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1987 to 1991. My father was stationed at Yuma Marine Corps Air Station, and you can bet that the Marines and La Migra interfaced on a highly regular basis - Posse Comitatus does not apply to border situations. Lived from 1985 to 1998 within 100 miles of the border, but for those four years, we were ten minutes from a border that could have gone bonkers at any time (and did - the peso crashed in 89). Honestly, there's no place in the US that I've ever felt safer.
Gang violence does not come from Mexico. First generation Mexican immigrants consider the whole street gang thing to be bullshit. Most of the gang members I have known (and I've known a decent number, since a lot of them were my clients after they got in trouble and were required to get counseling as a part of their probation/parole) were subsequent generation, or were brought to the US as very small children and grew up in American culture. The sociological reason for gang involvement is equal parts alienation from the conflicting cultures (Anglo America doesn't appreciate the child of Mexican immigrant parents, while Hispanic culture doesn't consider the American born or raised children of immigrants to be really Mexican) and rebellion against those conflicting cultures. There's a strong cultural imperative among young Hispanics to exclude their parents from their lives and to form peer groups that exert communal control rather than accepting control from the community elders. Without access to the generational knowledge, and in a community that does not value education and does not have access to decent work, the youth communities turn to crime and each other to support themselves. The elders withdraw further from their children, in both fear of outside consequences such as an immigration violation, and in personal fear of the youth community's violence. Thus, the cycle perpetuates. This is not a new pattern - Irish and Italians notably followed it during their own immigrations - but since Central American immigration has not cycled as European immigration did, there has not been a chance for intra-communal correction, as the youth community ages and matures.
And unlike the native-born, urban African American community, Hispanic culture has never placed any positive emphasis on family planning and reproductive control. Since the parent culture is still strongly agrarian and religious in cultural emphasis (even if not in reality) and early and frequent reproduction has an economic benefit in that culture, the generational progression from large families with little education to small, carefully planned families with a high standard of education has not happened with immigration. Historically, by the third or fourth generation, immigrant families assimilated and adopted education and smaller family size as economically beneficial. This has not yet happened with the Central American communities, in part because the alienation of the youth peer-group from the elder group is encouraging a separatist community rather than an assimilationist one. (But keep in mind that these separatists are usually American Citizens and almost always native born. They nearly always straddle the cultural line between American Mass culture and Central American immigrant culture.)
From what I've read of other people who work in the mental health system and the social work system, gang involvement in other areas tends to the same pattern - it's not the first generation Haitian, Jamaican, Irish, Parsi, Nigerian, Iranian, Indian or Ivorian immigrants who take up with the gangs - it's their children, and it all stems back to the sense of dual cultural alienation and racism. (Some data on gang involvement can be found in Freakanomics, by Levitt and Dubner, while the influences of immigration on gang membership are being documented in most of the sociology journals in the country.)
So... on to drugs. Most of the drugs consumed in the US are produced in the US - prescription abuse, meth and pot are numerically where the poundage (and the money) is. (DEA numbers are published every year, but rarely get read.) Coca primarily comes in via water, so Florida, the Gulf Coast and Texas, and opiates come in from the West Coast. Mexico is not nearly the drug danger that the DEA would have us believe it is. (If they'd stop inflating their numbers so dramatically, maybe they'd be more believable.) The drugs come in in container ships for the most part, and 99.5% of all containers are never inspected. If their paperwork is accurate, why bother? There is no way to get the manpower to inspect every single container that comes in through the Ports of Long Beach and Norfolk alone, without putting shipping at a standstill. So as long as we Americans are willing to import carefully bubble-wrapped, washed pebbles from China and vacuum wrapped cushions from Pakistan, we are going to import coca and heroin.
If I have approximately $300,000, I can set up a single ship shipping company, buy a container ship, flag it out of Liberia, and hire a Southeast Asian crew to run it. As long as my paperwork is accurate, that ship is unlikely to be bothered, and it's cheap to keep the paperwork accurate. (In other words, it would not be much of a problem for a determined terrorist to import nasty things in the hold of a container ship - if they play by the rules, they're likely to be waved through. If we don't want bad shit coming in, we have to Stop. Importing. Shit. And that's just not likely to happen any time soon. (For more info on sea trafficking and container imports, please read The Outlaw Sea, by William Langeweische. For information on estimates of drug importation and policies as well as information about the economics of undocumented labor, try Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser.)
As long as there are employers willing to exploit people who are willing to work outside of the laws, there will be illegal labor. If employers can't hire undocumented workers, they will hire the young (who don't know enough to fight back), deny overtime or force people to work off the clock, put everyone on salary and force a 40+ X work week, force those on what passes for welfare who are forced by law to work 40 hours a week for minimum wage (who will work to make sure their kids still have access to a bare minimum level of food, shelter and health care) doing jobs that should be paid far better (calling it "Training Wages") , or those willing to try to cheat the system and work off the books. They already do this - I've seen every one of these violations in the low end of the service sector. It will just get more common.
Illegal labor doesn't go away because you take the undocumented workers away - business just shifts to some other form. As long as there is an incentive to cut labor costs and there are few risks or punishments in doing so (Labor law enforcement is one of the weakest areas of federal law enforcement) business will do so. (If you really want to end illegal labor, then cracking down on those that hire illegal workers is far more effective than trying to limit the supply of undocumented workers. But the latter are much easier to attack, because they don't make campaign contributions.) And as long as there are employers willing to pay for undocumented labor, there will be people willing to risk their lives for the offered dollars, and others willing to convey them here, no matter what the risk is. I've seen people walk across that desert, and I've seen people hauled out of there, raving from dehydration. Making it harder doesn't stop anyone... it just wastes more lives. Punish those who make it profitable, not those who are willing to take the money.
Every terrorist who has attacked an American target since the end of World War I was either here legally, admitted legally and overstayed, known to have entered the country and was under legal supervision, or was a citizen. None of those who have intentionally tried to damage us ever came in without our knowledge. (wikipedia, US terrorist incidents.) Poor Mexicans looking for a crap job mowing lawns and washing shirts so that they can send a few bucks home to keep their kids in school are not setting bombs in federal buildings or taking flight lessons in Florida. Irish illegals are driving hacks and delivering pizzas in New York and Boston. If you're gonna be undocumented, the very last thing you want to do is make purchases that are going to catch the Feds' eyes (like fertilizer) or get involved in something that would bring you to the attention of La Migra. There is a microscopic minority of people who are still annoyed over the Mexican American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsen Purchase; most of these are in Mexico, and want the treaties rescinded so they can claim LA and Houston. (There's a part of me that wants to give them back Texas, but only if they agree to take Bush, too.)
And on the subject of passports: Look at the situation in the USSR between the 1917 Revolution and Perestroika. In theory, everyone could get a passport, and in fact, everyone had to have an "internal passport", or identification. But to get a real passport, that would allow for overseas travel, one had to be a Party Member and be descended of Party members; one had to have an excess of spare money to pay for "service", a lot of time to deal with the bureaucracy, and get approval to get the paperwork to apply for a passport. Effectively, only the rich and the well connected had access to documentation. If your parents were capitalists, too bad. If you criticized the local Party boss where someone could hear, so sorry. If you refused to pay the "service fees" above and beyond what was legally demanded, go chase yourself. Once you had the passport (not something any intellectual, social critic, non-communist, or member of a necessary profession was likely to get), you had to obtain an exit visa, and unless you were a spotless party member with an impeccable set of references, getting out was not going to happen. The same was true in most of the totalitarian countries, whether fascist or communist in ideology.
We're not there yet, but we're close, and closing a border makes it all the easier to slap exit visas into place. Right now, Americans can be fined or arrested for going to no-go countries, and Cuba very kindly does not stamp American passports. (I don't know about the other 25 no-gos; I know a Hemingway researcher who has been to "Mexico" a few times.) When I went to Russia while I was in college, I was grilled on exit and re-entry (I'm an historian. I didn't and don't give a fuck about communism - I was interested in medieval documentation.) That was in 94, when international terrorism was something that happened elsewhere. I can't imagine what hoops I'd be jumping through now. I was and am legal - I was not going anyplace that was forbidden, I was going for legitimate and legal research purposes, and I was not politically active at the time. There was no reason for any suspicion of me - but I got it.
I'm thinking about old people who cross the border to buy their meds - or their food; show riders who go to Algodones to have saddles made; students who go to get dental work done. In the name of protection of the drug industry (which has more money than I can even dream of), an exit visa system could easily be sold to Americans. Gotta keep an eye on *X*. We get scared and dumb enough to buy it. (We bought the PATRIOT Act, remember?) And once you sell that type of system, then who gets to go becomes a system of privilege.
I see this as a very slippery slope... When it becomes okay to make travel difficult, the next easy step is to make certain travel impossible, or to make certain people ineligible for travel. We're doing that now - no-go countries, Watch Lists, and freezing bank accounts and seizing property on suspicion, not conviction. And the next step is to prevent those "difficult" types from crossing state, town or county borders. And it all sells in the name of safety and protection. We Americans may be individually smart and fair, but collectively, we're as dumb and prejudiced as the biggest idiot with the loudest voice.
I don't want to cross borders illegally. I just want to continue to be able to cross them, and I've seen too many places where it hasn't been possible to travel to feel comfortable letting a government as inept as this one try to keep others out and me in.
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