The folly of fortresses

„We were eight Mexican peasants, one smuggler and me - desperately stretched out in dirt furrows in the night. The Border Patrol helicopter with its huge searchlight kept coming closer. It stopped, hovered and turned the other way. »Madre«, whispered Pablo, who at 17 was the youngest among us. We took off running, then crawling past a parked Border Patrol jeep that was so close you could hear the patrol officers as they booked a group they had caught. Finally, two hours after squirming under a fence in Tijuana, we were running down empty streets in San Ysidro, Calif., to a safe house and America.

This was in 1977, and I retell the story from my days as a reporter to make three points as Congress, moving with surprising speed, is sending the president $600 million in emergency border enforcement funding. One is that the border will never be »sealed«, as some want. Two is that »enforcement first«, which Republican legislators are demanding, has already happened. Three is that illegal immigration won't stop until there is a temporary worker program and those already here have been legalized. The funding provides for 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents and more drones, sensors, legal infrastructure and the like.

The legislation will bring the number of agents on the Mexican border to more than 18,200. Along the 2,000-mile border, that is nine per mile. Despite all the fences and advanced paraphernalia, some people will always sneak through, raising the question of how much more spending is worth it on top of the $10 billion being spent this year on just the Border Patrol. History is littered with the folly of fortress strategies, of building walls, from the Chinese to the French. For that reason, the Mexican border was never intended by this or past administrations to be the only line of enforcement.”