recover.

    So while the grumbling Archie Bunkers might get their ya-yas all worked up by the Mexican flags flapping in Saturday's demos, you can be damn sure that the smarter among Republican strategists looked at the size of those protests with some trepidation. Many of those in the rally were legal, or have legal relatives or if illegal might soon be legal. And they just didn't look to be likely Republican voters.

    Bradley is one of the smartest analysts around when it comes to California state politics (and he's a good friend) but, I have to say his reaction to these marches border on the phantasmagorical. He went out of his way to title his report "The Pro-Illegal Immigration Rally in Los Angeles" and asks if it was "really necessary" to stage such a provocative rally. It's the wrong question, of course. This wasn't a staged campaign event or some tightly orchestrated TV photo op. While the demos certainly have leaders and organizers, and while the Mexican flags were certainly politically gratuitous, it seems quite obvious that when you bring out a half-million people you've tapped into something quite organic, some self-propelling force way beyond the control or shaping of a few professional organizers. So it hardly matters if it was necessary or not because - like illegal immigration itself - it happened anyway. It was a rather natural reaction to the shut-the-borders demagogy that's been ventilating for the pas couple of years.

    Another not so minor point. Bradley argues that these rallies "enable" people who have "broken the law" to continue breaking the law. Well, no, not exactly. People who have entered the U.S. improperly and who stay here have, in fact, not violated any criminal statutes but are instead in violation of civil codes - even though they are commonly called "illegals."

    Any of these illegals, if arrested on immigration grounds, are not tried by a criminal court and are, in fact, denied standard due process. Bradley should spend a day in Federal Immigration Court and watch how these "illegals" are deported without as much as the right to a court-provided lawyer. As violators of civil codes, they are cast out and often their families are broken apart with no more process than the DMV revoking a driver's license.

    Indeed, these protests have been sparked to a great degree by the so-called Sensenbrenner bill that would in the future make the "illegals" really illegal by making them criminal felons. It's a distinction worth five or ten years in jail that Bradley is blurring.

    Bill, my friend, you've got it bass-ackwards. This was a rally in favor of legal immigration. It called precisely for a way for immigrants who are otherwise already absorbed into our economy and society to be granted the minimal status that they obviously merit. To defend illegal immigration no protest would be necessary - you would need only defend the status quo.

    My arguments against the sort of simplistic and anachronostic mode of parsing this issue which we glimpse in Bradley's post is well explained in the articles I linked to above - so no need to rehearse them here. What some people don't get is that we have already been cracking down on the border for more than a decade and there's a reason why it has so miserably failed. It's about as futile as engaging in prayer dances to stop earthquakes or invoke rain storms.

    The only argument we - as a nation of immigrants - can make against the current migratory wave is that our grandparents and parents came here legally so why don't Jose and Maria do the same? Well, America of 2006 is not the America that my family came to in 1915 (and when they came they also pushed aside better-paid longer-term residents and citizens). Our work force is vastly older and immensely better educated and skilled than even fifty years ago. The industrial revolution which was roaring ahead a century ago has given way, unfortunately, to a service economy. Barring Mexicans from coming across the border is not going to magically re-open shuttered car and tractor factories. On the contrary, if you could even plausibly tamp down the inflow, you would only increase the out-migration of American business.

    Our national economy easily absorbs and desperately needs about a million-and-a-half immigrant workers per year to grow and compete. We let a million of them come in legally. The other half million we make run and dart across the border at cost of great peril.

    Our reality has outstripped our laws - and our way of framing the issue. In the end, it will make little difference who prevails in this year's debate as nothing will change on the ground - backlash or not. it's a little like debating the tides. Meanwhile, someone throw my pal Bill Bradley a rope. He's waded in at high tide and has sunk in up to his neck.