Associated Press
March 27, 2013
A group of U.S. senators who will be influential in shaping and negotiating details of an immigration reform package is traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona to get a firsthand look at issues affecting the region.
Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona were expected to tour the border today with Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Michael Bennet of Colorado. They are all members of the so-called Gang of Eight — a bipartisan group that has spent recent weeks trying to craft proposed immigration legislation.
The trip comes as Congress is in recess and as the lawmakers wrap up a bill designed to secure the border and put 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. President Barack Obama has urged Congress to pass immigration reform this year, and border security is critical to McCain and other Republicans who contend that some areas along the border are far from secure.
"I wish every member of the United States Senate and Congress could see the border," McCain told reporters in Phoenix on Monday. "Only when you can see the expanse, the difficulties and the challenges of the border, can you really appreciate the need for our border security."
With top Republicans and Democrats focused on the issue, immigration reform faces its best odds in years. The proposed legislation will likely put illegal immigrants on a 13-year path to citizenship and would install new criteria for border security, allow more high- and low-skilled workers to come to the U.S. and hold businesses to tougher standards on verifying their workers are in the country legally.
McCain sought to lower expectations for the bill Monday during a town hall in Phoenix. He told immigration activists they wouldn't be completely happy with the measure and warned that the group must overcome difficult disagreements.
"We've made progress in a number of areas that I am encouraged by, but there are still areas that we are not in agreement," he said.
McCain said the lawmakers had reached an agreement on protections for young illegal immigrants brought to the country as children and on visas for workers, but declined to provide specifics.
Reports indicate that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, negotiating through the Gang of Eight senators, had reached significant agreement Friday on a new visa program to bring up to 200,000 lower-skilled workers a year to the country. The groups did not reach consensus on how much the workers would be paid.
The bill is expected to be lengthy and cover numerous issues, including limiting family-based immigration to put a greater emphasis on skills and employment ties instead.
The legislation was initially promised in March, but the lawmakers have since said they won't be done until at least April. Immigration proponents have said the group needs to introduce legislation soon, while some Republican lawmakers complain the process has moved too quickly.
If passed, the legislation could usher in the most sweeping changes in immigration law in nearly 30 years.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/mccain_other_senators_to_tour.html
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Sunday, November 18, 2012
McCain, Hatch, Rubio offer optimism on immigration on return for lame duck
The Hill
November 13, 2012
by Cameron Joseph
Three key Senate Republican players on immigration returned to a lame-duck session of Congress on Tuesday offering optimism that a deal on immigration could be made next year.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he believes it’s “very likely” the Senate will come up with a comprehensive immigration bill that could include enforcement and a way of dealing with illegal immigrants in the country.
A pathway to residency or citizenship for those illegal immigrants was the major stumbling block to immigration reform efforts in the last decade.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said “everything ought to be on the table” in the immigration talks, while McCain said there’s a “sense of urgency” in the GOP to deal with the issue.
Sen. Marco Rubio said he was “hopeful” lawmakers would be able to work on something, but added his position remains that Congress should take action on strengthening border security first.
“As I've said, in my opinion, the first steps in all of this is to win the confidence of the American people by modernizing the legal immigration issue and by improving enforcements of the existing law,” he said. “And then, obviously, we're going to have to deal with 11 million people who are here in undocumented status.
“I think it'll be a lot easier to figure that out if we do those other steps first. But like I said, there are going to be a lot of opinions on this.”
Republican soul searching on immigration has stepped up after President Obama’s victory in last week’s presidential election. Obama soundly defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney among Hispanic voters.
In the wake of the election, conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity and pundit Charles Krauthhammer have both urged Republicans to work on an immigration plan that would include a pathway to residence for those in the country illegally.
“There's a sense of urgency in the Republican Party for obvious reasons, and I'm sure that everybody's ready to deal. But the specifics? Too early,” McCain said Tuesday when asked about a comprehensive bill that included a pathway to citizenship.
“There are a lot of very important legal considerations that have to be made, but I've always been empathetic towards resolving this problem one way or the other,” said Hatch.
McCain had abandoned his support for a comprehensive bill during a 2010 primary challenge from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.).
But on Tuesday, he sounded more like the McCain who championed a comprehensive immigration reform plan backed by President George W. Bush.
“Oh, I think it's very likely that we get it resolved, but there are going to be some tough negotiations," he said.
Rubio, a Hispanic who is trusted and beloved by the GOP base, could be the most important player to watch in the negotiations.
He seemed more hesitant to embrace the concept of a big package than McCain or Hatch but didn’t close the door on a single, comprehensive bill. In the past, that’s usually meant a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the U.S., stricter border enforcement, a temporary worker program for industries such as agriculture and a crackdown on those who hire undocumented immigrants.
“People are interested in it. It's going to take some time,” he said. “It's an important issue for the country economically, it behooves us to have a 21st century immigration policy.”
Rubio said he “didn’t have anything to announce today” on how involved he’ll be with the issue, but said he was “hopeful we’ll be able to work on something.”
The Florida senator had begun to work on a Republican version of the “DREAM Act” last year before President Obama ordered temporary visas be given to some undocumented immigrants brought here as children.
Hatch, an original sponsor of the DREAM Act, voted against it in 2010, largely because of concerns about a 2012 Tea Party primary challenge.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/267763-rubio-mccain-hatch-ready-to-negotiate-on-pathway-to-citizenship
November 13, 2012
by Cameron Joseph
Three key Senate Republican players on immigration returned to a lame-duck session of Congress on Tuesday offering optimism that a deal on immigration could be made next year.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he believes it’s “very likely” the Senate will come up with a comprehensive immigration bill that could include enforcement and a way of dealing with illegal immigrants in the country.
A pathway to residency or citizenship for those illegal immigrants was the major stumbling block to immigration reform efforts in the last decade.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said “everything ought to be on the table” in the immigration talks, while McCain said there’s a “sense of urgency” in the GOP to deal with the issue.
Sen. Marco Rubio said he was “hopeful” lawmakers would be able to work on something, but added his position remains that Congress should take action on strengthening border security first.
“As I've said, in my opinion, the first steps in all of this is to win the confidence of the American people by modernizing the legal immigration issue and by improving enforcements of the existing law,” he said. “And then, obviously, we're going to have to deal with 11 million people who are here in undocumented status.
“I think it'll be a lot easier to figure that out if we do those other steps first. But like I said, there are going to be a lot of opinions on this.”
Republican soul searching on immigration has stepped up after President Obama’s victory in last week’s presidential election. Obama soundly defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney among Hispanic voters.
In the wake of the election, conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity and pundit Charles Krauthhammer have both urged Republicans to work on an immigration plan that would include a pathway to residence for those in the country illegally.
“There's a sense of urgency in the Republican Party for obvious reasons, and I'm sure that everybody's ready to deal. But the specifics? Too early,” McCain said Tuesday when asked about a comprehensive bill that included a pathway to citizenship.
“There are a lot of very important legal considerations that have to be made, but I've always been empathetic towards resolving this problem one way or the other,” said Hatch.
McCain had abandoned his support for a comprehensive bill during a 2010 primary challenge from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.).
But on Tuesday, he sounded more like the McCain who championed a comprehensive immigration reform plan backed by President George W. Bush.
“Oh, I think it's very likely that we get it resolved, but there are going to be some tough negotiations," he said.
Rubio, a Hispanic who is trusted and beloved by the GOP base, could be the most important player to watch in the negotiations.
He seemed more hesitant to embrace the concept of a big package than McCain or Hatch but didn’t close the door on a single, comprehensive bill. In the past, that’s usually meant a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the U.S., stricter border enforcement, a temporary worker program for industries such as agriculture and a crackdown on those who hire undocumented immigrants.
“People are interested in it. It's going to take some time,” he said. “It's an important issue for the country economically, it behooves us to have a 21st century immigration policy.”
Rubio said he “didn’t have anything to announce today” on how involved he’ll be with the issue, but said he was “hopeful we’ll be able to work on something.”
The Florida senator had begun to work on a Republican version of the “DREAM Act” last year before President Obama ordered temporary visas be given to some undocumented immigrants brought here as children.
Hatch, an original sponsor of the DREAM Act, voted against it in 2010, largely because of concerns about a 2012 Tea Party primary challenge.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/267763-rubio-mccain-hatch-ready-to-negotiate-on-pathway-to-citizenship
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Kyl, McCain, Flake float border-security bill
Associated Press
April 13, 2011
Arizona U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl have introduced legislation that would mandate 6,000 troops on the Mexican border, 5,000 more Border Patrol agents by 2016 and hundreds of millions in additional spending.
A version of the bill was also introduced in the House by Rep. Jeff Flake. It would spend $4 billion taken from previously unspent federal appropriations but spare funds given to the military and Veterans Affairs and for nuclear weapons.
The bill introduced on Wednesday would also add spending for the prosecution of illegal immigrants and boost funding to local law enforcement agencies along the border. More fencing would be built, more manned and unmanned aircraft deployed and communications equipment updated.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/azelections/articles/2011/04/13/20110413arizona-border-bill-congress-kyl-mccain-flake.html
April 13, 2011
Arizona U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl have introduced legislation that would mandate 6,000 troops on the Mexican border, 5,000 more Border Patrol agents by 2016 and hundreds of millions in additional spending.
A version of the bill was also introduced in the House by Rep. Jeff Flake. It would spend $4 billion taken from previously unspent federal appropriations but spare funds given to the military and Veterans Affairs and for nuclear weapons.
The bill introduced on Wednesday would also add spending for the prosecution of illegal immigrants and boost funding to local law enforcement agencies along the border. More fencing would be built, more manned and unmanned aircraft deployed and communications equipment updated.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/azelections/articles/2011/04/13/20110413arizona-border-bill-congress-kyl-mccain-flake.html
Friday, April 8, 2011
Border hearing: Escobar, McCain spar on security
El Paso Times
April 8, 2011
by Aileen B. Flores
Federal funding has not met growing demands for law enforcement agencies along the U.S.-Mexico border to meet the appetite for a secure border, County Judge Veronica Escobar said Thursday.
Escobar was part of a delegation that testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in Washington, D.C.
During her testimony, she and committee member Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., disagreed on the value of a border fence.
Escobar said, "While federal law enforcement has gone on the record to praise the border wall, it is, to me and others, an example of considerable federal dollars being spent on a rusting monument that makes my community look like a junkyard.
"We are indeed on the front lines, and a safe border means a safe nation," she said. "But vilifying immigrants, building expensive, ugly walls, and encouraging hysteria and xenophobia only hurts our border communities, our commerce and the economy of the nation."
McCain said her comments do not apply to Arizona's citizens.
"I don't view ranchers who live in the southern part of my state who had repeated home invasions as xenophobic," he said.
McCain talked about several violent incidents in southern Arizona. He also mentioned signs posted along the Arizona border warning residents against traveling in certain areas because of potential drug and human smugglers.
He said drug smuggling has changed the jobs of border law enforcement. McCain said sheriff's deputies' jobs in border communities are more difficult, more challenging and more dangerous than ever before.
He repeatedly said he does not believe the U.S. border is immune to being affected by Mexico's violence.
"There is no logic associated with that," he said.
McCain said he appreciated the fact that U.S. border cities are safe but, to him, the statement is not logical when Mexico's violence is increasing.
McCain added that the National Guard's presence along the U.S.-Mexico border is "indispensable." He said the National Guard supplements the U.S. Border Patrol.
Escobar said the federal government has supported local law enforcement agencies through programs, funds and grants. But funding has not grown along the border over the years to meet law enforcement's needs.
"The federal funds coming into my community are critical and are not enough," she said. Escobar also said this has caused property taxes to increase and law enforcement agencies to make operational cuts.
Escobar said El Paso County has requested money from the Merida Initiative, a multiyear program that helps the governments of Mexico, Central American nations, the Dominican Republic and Haiti to confront criminal organizations.
But the U.S. government has not given the county any money from Merida, Escobar told the panel.
Specifically talking about Juárez, Escobar said the continuing pattern of violence has led to an increase in people seeking treatment at El Paso's University Medical Center trauma center.
Since 2008, El Paso County has spent close to $5 million in trauma care for victims of the Juárez violence -- of which only $1.2 million has been collected -- Escobar said.
Escobar credits El Paso's safety to a good relationship between law enforcement officials and residents.
"We depend on that relationship to keep us safe," she said. She added that El Paso has achieved its designation of America's safest city despite its proximity to Juárez -- called by many the world's most dangerous city.
Escobar voiced her support for comprehensive immigration reform and was clear that El Paso officials are against local law enforcement enforcing immigration laws.
Escobar asked for better technology and equipment for the international ports of entry and said it would speed up crossing times.
She was one of four witnesses in Thursday's hearing, which focused on illegal immigration and border-related crime in border communities.
Other witnesses were Imperial County (Calif.) Sheriff Raymond Loera, Luna County (N.M.) Sheriff Raymond Cobos and Pinal County (Ariz.) Sheriff Paul Babeu.
Cobos testified that Mexico's violence has affected his community in an indirect way.
He talked about a recent incident in which the Columbus, N.M., police chief, its mayor, a village trustee and eight others were charged with trafficking firearms to Mexican cartels.
Cobos also voiced his support of the border fence and said it has deterred women and children from crossing illegally.
The delegation's testimony was part of a series of hearings that will study progress made during the past 10 years as a result of substantial federal support to secure the U.S. border with Mexico.
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_17792139
April 8, 2011
by Aileen B. Flores
Federal funding has not met growing demands for law enforcement agencies along the U.S.-Mexico border to meet the appetite for a secure border, County Judge Veronica Escobar said Thursday.
Escobar was part of a delegation that testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in Washington, D.C.
During her testimony, she and committee member Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., disagreed on the value of a border fence.
Escobar said, "While federal law enforcement has gone on the record to praise the border wall, it is, to me and others, an example of considerable federal dollars being spent on a rusting monument that makes my community look like a junkyard.
"We are indeed on the front lines, and a safe border means a safe nation," she said. "But vilifying immigrants, building expensive, ugly walls, and encouraging hysteria and xenophobia only hurts our border communities, our commerce and the economy of the nation."
McCain said her comments do not apply to Arizona's citizens.
"I don't view ranchers who live in the southern part of my state who had repeated home invasions as xenophobic," he said.
McCain talked about several violent incidents in southern Arizona. He also mentioned signs posted along the Arizona border warning residents against traveling in certain areas because of potential drug and human smugglers.
He said drug smuggling has changed the jobs of border law enforcement. McCain said sheriff's deputies' jobs in border communities are more difficult, more challenging and more dangerous than ever before.
He repeatedly said he does not believe the U.S. border is immune to being affected by Mexico's violence.
"There is no logic associated with that," he said.
McCain said he appreciated the fact that U.S. border cities are safe but, to him, the statement is not logical when Mexico's violence is increasing.
McCain added that the National Guard's presence along the U.S.-Mexico border is "indispensable." He said the National Guard supplements the U.S. Border Patrol.
Escobar said the federal government has supported local law enforcement agencies through programs, funds and grants. But funding has not grown along the border over the years to meet law enforcement's needs.
"The federal funds coming into my community are critical and are not enough," she said. Escobar also said this has caused property taxes to increase and law enforcement agencies to make operational cuts.
Escobar said El Paso County has requested money from the Merida Initiative, a multiyear program that helps the governments of Mexico, Central American nations, the Dominican Republic and Haiti to confront criminal organizations.
But the U.S. government has not given the county any money from Merida, Escobar told the panel.
Specifically talking about Juárez, Escobar said the continuing pattern of violence has led to an increase in people seeking treatment at El Paso's University Medical Center trauma center.
Since 2008, El Paso County has spent close to $5 million in trauma care for victims of the Juárez violence -- of which only $1.2 million has been collected -- Escobar said.
Escobar credits El Paso's safety to a good relationship between law enforcement officials and residents.
"We depend on that relationship to keep us safe," she said. She added that El Paso has achieved its designation of America's safest city despite its proximity to Juárez -- called by many the world's most dangerous city.
Escobar voiced her support for comprehensive immigration reform and was clear that El Paso officials are against local law enforcement enforcing immigration laws.
Escobar asked for better technology and equipment for the international ports of entry and said it would speed up crossing times.
She was one of four witnesses in Thursday's hearing, which focused on illegal immigration and border-related crime in border communities.
Other witnesses were Imperial County (Calif.) Sheriff Raymond Loera, Luna County (N.M.) Sheriff Raymond Cobos and Pinal County (Ariz.) Sheriff Paul Babeu.
Cobos testified that Mexico's violence has affected his community in an indirect way.
He talked about a recent incident in which the Columbus, N.M., police chief, its mayor, a village trustee and eight others were charged with trafficking firearms to Mexican cartels.
Cobos also voiced his support of the border fence and said it has deterred women and children from crossing illegally.
The delegation's testimony was part of a series of hearings that will study progress made during the past 10 years as a result of substantial federal support to secure the U.S. border with Mexico.
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_17792139
Monday, June 14, 2010
Border security trips up immigration debate
Los Angeles Times
June 15, 2010
by Ken Dilanian and Nicholas Riccardi
The Republican governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, calls her state "the gateway to America for drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and crime." She blames the federal government for failing to secure the border with Mexico.
Her Democratic predecessor, Janet Napolitano, now the country's Homeland Security secretary, counters that the Southwestern border "is as secure now as it has ever been."
The dispute over just how much border security is enough looms as the biggest impediment to any attempt by the Obama administration and Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration laws.
Republicans say they can't support an immigration bill until the border is under control. The Obama administration points out that crime in U.S. border cities is down, as are illegal border crossings.
There should be room for compromise: One side would get more resources for border enforcement, and the other would get a program allowing migrants to cross the border to work and a path to legalization for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.
But so far, Washington is not even close.
Last month, President Obama nodded toward such an arrangement by agreeing to dispatch 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek half a billion dollars in additional funds for border enforcement.
That came after 18 months in which the Obama administration has outdone its predecessor on border enforcement spending and on deportations of illegal immigrants, all in an effort to build support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
None of it, however, has been enough for Republicans in Congress, including those, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, who previously supported immigration changes.
McCain, facing a primary challenge, said Obama's plan was insufficient, and he tried unsuccessfully to pass an amendment in the Senate calling for 6,000 troops and $2 billion in spending.
Napolitano, in an interview, expressed frustration about the Republicans' singular focus on border security.
"Their position has evolved to be, 'We don't even want to talk about immigration reform unless you secure — read: seal — the border,' " she said. "And the definition of what securing the border means keeps changing, and that then becomes a reason not to address the real underlying issue, which is immigration reform."
The raw statistics don't support the notion, as Brewer put it in April, that the U.S. side of the Mexico border is awash in "uncontrolled … horrendous violence."
Mexico has seen a wave of killings and violence, but crime on the U.S. side is lower than it has been in previous years. In fact, the four largest American cities with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states, according to a new FBI report: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, Texas.
Illegal immigration is also down significantly, partly because of the U.S. economic recession.
Still, recent high-profile incidents have fueled perceptions that the drug violence in Mexico is spilling over. They include the March killing of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, shot on his property in what authorities suspect was an encounter with a drug smuggling scout.
There also has been a dramatic rise in home invasions in Arizona in which suspected gang members target drug stash houses — "mostly trafficker against trafficker," said Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney for Arizona.
But it's unclear whether border enforcement can have much effect on those trends. Experience has shown that fences, technology and patrols have slowed illegal crossings in some areas only to steer traffic to other, more remote stretches.
The projected cost of border fencing is about $5 million a mile. That would be a price tag of nearly $9 billion for the 1,700 miles of unfenced border.
With huge budget deficits looming, there is little appetite for such spending. But most political observers believe that for an immigration bill to stand any chance in Congress, the Obama administration is going to have to convince more Americans that violence and illegal immigration have been mostly quelled.
"It is impossible for me and any other serious Democrat to get this body to move forward until we prove to the American people we can secure our borders," Graham told Napolitano when she testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April. "But once we get there, comprehensive reform should come up, will come up."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-border-security-20100615,0,5865058.story
June 15, 2010
by Ken Dilanian and Nicholas Riccardi
The Republican governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, calls her state "the gateway to America for drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and crime." She blames the federal government for failing to secure the border with Mexico.
Her Democratic predecessor, Janet Napolitano, now the country's Homeland Security secretary, counters that the Southwestern border "is as secure now as it has ever been."
The dispute over just how much border security is enough looms as the biggest impediment to any attempt by the Obama administration and Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration laws.
Republicans say they can't support an immigration bill until the border is under control. The Obama administration points out that crime in U.S. border cities is down, as are illegal border crossings.
There should be room for compromise: One side would get more resources for border enforcement, and the other would get a program allowing migrants to cross the border to work and a path to legalization for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.
But so far, Washington is not even close.
Last month, President Obama nodded toward such an arrangement by agreeing to dispatch 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek half a billion dollars in additional funds for border enforcement.
That came after 18 months in which the Obama administration has outdone its predecessor on border enforcement spending and on deportations of illegal immigrants, all in an effort to build support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
None of it, however, has been enough for Republicans in Congress, including those, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, who previously supported immigration changes.
McCain, facing a primary challenge, said Obama's plan was insufficient, and he tried unsuccessfully to pass an amendment in the Senate calling for 6,000 troops and $2 billion in spending.
Napolitano, in an interview, expressed frustration about the Republicans' singular focus on border security.
"Their position has evolved to be, 'We don't even want to talk about immigration reform unless you secure — read: seal — the border,' " she said. "And the definition of what securing the border means keeps changing, and that then becomes a reason not to address the real underlying issue, which is immigration reform."
The raw statistics don't support the notion, as Brewer put it in April, that the U.S. side of the Mexico border is awash in "uncontrolled … horrendous violence."
Mexico has seen a wave of killings and violence, but crime on the U.S. side is lower than it has been in previous years. In fact, the four largest American cities with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states, according to a new FBI report: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, Texas.
Illegal immigration is also down significantly, partly because of the U.S. economic recession.
Still, recent high-profile incidents have fueled perceptions that the drug violence in Mexico is spilling over. They include the March killing of Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, shot on his property in what authorities suspect was an encounter with a drug smuggling scout.
There also has been a dramatic rise in home invasions in Arizona in which suspected gang members target drug stash houses — "mostly trafficker against trafficker," said Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney for Arizona.
But it's unclear whether border enforcement can have much effect on those trends. Experience has shown that fences, technology and patrols have slowed illegal crossings in some areas only to steer traffic to other, more remote stretches.
The projected cost of border fencing is about $5 million a mile. That would be a price tag of nearly $9 billion for the 1,700 miles of unfenced border.
With huge budget deficits looming, there is little appetite for such spending. But most political observers believe that for an immigration bill to stand any chance in Congress, the Obama administration is going to have to convince more Americans that violence and illegal immigration have been mostly quelled.
"It is impossible for me and any other serious Democrat to get this body to move forward until we prove to the American people we can secure our borders," Graham told Napolitano when she testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April. "But once we get there, comprehensive reform should come up, will come up."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-border-security-20100615,0,5865058.story
Monday, May 17, 2010
After dismissing fence, McCain touts it in ad
Associated Press
May 13, 2010
by Jonathan Cooper
PHOENIX — Three years after dismissing the effectiveness of building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizona Sen. John McCain is airing a campaign ad in which he declares: "complete the danged fence."
The 30-second ad shows McCain walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu and ticking off crimes potentially associated with illegal immigration, including drug and human smuggling, home invasions and murder.
Babeu replies, "We're outmanned," and touts McCain's border-security plan. The ad ends with the sheriff telling McCain that "you're one of us."
In a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair, McCain suggested a border fence wouldn't be much help in securing the border, saying: "I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the g--d----- fence if they want it."
Brian Rogers, McCain's campaign spokesman, said the senator has long supported a fence but recognizes that it must be used in conjunction with other tactics, particularly in remote desert areas. Rogers pointed to a 2007 compromise immigration reform bill, which McCain co-sponsored, calling for 370 miles of fencing.
The ad, which has been airing in Arizona for about a week, has been subject to ridicule online and on cable television, in part for its contrived dialogue. U.S. Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., shared a laugh with hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" after watching the ad Thursday, and the Democratic National Committee released a statement saying McCain's tactics "reek of political desperation."
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth is challenging McCain from the right for the GOP nomination in an August primary. His campaign has attacked McCain's record on illegal immigration, among other issues, and says he has "flip-flopped" on the border fence issue.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hSbnwTGhdLLKp0gvxRgH9ZbabY-QD9FM6PG00
May 13, 2010
by Jonathan Cooper
PHOENIX — Three years after dismissing the effectiveness of building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizona Sen. John McCain is airing a campaign ad in which he declares: "complete the danged fence."
The 30-second ad shows McCain walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu and ticking off crimes potentially associated with illegal immigration, including drug and human smuggling, home invasions and murder.
Babeu replies, "We're outmanned," and touts McCain's border-security plan. The ad ends with the sheriff telling McCain that "you're one of us."
In a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair, McCain suggested a border fence wouldn't be much help in securing the border, saying: "I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the g--d----- fence if they want it."
Brian Rogers, McCain's campaign spokesman, said the senator has long supported a fence but recognizes that it must be used in conjunction with other tactics, particularly in remote desert areas. Rogers pointed to a 2007 compromise immigration reform bill, which McCain co-sponsored, calling for 370 miles of fencing.
The ad, which has been airing in Arizona for about a week, has been subject to ridicule online and on cable television, in part for its contrived dialogue. U.S. Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., shared a laugh with hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" after watching the ad Thursday, and the Democratic National Committee released a statement saying McCain's tactics "reek of political desperation."
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth is challenging McCain from the right for the GOP nomination in an August primary. His campaign has attacked McCain's record on illegal immigration, among other issues, and says he has "flip-flopped" on the border fence issue.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hSbnwTGhdLLKp0gvxRgH9ZbabY-QD9FM6PG00
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Violence is not up on Arizona border
Arizona Republic
May2, 2010
by Dennis Wagner
NOGALES, Ariz. - Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.
"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."
FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down.
While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.
In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.
Bermudez said people unfamiliar with the border may be confused because Nogales, Sonora, has become notorious for kidnappings, shootouts and beheadings. With 500 Border Patrol agents and countless other law officers swarming the Arizona side, he said, smugglers pass through as quickly and furtively as possible.
"Everywhere you turn, there's some kind of law enforcement looking at you," Bermudez said. "Per capita, we probably have the highest amount of any city in the United States."
In Yuma, police spokesman Sgt. Clint Norred said he cannot recall any significant cartel violence in the past several years. Departmental crime records show the amount of bloodshed has remained stable despite a substantial population increase.
"It almost seems like Yuma is more of an entryway" for smugglers rather than a combat zone, he said.
Perceptions vs. reality
Since the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz by a suspected illegal immigrant in March, politicians and the national press have fanned a perception that the border is inundated with bloodshed and that it's escalating.
In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that the failure to secure that border between Arizona and Mexico "has led to violence - the worst I have ever seen."
He reiterated that Saturday after speaking at the West Valley Military Family Day event in Glendale, saying the concern that drug violence could spill across the border remains intense because Mexico's political situation is volatile.
"The violence is on the increase," McCain told The Arizona Republic. "The president of Mexico has said that it's a struggle for the existence of the government of Mexico."
Congressional members, including Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and John Shadegg, R-Ariz., sent President Barack Obama a letter asking that National Guard soldiers be sent to the border because "violence in the vicinity of the U.S. Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate."
And last month, as she signed Arizona's tough new law cracking down on illegal immigrants, Gov. Jan Brewer also called for National Guard troops. The law makes it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally and requires authorities to check documents of people they reasonably suspect to be illegal. Brewer said she signed it to solve what she said is an Arizona "crisis" caused by "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration."
Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said there always has been crime associated with smuggling in southern Arizona, but today's rhetoric does not seem to jibe with reality.
"This is a media-created event," Dupnik said. "I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure."
Even Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, among the most strident critics of federal enforcement, concedes that notions of cartel mayhem are exaggerated. "We're not seeing the multiple killings, beheadings and shootouts that are going on on the other side," he said.
In fact, according to the Border Patrol, Krentz is the only American murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant in at least a decade within the agency's Tucson sector, the busiest smuggling route among the Border Patrol's nine coverage regions along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Still, Dever said, the slaying proved useful to southern Arizonans who are sick of smugglers and immigrants tramping through their lands.
"The interest just elevated. And we keep the pressure on because next week something else is going to happen, and the window of opportunity will close," Dever said.
Cochise County's crime rate has been "flat" for at least 10 years, the sheriff added. Even in 2000, when record numbers of undocumented immigrants were detained in the area, just 4 percent of the area's violent crimes were committed by illegal aliens.
Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said his town suffers from home invasions and kidnappings involving marijuana smugglers who are undoubtedly tied to Mexican organizations. However, he added, most of those committing the rip-offs are American citizens.
"I think the border-influenced violence is getting worse," Villasenor said. "But is it a spillover of Mexican cartel members? No, I don't buy that."
More help on the border
While the nation's illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records, the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent.
More recently, Arizona's violent-crime rate dropped from 512 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 447 incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available.
In testimony to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security last month, Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, noted that Arizona now has more than 6,000 federal law-enforcement agents, with the majority of them employed by the Border Patrol. That represents nearly 10 agents for every mile of international line between Arizona and Sonora.
Border Patrol presence has been backed by increases in counter-smuggling technology and intelligence, the establishment of permanent highway checkpoints and a dramatic increase in customs inspectors at U.S. ports.
"The border is as secure now as it has ever been," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate panel last week.
Given that level of security, Bermudez and others say, it is no wonder that cartel operatives pass through border communities as quickly as possible, avoiding conflicts and attention.
In fact, violent-crime data suggest that violence from Mexico leapfrogs the border to smuggling hubs and destinations, where cartel members do take part in murders, home invasions and kidnappings.
In Phoenix and Tucson, cartel-related violence is hardly new.
In 1996, for example, Valley law-enforcement agents estimated that 40 percent of all homicides in Maricopa County were a result of conflicts involving Mexican narcotics organizations, mostly from Sinaloa state. A decade later, the Attorney General's Office exposed a $2 billion human-smuggling business based in metro Phoenix, where criminals often assaulted illegal aliens while holding them for payment of smuggling fees. More recently, cartel-related home invasions and abductions put Phoenix among the world leaders in kidnappings.
'A third country'
During a national border security expo in Phoenix last week, David Aguilar, acting deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection, said policy makers and the public need to understand that the border is not a fence or a line in the dirt but a broad and complex corridor.
"It is," Aguilar explained, "a third country that joins Mexico and the United States."
He emphasized that the cartels operate throughout Mexico and the United States, and he noted that those who think of border security in terms of a "juridical line" really don't understand the dynamics.
Aguilar said that Juarez, Mexico, is widely regarded as the "deadliest city in the world" because of an estimated 5,000 murders in recent years. Yet right across the border, El Paso, Texas, is listed among the safest towns in America.
A review of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports suggests that Arizona's border towns share El Paso's good fortune. Douglas and Nogales are about the same size as Florence but have significantly lower violent-crime rates. Likewise, Yuma has a population greater than Avondale's but a lower rate of violent offenses.
In Nogales, Ariz., residents seem bemused and annoyed by their town's perilous reputation. Yes, they sometimes hear the gunfire across the border. No, they don't feel safe visiting the sister city across the line. But with cops and federal agents everywhere, they see no danger on their streets.
"There's no violence here," said Francisco Hernandez, 31, who works in a sign shop and lives on a ranch along the border. "It doesn't drain over, like people are saying."
Leo Federico, 61, a retired teacher, said he has been amazed to hear members of Congress call for National Guard troops in the area.
"That's politics," he said, shrugging. "It's all about votes. . . . We have plenty of law enforcement."
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/05/02/20100502arizona-border-violence-mexico.html
May2, 2010
by Dennis Wagner
NOGALES, Ariz. - Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.
"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."
FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down.
While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.
In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.
Bermudez said people unfamiliar with the border may be confused because Nogales, Sonora, has become notorious for kidnappings, shootouts and beheadings. With 500 Border Patrol agents and countless other law officers swarming the Arizona side, he said, smugglers pass through as quickly and furtively as possible.
"Everywhere you turn, there's some kind of law enforcement looking at you," Bermudez said. "Per capita, we probably have the highest amount of any city in the United States."
In Yuma, police spokesman Sgt. Clint Norred said he cannot recall any significant cartel violence in the past several years. Departmental crime records show the amount of bloodshed has remained stable despite a substantial population increase.
"It almost seems like Yuma is more of an entryway" for smugglers rather than a combat zone, he said.
Perceptions vs. reality
Since the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz by a suspected illegal immigrant in March, politicians and the national press have fanned a perception that the border is inundated with bloodshed and that it's escalating.
In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that the failure to secure that border between Arizona and Mexico "has led to violence - the worst I have ever seen."
He reiterated that Saturday after speaking at the West Valley Military Family Day event in Glendale, saying the concern that drug violence could spill across the border remains intense because Mexico's political situation is volatile.
"The violence is on the increase," McCain told The Arizona Republic. "The president of Mexico has said that it's a struggle for the existence of the government of Mexico."
Congressional members, including Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and John Shadegg, R-Ariz., sent President Barack Obama a letter asking that National Guard soldiers be sent to the border because "violence in the vicinity of the U.S. Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate."
And last month, as she signed Arizona's tough new law cracking down on illegal immigrants, Gov. Jan Brewer also called for National Guard troops. The law makes it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally and requires authorities to check documents of people they reasonably suspect to be illegal. Brewer said she signed it to solve what she said is an Arizona "crisis" caused by "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration."
Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said there always has been crime associated with smuggling in southern Arizona, but today's rhetoric does not seem to jibe with reality.
"This is a media-created event," Dupnik said. "I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure."
Even Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, among the most strident critics of federal enforcement, concedes that notions of cartel mayhem are exaggerated. "We're not seeing the multiple killings, beheadings and shootouts that are going on on the other side," he said.
In fact, according to the Border Patrol, Krentz is the only American murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant in at least a decade within the agency's Tucson sector, the busiest smuggling route among the Border Patrol's nine coverage regions along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Still, Dever said, the slaying proved useful to southern Arizonans who are sick of smugglers and immigrants tramping through their lands.
"The interest just elevated. And we keep the pressure on because next week something else is going to happen, and the window of opportunity will close," Dever said.
Cochise County's crime rate has been "flat" for at least 10 years, the sheriff added. Even in 2000, when record numbers of undocumented immigrants were detained in the area, just 4 percent of the area's violent crimes were committed by illegal aliens.
Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said his town suffers from home invasions and kidnappings involving marijuana smugglers who are undoubtedly tied to Mexican organizations. However, he added, most of those committing the rip-offs are American citizens.
"I think the border-influenced violence is getting worse," Villasenor said. "But is it a spillover of Mexican cartel members? No, I don't buy that."
More help on the border
While the nation's illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records, the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent.
More recently, Arizona's violent-crime rate dropped from 512 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 447 incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available.
In testimony to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security last month, Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, noted that Arizona now has more than 6,000 federal law-enforcement agents, with the majority of them employed by the Border Patrol. That represents nearly 10 agents for every mile of international line between Arizona and Sonora.
Border Patrol presence has been backed by increases in counter-smuggling technology and intelligence, the establishment of permanent highway checkpoints and a dramatic increase in customs inspectors at U.S. ports.
"The border is as secure now as it has ever been," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate panel last week.
Given that level of security, Bermudez and others say, it is no wonder that cartel operatives pass through border communities as quickly as possible, avoiding conflicts and attention.
In fact, violent-crime data suggest that violence from Mexico leapfrogs the border to smuggling hubs and destinations, where cartel members do take part in murders, home invasions and kidnappings.
In Phoenix and Tucson, cartel-related violence is hardly new.
In 1996, for example, Valley law-enforcement agents estimated that 40 percent of all homicides in Maricopa County were a result of conflicts involving Mexican narcotics organizations, mostly from Sinaloa state. A decade later, the Attorney General's Office exposed a $2 billion human-smuggling business based in metro Phoenix, where criminals often assaulted illegal aliens while holding them for payment of smuggling fees. More recently, cartel-related home invasions and abductions put Phoenix among the world leaders in kidnappings.
'A third country'
During a national border security expo in Phoenix last week, David Aguilar, acting deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection, said policy makers and the public need to understand that the border is not a fence or a line in the dirt but a broad and complex corridor.
"It is," Aguilar explained, "a third country that joins Mexico and the United States."
He emphasized that the cartels operate throughout Mexico and the United States, and he noted that those who think of border security in terms of a "juridical line" really don't understand the dynamics.
Aguilar said that Juarez, Mexico, is widely regarded as the "deadliest city in the world" because of an estimated 5,000 murders in recent years. Yet right across the border, El Paso, Texas, is listed among the safest towns in America.
A review of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports suggests that Arizona's border towns share El Paso's good fortune. Douglas and Nogales are about the same size as Florence but have significantly lower violent-crime rates. Likewise, Yuma has a population greater than Avondale's but a lower rate of violent offenses.
In Nogales, Ariz., residents seem bemused and annoyed by their town's perilous reputation. Yes, they sometimes hear the gunfire across the border. No, they don't feel safe visiting the sister city across the line. But with cops and federal agents everywhere, they see no danger on their streets.
"There's no violence here," said Francisco Hernandez, 31, who works in a sign shop and lives on a ranch along the border. "It doesn't drain over, like people are saying."
Leo Federico, 61, a retired teacher, said he has been amazed to hear members of Congress call for National Guard troops in the area.
"That's politics," he said, shrugging. "It's all about votes. . . . We have plenty of law enforcement."
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/05/02/20100502arizona-border-violence-mexico.html
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Border mayors tell Congress fence won't work
San Antonio Express-News
September 9, 2009
by Gary Martin
WASHINGTON — A group of elected officials from Texas cities and counties along the U.S.-Mexico border urged Congress on Wednesday to strip a provision requiring the building of more border fencing from an annual spending bill.
The Texas Border Coalition wants a House-Senate conference committee to remove language from the spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that would require the government to replace vehicle barriers and a high-technology “virtual fence” with pedestrian fencing.
Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, the coalition's chairman, said the current fence, at a cost of $3.5 billion, has only forced narcotics traffickers and smugglers of undocumented immigrants to develop counterstrategies to move contraband and people into the United States.
With the recent building of some pedestrian fence, Foster said narco-traffickers and smugglers are now shifting their focus to busy land ports.
“If Congress perceives the purpose of the border fence is to seal the border from illegal activity, then the program is and will continue to be a failure,” Foster said.
The pedestrian fence provision was added as an amendment to the spending bill on a 54-44 vote in the Senate.
Republican Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn of Texas, and Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California voted in favor of the amendment.
New Mexico Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, both Democrats, voted against the measure sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. Arizona Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, both Republicans, voted for it.
The House did not include the measure in its version of the spending bill, which is now before a House-Senate conference committee to iron out differences in the two pieces of legislation.
DeMint vowed to work to keep the provision in the final bill.
But House Democrats from the four Southwest border states are lobbying leaders to strip the provision from the bill and use the funds to better equip overcrowded and understaffed ports of entry.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, called the DeMint amendment “a waste of taxpayer's money.”
Congress authorized 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Secure Fence Initiative of 2006. Homeland Security has 370 miles of fence under contract, with the remainder to be secured by vehicle barriers, as well as technology and sensors.
Some portions of uncompleted fence remain under court challenge.
The DeMint provision would require that pedestrian fence account for all 700 miles of barriers authorized by Congress in 2006, and be completed by Dec. 31, 2010.
The Texas Border Coalition, made up of mayors, county judges and eco
nomic development officials, argue that the fence funds would be better spent on improvements to border ports to better inspect cargo and facilitate legal trade.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/58155687.html
September 9, 2009
by Gary Martin
WASHINGTON — A group of elected officials from Texas cities and counties along the U.S.-Mexico border urged Congress on Wednesday to strip a provision requiring the building of more border fencing from an annual spending bill.
The Texas Border Coalition wants a House-Senate conference committee to remove language from the spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that would require the government to replace vehicle barriers and a high-technology “virtual fence” with pedestrian fencing.
Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, the coalition's chairman, said the current fence, at a cost of $3.5 billion, has only forced narcotics traffickers and smugglers of undocumented immigrants to develop counterstrategies to move contraband and people into the United States.
With the recent building of some pedestrian fence, Foster said narco-traffickers and smugglers are now shifting their focus to busy land ports.
“If Congress perceives the purpose of the border fence is to seal the border from illegal activity, then the program is and will continue to be a failure,” Foster said.
The pedestrian fence provision was added as an amendment to the spending bill on a 54-44 vote in the Senate.
Republican Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn of Texas, and Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California voted in favor of the amendment.
New Mexico Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, both Democrats, voted against the measure sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. Arizona Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, both Republicans, voted for it.
The House did not include the measure in its version of the spending bill, which is now before a House-Senate conference committee to iron out differences in the two pieces of legislation.
DeMint vowed to work to keep the provision in the final bill.
But House Democrats from the four Southwest border states are lobbying leaders to strip the provision from the bill and use the funds to better equip overcrowded and understaffed ports of entry.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, called the DeMint amendment “a waste of taxpayer's money.”
Congress authorized 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Secure Fence Initiative of 2006. Homeland Security has 370 miles of fence under contract, with the remainder to be secured by vehicle barriers, as well as technology and sensors.
Some portions of uncompleted fence remain under court challenge.
The DeMint provision would require that pedestrian fence account for all 700 miles of barriers authorized by Congress in 2006, and be completed by Dec. 31, 2010.
The Texas Border Coalition, made up of mayors, county judges and eco
nomic development officials, argue that the fence funds would be better spent on improvements to border ports to better inspect cargo and facilitate legal trade.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/58155687.html
Sunday, February 1, 2009
On Fox News Sunday, Wallace failed to challenge Steele's claim that Hispanic leaders support border security first
Media Matters
February 1, 2009
February 1, 2009
During the February 1 edition of Fox News Sunday, after Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele stated that the Republican position on immigration is "secure our borders first," host Chris Wallace failed to challenge Steele's assertion that "you talk to those leaders in the Hispanic community, they will tell you the same thing: They understand the importance of making sure the United States borders are secure." In fact, many of the nation's leading Hispanic organizations advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, not a "secure our borders first" approach.
For instance, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) states: "The CHC opposes immigration enforcement measures that will only serve to push immigrants further into the shadows where they live in fear and are more likely to be exploited. We are committed to improving our national security, but see piecemeal adjustments of immigration enforcement as counterproductive if they are not included in a broad, comprehensive package overhauling the whole immigration system."
Other leading Hispanic organizations also advocate for comprehensive immigration reform that includes both enforcement and other measures:
- League of United Latin American Citizens: "LULAC opposes any legislation that threatens the rights of immigrants, criminalizes them or those who provide them assistance, and harms Latino communities. Legal residents and naturalized citizens should have the same benefits due native-born citizens. LULAC opposes the militarization of the border and vigilante attacks on immigrants, as well as the mistreatment of immigrants in the United States regardless of their status. LULAC supports comprehensive immigration reform that provides an avenue for undocumented workers to legalize their status and expands the number of legal immigrants allowed into the U.S. to meet our needs."
Further, a September 15, 2006, LULAC press release stated:
LULAC is in favor of border security but wants a comprehensive approach to solving the problem that is reasonable and fair. Each year, more than 400 immigrants die attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico. Building a wall between Mexico and the United States will force many migrants toward even more dangerous avenues resulting in increased loss of life along the border. Any comprehensive immigration legislation passed by Congress should be designed to reduce border deaths, not increase them. The Republican controlled Congress has failed to work with Democrats in passing meaningful comprehensive immigration reform this year.
- National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials: "The NALEO Educational Fund has adopted principles on comprehensive immigration reform [click here] that provide a road map to the work that needs to be done on this important national issue, including the need for a path to U.S. citizenship for those immigrants who have played by the rules and are contributing to our society. Our principles also envision a system which promotes family reunification and reduces immigration backlogs; provides a meaningful opportunity for immigrant students to pursue a college education; protects our national security with effective and fair enforcement measures; and promotes the civic integration of newcomers. We urge members of the U.S. Senate to work toward those principles for true comprehensive immigration reform."
Further, according to a NALEO survey following the 2008 election, "[o]n the issue of specific immigration reform proposals, Latino voters, across all subgroups, strongly support a comprehensive approach that seeks to address both border security and deal with immigrants in the United States at the same time. Nearly half, 49% of Latino voters, say they support a comprehensive approach, while 24% support proposals that would deal with immigrants first and 17% who believe we should deal with border security first."
- National Council of La Raza: "NCLR supports comprehensive immigration reforms that combine reasonable enforcement with reduction in family immigration backlogs, a legal path for future immigrant workers, and a path to citizenship for those living and working in the U.S."
- National Hispanic Leadership Agenda: "NHLA stands with the strong majority of Americans in urging prompt federal action in enacting comprehensive immigration reform to restore the rule of law to the nation's immigration system and strengthen our commitment to basic fairness, opportunity for all, and equal treatment under the law."
Moreover, according to an October 26, 2006, statement, NCLR, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), NALEO, and LULAC all oppose the Secure Fence Act, which former President Bush signed into law that same day. In the statement, John Trasviña, then-interim president and general counsel of MALDEF, and Arturo Vargas, executive director of NALEO, criticized Congress and the president for passing such a bill rather than a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
From the statement:
Noting that the construction of 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border will do little to fix our broken immigration system or deal with the 12 million undocumented immigrants who live and work in this country, the leaders of the nation's leading Latino organizations made the following comments:
Janet Murguía, President and CEO, NCLR
"This law doesn't solve the immigration issue, it makes it worse. By authorizing 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border without appropriating any funding, this law reflects everything that is wrong with the immigration debate. It is a symbol of Congress's and the Administration's failure to achieve meaningful immigration reform."
John Trasviña, Interim President and General Counsel, MALDEF
"The Secure Fence Act should be called the Secure Election Act. It is a travesty that Congress utterly failed in achieving comprehensive immigration reform and could only pass in its waning days a bill for a fence that will take years to complete and does nothing to address America's immigration or labor needs. The President's signing into law of this bill simply reiterates that failure."
Arturo Vargas, Executive Director, NALEO
"The President committed himself to passing a fair and complete immigration package, but the border fence bill takes us farther away from achieving that goal. By signing the bill into law, he has clearly taken a step back from his commitment. We will continue to work with Congress and the President for effective immigration reform that recognizes the valuable contributions newcomers make to our nation's economic and civic life."
Brent Wilkes, Executive Director, LULAC
"The Latino community expected Congress to enact feasible and humane immigration policies that would restore the rule of law and enhance security, reunite families, protect workers, promote citizenship and civic participation, and help local communities. Instead, the House leadership played politics with the issue and ended up with this meaningless gesture."
From the February 1 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200902010005?f=h_latestWALLACE: Well, let's talk about how you reach out. And that's part of the key to this, because, at this point, the Republicans -- if you look at the last election -- are a minority party. Let's talk about how you reach out to some of the groups that may feel alienated from the Republican Party. In November, John McCain got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote. Four years ago, President Bush did 13 points better. Does the GOP need to change its position on immigration reform -- guest worker, path to citizenship -- to reach out and say to Hispanics, "You have a home in the Republican Party"?
STEELE: No, well, I think the GOP's position on immigration is very much the position of many, many Hispanics who are in this country. We have --
WALLACE: But wait a minute. Is the GOP --
STEELE: Hold up. Hold up.
WALLACE: But is the GOP position the position of George Bush and John McCain, which is for immigration reform?
STEELE: The GOP -- the GOP's --
WALLACE: Or is it the position that was "build the fence"?
STEELE: The GOP's position is: secure our borders first. Let us know and let us make sure the American people know that we've taken care of the important business of dealing with the illegal immigration into this country. You cannot begin to address the concerns of the people who are already here unless and until you have made certain that no more are coming in behind them.
WALLACE: So no change in the position of the party?
STEELE: No change in the position on the party on that --
WALLACE: You are one of the --
STEELE: But how we message that is where we messed up the last time. We were pegged as being insensitive, anti-immigrant, and nothing could be further from the truth. Because, you talk to those leaders in the Hispanic community, they will tell you the same thing: They understand the importance of making sure the United States borders are secure.
WALLACE: You are one of the co-founders of something called the Republican Leadership Council --
STEELE: Yep.
WALLACE: -- which supports candidates who favor abortion and gay rights.
STEELE: Yep.
WALLACE: Does the GOP need to do a better job of reaching out to people who hold those views?
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Border-fence dispute snares rare jaguars
CNN
May 5, 2008
DOUGLAS, Arizona (CNN) -- It's a tale of homeland security concerns blocking wildlife management, and the hue and cry that ensues.
When most people think of jaguars, they think of the jungles of Central and South America, not the remote desert ranges between the United States and Mexico.
That region is known as mountain lion country, and that's what rancher Warner Glenn thought he was tracking when he saddled up his mules on a summer day 12 years ago near Douglas, Arizona.
Glenn has hunted mountain lions for 60 years, since he was eight years old. But Glenn was stunned when he saw what his hunting dogs had chased up to a high mountain perch.
The rancher took what's believed to be the first photo of a live jaguar in the United States. But it wasn't his last. In 2006, some 40 miles away, Glenn and his hunting party again cornered a jaguar -- a different one.
Jaguars, an endangered species, have a breeding population in northern Mexico. Scientists believe there are no more than 120 left in the wild there.
It's believed that since 1910, the cats are only visitors north of the border. They have been virtually unstudied here until recently.
But Glenn and other conservationists worry that the possible return of breeding jaguars to the United States could be stopped in its tracks. The reason: the border fence.
Last month the Department of Homeland Security waived 30 environmental laws to finish 470 miles of the fence by the end of the year.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Congress that the agency continues to talk to some 600 landowners along the border to get their input. But in order to comply with the congressional mandate, he said, there is no time to deal with "unnecessary delays caused by administrative processes or potential litigation."
"We are currently in a lawless situation at the border," says Chertoff. "I feel an urgency to get this tactical infrastructure in. And although we're going to be respectful of the environment, we're going to be expeditious."
Two environmental groups, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club, have filed appeals with the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming the waivers are unconstitutional and set a dangerous precedent.
"National security and environmental protection do not have to be at odds with each other," says Defenders of Wildlife spokesman Matt Clark. "If we can drop this arbitrary deadline for constructing the fence and go through the proper procedures, then there are inevitably ways to minimize environmental impact, but as it is now it's throwing all of those laws out the window."
Mountain lion tracker Jack Childs also worries about the impact of the fence on local wildlife, especially the jaguar.
Childs captured the first video of a live jaguar in the late summer of 1996, a few months after Warner Glenn. Watch Childs and Glenn talk about efforts to preserve the jaguar »
"I knew historically there had been a few jaguars sighted in Arizona but in the last hundred years never in any numbers."
His encounter sparked a passion for the big cats. Along with wife Anna and biologist Emil McCain, he created the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project.
Childs and McCain hike into remote mountain areas where the jaguars roam and have placed more than 50 motion sensor cameras near the border. They've taken 69 photos of three different jaguars since 2001, including several of the same cat Childs first saw in 1996.
He has nicknamed that cat Macho B.
A jaguar's spots are like fingerprints -- each cat has a unique set. One of the spots on Macho B resembles a Pinocchio cartoon figure, and that's how they identify him.
"We spend a lot of time walking along the border during the daytime, and we actually find his tracks going through the fence, so we know for sure that he crosses back and forth," says Childs.
"A fence like that is going to inhibit wildlife movements and migrations back and forth. It's not going to effectively stop human traffic. They've got wire cutters and torches." See where the jaguars have been spotted »
Childs says the fence also has an impact on wildlife because drug runners and human traffickers have been pushed up into the mountain areas to avoid the fence in the lowland valleys.
"It's impacting the animals number one, what's going on down there. It's almost brought my wildlife study to a stop because they (the traffickers) are tearing down my cameras as fast as I'm putting them up because they think we're taking pictures of them."
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finds itself in a unique position. Its mission is wildlife and habitat protection, but it must uphold another federal agency's mission to override environmental concerns. Bill Radke, manager of the San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge, says the Border Patrol is trying to work with his agency.
"The hope is that by working with Border Patrol that we can meet the national security mandate and at the same time protect the wildlife," says Radke. "Border Patrol is putting up camera towers but are putting them up on areas that are off the refuge. They're working on barriers but not barriers that would impede wildlife and large animals like jaguars."
At 6 foot 6, with steely blue eyes, dressed in leather chaps astride his mule, rancher Warner Glenn is every inch the American cowboy. And he is a man forever changed by his encounters with the jaguar. He has written a book, "Eyes of Fire," about his experience. He says he'd like to "invite Mr. Bush to come out on a mule" so he can see "what's going on here in these mountains."
For Glenn, the cat represents all that is wild about the Southwest.
"It would be a loss to me that maybe my granddaughter or my daughter wouldn't be able to see one like I have. It's just an animal that's a beautiful, magnificent cat and they're having a little bit of trouble surviving. But they're doing it, and I would hate to see us do anything that would cause the survival of that cat to go backwards.
"I'm a livestock rancher, but I wouldn't mind donating a few calves to that jaguar, so to speak."
Biologist Emil McCain agrees.
"They are part of our natural heritage. They are part of the American West. They are part of the American wild as much as the bald eagle or the grizzly bear, and the jaguar is really special because it is such an elusive and beautiful creature [that] it evokes a sense of imagination and curiosity about the natural world."
Though the jaguar is elusive, conservationists say the animal is caught -- in the political crossfire at the border.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/05/05/jaguars.fence/?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCText
May 5, 2008
DOUGLAS, Arizona (CNN) -- It's a tale of homeland security concerns blocking wildlife management, and the hue and cry that ensues.
When most people think of jaguars, they think of the jungles of Central and South America, not the remote desert ranges between the United States and Mexico.
That region is known as mountain lion country, and that's what rancher Warner Glenn thought he was tracking when he saddled up his mules on a summer day 12 years ago near Douglas, Arizona.
Glenn has hunted mountain lions for 60 years, since he was eight years old. But Glenn was stunned when he saw what his hunting dogs had chased up to a high mountain perch.
The rancher took what's believed to be the first photo of a live jaguar in the United States. But it wasn't his last. In 2006, some 40 miles away, Glenn and his hunting party again cornered a jaguar -- a different one.
Jaguars, an endangered species, have a breeding population in northern Mexico. Scientists believe there are no more than 120 left in the wild there.
It's believed that since 1910, the cats are only visitors north of the border. They have been virtually unstudied here until recently.
But Glenn and other conservationists worry that the possible return of breeding jaguars to the United States could be stopped in its tracks. The reason: the border fence.
Last month the Department of Homeland Security waived 30 environmental laws to finish 470 miles of the fence by the end of the year.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Congress that the agency continues to talk to some 600 landowners along the border to get their input. But in order to comply with the congressional mandate, he said, there is no time to deal with "unnecessary delays caused by administrative processes or potential litigation."
"We are currently in a lawless situation at the border," says Chertoff. "I feel an urgency to get this tactical infrastructure in. And although we're going to be respectful of the environment, we're going to be expeditious."
Two environmental groups, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club, have filed appeals with the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming the waivers are unconstitutional and set a dangerous precedent.
"National security and environmental protection do not have to be at odds with each other," says Defenders of Wildlife spokesman Matt Clark. "If we can drop this arbitrary deadline for constructing the fence and go through the proper procedures, then there are inevitably ways to minimize environmental impact, but as it is now it's throwing all of those laws out the window."
Mountain lion tracker Jack Childs also worries about the impact of the fence on local wildlife, especially the jaguar.
Childs captured the first video of a live jaguar in the late summer of 1996, a few months after Warner Glenn. Watch Childs and Glenn talk about efforts to preserve the jaguar »
"I knew historically there had been a few jaguars sighted in Arizona but in the last hundred years never in any numbers."
His encounter sparked a passion for the big cats. Along with wife Anna and biologist Emil McCain, he created the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project.
Childs and McCain hike into remote mountain areas where the jaguars roam and have placed more than 50 motion sensor cameras near the border. They've taken 69 photos of three different jaguars since 2001, including several of the same cat Childs first saw in 1996.
He has nicknamed that cat Macho B.
A jaguar's spots are like fingerprints -- each cat has a unique set. One of the spots on Macho B resembles a Pinocchio cartoon figure, and that's how they identify him.
"We spend a lot of time walking along the border during the daytime, and we actually find his tracks going through the fence, so we know for sure that he crosses back and forth," says Childs.
"A fence like that is going to inhibit wildlife movements and migrations back and forth. It's not going to effectively stop human traffic. They've got wire cutters and torches." See where the jaguars have been spotted »
Childs says the fence also has an impact on wildlife because drug runners and human traffickers have been pushed up into the mountain areas to avoid the fence in the lowland valleys.
"It's impacting the animals number one, what's going on down there. It's almost brought my wildlife study to a stop because they (the traffickers) are tearing down my cameras as fast as I'm putting them up because they think we're taking pictures of them."
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finds itself in a unique position. Its mission is wildlife and habitat protection, but it must uphold another federal agency's mission to override environmental concerns. Bill Radke, manager of the San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge, says the Border Patrol is trying to work with his agency.
"The hope is that by working with Border Patrol that we can meet the national security mandate and at the same time protect the wildlife," says Radke. "Border Patrol is putting up camera towers but are putting them up on areas that are off the refuge. They're working on barriers but not barriers that would impede wildlife and large animals like jaguars."
At 6 foot 6, with steely blue eyes, dressed in leather chaps astride his mule, rancher Warner Glenn is every inch the American cowboy. And he is a man forever changed by his encounters with the jaguar. He has written a book, "Eyes of Fire," about his experience. He says he'd like to "invite Mr. Bush to come out on a mule" so he can see "what's going on here in these mountains."
For Glenn, the cat represents all that is wild about the Southwest.
"It would be a loss to me that maybe my granddaughter or my daughter wouldn't be able to see one like I have. It's just an animal that's a beautiful, magnificent cat and they're having a little bit of trouble surviving. But they're doing it, and I would hate to see us do anything that would cause the survival of that cat to go backwards.
"I'm a livestock rancher, but I wouldn't mind donating a few calves to that jaguar, so to speak."
Biologist Emil McCain agrees.
"They are part of our natural heritage. They are part of the American West. They are part of the American wild as much as the bald eagle or the grizzly bear, and the jaguar is really special because it is such an elusive and beautiful creature [that] it evokes a sense of imagination and curiosity about the natural world."
Though the jaguar is elusive, conservationists say the animal is caught -- in the political crossfire at the border.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/05/05/jaguars.fence/?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCText
Friday, October 3, 2008
Good neighbours make fences: America is building a border barrier that is both too tight and not tight enough
The Economist
October 2, 2008
FOR the past four years Steve Johnston has been dropping food, water and socks in the Sonoran desert. They are intended for illegal immigrants, who have often been walking for three or four days. Demand has never been greater. Recently Mr Johnston left 80 gallons of water beside a popular trail, and returned the next day to find all but eight gallons gone. He has encountered 40-strong groups walking in broad daylight. It is, oddly, proof that America’s growing border fence is having an effect on illegal immigration.
The reason so many immigrants are tramping through Mr Johnston’s neighbourhood can be found 12 miles to the south-west. Around Sasabe, steel cylinders have been sunk into the desert to create an imposing fence. That has blocked a popular migration route and driven people east. No More Deaths, a humanitarian group, has drawn up a map of migration routes based on how much water and food disappears. It looks like a leaf skeleton—a pattern of interlocking lines snaking north through the desert, then east to just above a checkpoint. From there, immigrants are driven to Tucson and Phoenix, whence they travel to wherever there are jobs.
By the end of this year the American government is supposed to have erected 670 miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Roughly half of the barrier is designed to stop everything bigger than a jackrabbit; the other half will let people through but stop vehicles. It is just part of a drive, stepped up in the past two years, to clamp down on illegal immigration and drug-smuggling. The Border Patrol is swelling from fewer than 6,000 officers in 1996 to more than 18,000 by next year. Unmanned watchtowers bristling with cameras and heat sensors are being developed. Finally, checks at proper border crossings are becoming more rigorous.
The fence is behind schedule and well over budget, and the network of electronic watchtowers is even further from deployment. But enough has been built, strengthened and staffed to make it clear what kind of border the next president will inherit. America is creating a barrier that is at once much too porous and rather too tight.
Until fairly recently the western half of the US-Mexican border was largely abstract. “As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless,” wrote John Russell Bartlett, who surveyed the area for the American government in the 1850s. The border was marked at first by piles of stones, then by concrete obelisks. Over time the occasional barbed-wire fence went up, but the border was permeable. “You could ride your bike across it,” says Michael Gomez, who grew up five blocks from the border and is now mayor of Douglas, Arizona.
Before the early 1990s those who wanted to cross illegally generally headed for the cities of Tijuana and Juárez. They would wait until night, scale the puny fence and dash for San Diego and El Paso. It was a simple matter of outnumbering the Border Patrol. Then, beginning in 1993, taller fences began to go up in the busiest sections of California and Texas. The assumption was that physical barriers would stop crossers in the cities, and geography would stop them elsewhere.
The first assumption turned out to be correct: between 1994 and 2000 the number of apprehensions around San Diego plunged by two-thirds. The second did not. Rather than giving up, immigrants converged on the border’s thinly-policed midsection, braving sun and snakes on long hikes through the desert. In the late 1990s the number of apprehensions shot up in the 260-mile Tucson sector (see chart). So did deaths. Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith of the University of Arizona reckons 125 people died trying to cross the desert in the 1990s. Since 2000 the death toll has been more than 1,000. By contrast, fewer than 300 people died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in its 28-year history.
As illegal immigrants began to funnel through Arizona, attitudes hardened. In 2004 the state’s voters approved a measure intended to deny public benefits to illegals. It was reminiscent of an initiative that Californians had supported in the previous decade, when their state was the central conduit for immigration. Two years later Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s Democratic governor, harried the federal government into sending National Guard troops to the border. In 2007 she signed a law stepping up penalties on businesses that knowingly employed illegal workers.
Even political moderates have become advocates for the border fence. Arizona’s senior senator is a good example. John McCain has long been an advocate for “comprehensive” immigration reform—Washington-speak for a bill that would allow some illegal immigrants to become citizens. In the past few months, though, he has insisted that the border must be sealed first. Mr McCain’s change of heart was probably necessary to get him through the Republican primaries. Yet it is also in harmony with the more strident tone of public opinion in his home state.
Opinions are more nuanced closer to Mexico. David Walker, whose family owns a ranch that spans ten miles of the Arizona-Sonora border, describes the fence as “kind of a Band-Aid”. The new pedestrian fence that edges his property has stemmed the flow of immigrants but not stopped it. By means of ladders, blow-torches and screwdrivers, immigrants are still getting through. They drop litter, which is harmful (“Cattle are dumb—they’ll eat plastic water bottles”) and break cisterns trying to get fresh water. But Mr Walker regards such things as fairly minor nuisances.
He is more concerned about the drug-traffickers who once tried to run him over. So are others. “I’m not a bit afraid of the little Mexicans coming across the border to work,” says one woman who runs a ranch near the border. “It’s the drug lords that worry me.” She is right to be worried.
New Tijuana moods
Though the drug trade and the violence that goes with it have long been features of the border, the past few years have seen both a rise in violence and a change in its nature. The decision of Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president, to use the army against drug-trafficking gangs has led to an arms race and provoked turf wars along the border, from Tijuana to Matamoros. The city of Nogales, Sonora (across the border from Nogales, Arizona) has seen 72 murders so far this year, compared with 44 in 2007.
Despite talk of a united front, the Mexican authorities are divided over how to tackle the problem. Marco Antonio Martinez Dabdoub, the mayor of Nogales, reckons the federal government ought to be more heavy-handed. “This should be like the famous surge in Baghdad,” he says. Yet Arturo Ramirez Camacho, the head of Nogales’s police force, says that the deployment of the army has served only to provoke more violence. It has been hard to replace the 188 officers who have been sacked for corruption.
So far the surge of violence in Mexican border towns has been largely confined to the narcos and the police. One journalist in Nogales estimates that all but one of the murders so far this year have involved someone connected with the drug trade. Alvaro Navarro Gárate, who is in charge of promoting economic development for the city of Juárez, south of El Paso, says the violence has not yet deterred economic investment. Although some executives fret about being kidnapped, the lack of infrastructure is more off-putting.
The rise of organised crime has, however, changed patterns of illegal immigration. Ten years ago people-smuggling was a casual, low-margin business—a “mom-and-pop” operation, as locals call it. As crossing the border became harder, and the coyotes’ fees rose from about $500 to more than $2,000, the cartels saw a chance for profit. Many of those who traipse through western Arizona these days do so at the pleasure of the Sinaloa cartel, which also runs drugs across the border (although rarely at the same time as people). Its henchmen can be brutal and dishonest, but they are also pretty good at their jobs.
Counting fish in the sea
The fence is undoubtedly changing patterns of illegal immigration. But is it staunching the flow? The Border Patrol points to the fact that they are catching fewer people. Yet this is a very imperfect measure, rather like estimating the number of fish in the sea from those hauled up in fishermen’s nets. The figures do not count those who make it, and they double-count people who keep trying. Remittances to Mexico (see chart above) provide a better picture. These were rising until recently, largely because immigrants began to send more money through formal channels. Now they are falling, but not by much.
For more than ten years, Wayne Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego has been surveying people in high-emigration areas of Mexico. He finds that fewer than half of all would-be illegal immigrants are apprehended on any given trip, and virtually all get through eventually. Mexicans keep trying even though they know the border has become more dangerous. In an unpublished study, Mr Cornelius reports that more than 30% of Oaxacans who plan to steal across the border know somebody who has died trying.
There is a more obvious reason for the recent slowdown in illegal immigration. Construction and landscaping jobs, a common source of employment for Latino immigrants both legal and illegal, have disappeared as the housing market has collapsed. In the past year the Hispanic unemployment rate has risen from 5.4% to 8.0%. Among Hispanics aged 16 to 19 the rate is 22.8%. This deters would-be workers from crossing the border and curtails the ability of people already in America to pay for their relatives to make the trip.
Even if tougher border enforcement has slowed the movement of people, this is not quite the good news it seems. Until recently Mexicans crossed back and forth across the border as work and family demanded. Many years ago Mr Walker’s ranch employed a couple of “wetbacks” (the term was not so derogatory as it is today) who would work half a year each, returning to their families in the off-season.
These days, says Ms Rubio-Goldsmith, migration is not circular but linear. If people come they tend to stay, because the cost and difficulty of crossing the border have increased so steeply. They are more likely to bring their families: in the Sonoran desert, says Mr Johnston, about a quarter of the immigrants are women and children. As immigrants put down deep roots in America, villages in Oaxaca that once lacked young men are becoming utterly depopulated. The border fence may be deterring illegal immigration, but it is not reducing the number of illegal immigrants. It is also annoying people.
Not neighbourly
Ten years ago a group of mayors and other officials on both sides of the line formed the Texas Border Coalition. At first it promoted infrastructure projects, but it is now focused on fighting the fence, which almost everyone in South Texas opposes. They say that it is not neighbourly, that it will be a waste of money, and that it will cut Texans off from the Rio Grande, which marks the border in much of the state.
Texas’s two Republican senators are keener on the fence, but not much. Kay Bailey Hutchinson wrote an amendment to a spending bill that allowed the Department of Homeland Security greater latitude to decide where it should run. Hardliners argued that this was a way of “gutting” the more specific Secure Fence Act of 2006. The state’s other senator, John Cornyn, insists that despite voting for the Secure Fence Act, he doesn’t think it will be built.
Such coolness, which may seem strange in such a politically conservative state, is partly a product of economics. During the first half of this year almost 80% of all US-Mexican trade by value passed through Texas. The state’s border towns have benefited from NAFTA, which was signed 15 years ago. In July unemployment in the McAllen area was 7.8%, down from 25% in 1990.
Texans’ sanguine attitude is also a matter of demography. When the last census was taken, in 2000, Arizona, California and Texas were all between one-quarter and one-third Hispanic. But their border regions look utterly different. Arizona, which is currently America’s fastest-growing state, has experienced a wave of white immigrants—the Midwestern “snowbirds”—who have little experience of Latino culture. Its four border counties were 34% Hispanic in 2000.
California’s two border counties, which are thick with retirees and military families, were just 28% Hispanic. Texas’s border counties, by contrast, were 85% Hispanic.
Margaret Dorsey, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who studies Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley, says many local families can trace their roots to the mid-18th-century Spanish land-grant programme. Border Texans often speak fluent Spanish and have family and friends on the other side of the river. Students commute from Mexico to the university in El Paso, crossing in a special line that allows them to make it to class on time. They even pay instate tuition rates.
That would be unthinkable in Arizona, where the fence is broadly popular. Yet Arizonans have plenty of gripes about the tightening border. Increasingly, the problem is less the ease of illegal immigration than the difficulty of legal migration.
Roughly three-quarters of people who cross legally from Mexico into Arizona do so in order to shop. As a result, streets close to the fence have become emporiums for things that are more expensive or harder to come by on the other side. That means handbags and children’s clothes on the American side, pharmaceuticals and beer on the Mexican side. Because most twin towns are bottom-heavy (Nogales, Arizona has just 20,000 inhabitants, compared with 190,000 in Nogales, Sonora), American towns depend a lot more on Mexican shoppers than the other way around.
Jaime Fontes, the city manager of Nogales, Arizona, reckons Mexican visitors account for roughly 65% of all retail sales in his city. As border officers become more finicky about documents and more zealous in searching vehicles, he worries trade will suffer. Local businessmen say it already has. Chang Lee, who runs a clothes shop just north of the border, explains in fluent Spanglish that Mexicans are spending “too mucho time” waiting to cross, which leaves too little time for shopping. They come running into his shop, clutching fistfuls of bills and begging him to sell them something before they have to return. He estimates that trade has fallen 20-30% in the past year.
In Douglas, the number of vehicle passengers crossing during the first half of this year averaged 321,000 a month—down from 708,000 a month in the first half of 2002. There are more pedestrians, but pedestrians do not buy as much. Manufacturing firms that have set up maquilas in Mexico are suffering too. Two years ago a group of economists calculated that delays at the Tijuana border were costing San Diego County and Baja California more than $4 billion each year.
The tortilla curtain
Over time such gripes are likely to become louder, while complaints about illegal immigration will probably become more muted. Hispanics are slowly acquiring political heft to match their large presence in America; in some states, such as California and New Mexico, they are already powerful enough to punish tough talk. Perhaps more important, Mexico is changing. The country has zoomed towards a first-world birth rate. In the late 1970s the average woman could expect to give birth to five children; now she gives birth to two. As a result, the potential supply of border-crossers will gradually drop.
Yet they will not stop coming. If the Mexican border is, in the old expression, a “tortilla curtain”, it is still floppy enough to allow people and drugs through. A truly impregnable border, of the kind that Mr McCain is demanding, would involve two layers of fencing 2,000 miles long, with a large no-man’s land in the middle and plenty of watchtowers. The fence would have to look as it does near San Diego, or as it used to in Berlin. This would involve virtually rasing several towns.
Travelling through Texas in the 1850s, Bartlett encountered plenty of immigrant workers. They found employment in the copper mines for the same reason they now toil in America’s building sites and lettuce fields:
“Labour is cheap and abundant in Mexico. At El Paso, Mexican labourers could be had for sixty-two and a half cents per day, they finding themselves; but men could doubtless be procured at even less price.”
While the wage gap between America and Mexico persists, Mexicans will continue to “find themselves” in the American labour force, fence or no fence.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12332971
October 2, 2008
FOR the past four years Steve Johnston has been dropping food, water and socks in the Sonoran desert. They are intended for illegal immigrants, who have often been walking for three or four days. Demand has never been greater. Recently Mr Johnston left 80 gallons of water beside a popular trail, and returned the next day to find all but eight gallons gone. He has encountered 40-strong groups walking in broad daylight. It is, oddly, proof that America’s growing border fence is having an effect on illegal immigration.
The reason so many immigrants are tramping through Mr Johnston’s neighbourhood can be found 12 miles to the south-west. Around Sasabe, steel cylinders have been sunk into the desert to create an imposing fence. That has blocked a popular migration route and driven people east. No More Deaths, a humanitarian group, has drawn up a map of migration routes based on how much water and food disappears. It looks like a leaf skeleton—a pattern of interlocking lines snaking north through the desert, then east to just above a checkpoint. From there, immigrants are driven to Tucson and Phoenix, whence they travel to wherever there are jobs.
By the end of this year the American government is supposed to have erected 670 miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Roughly half of the barrier is designed to stop everything bigger than a jackrabbit; the other half will let people through but stop vehicles. It is just part of a drive, stepped up in the past two years, to clamp down on illegal immigration and drug-smuggling. The Border Patrol is swelling from fewer than 6,000 officers in 1996 to more than 18,000 by next year. Unmanned watchtowers bristling with cameras and heat sensors are being developed. Finally, checks at proper border crossings are becoming more rigorous.
The fence is behind schedule and well over budget, and the network of electronic watchtowers is even further from deployment. But enough has been built, strengthened and staffed to make it clear what kind of border the next president will inherit. America is creating a barrier that is at once much too porous and rather too tight.
Until fairly recently the western half of the US-Mexican border was largely abstract. “As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless,” wrote John Russell Bartlett, who surveyed the area for the American government in the 1850s. The border was marked at first by piles of stones, then by concrete obelisks. Over time the occasional barbed-wire fence went up, but the border was permeable. “You could ride your bike across it,” says Michael Gomez, who grew up five blocks from the border and is now mayor of Douglas, Arizona.
Before the early 1990s those who wanted to cross illegally generally headed for the cities of Tijuana and Juárez. They would wait until night, scale the puny fence and dash for San Diego and El Paso. It was a simple matter of outnumbering the Border Patrol. Then, beginning in 1993, taller fences began to go up in the busiest sections of California and Texas. The assumption was that physical barriers would stop crossers in the cities, and geography would stop them elsewhere.
The first assumption turned out to be correct: between 1994 and 2000 the number of apprehensions around San Diego plunged by two-thirds. The second did not. Rather than giving up, immigrants converged on the border’s thinly-policed midsection, braving sun and snakes on long hikes through the desert. In the late 1990s the number of apprehensions shot up in the 260-mile Tucson sector (see chart). So did deaths. Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith of the University of Arizona reckons 125 people died trying to cross the desert in the 1990s. Since 2000 the death toll has been more than 1,000. By contrast, fewer than 300 people died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in its 28-year history.
As illegal immigrants began to funnel through Arizona, attitudes hardened. In 2004 the state’s voters approved a measure intended to deny public benefits to illegals. It was reminiscent of an initiative that Californians had supported in the previous decade, when their state was the central conduit for immigration. Two years later Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s Democratic governor, harried the federal government into sending National Guard troops to the border. In 2007 she signed a law stepping up penalties on businesses that knowingly employed illegal workers.
Even political moderates have become advocates for the border fence. Arizona’s senior senator is a good example. John McCain has long been an advocate for “comprehensive” immigration reform—Washington-speak for a bill that would allow some illegal immigrants to become citizens. In the past few months, though, he has insisted that the border must be sealed first. Mr McCain’s change of heart was probably necessary to get him through the Republican primaries. Yet it is also in harmony with the more strident tone of public opinion in his home state.
Opinions are more nuanced closer to Mexico. David Walker, whose family owns a ranch that spans ten miles of the Arizona-Sonora border, describes the fence as “kind of a Band-Aid”. The new pedestrian fence that edges his property has stemmed the flow of immigrants but not stopped it. By means of ladders, blow-torches and screwdrivers, immigrants are still getting through. They drop litter, which is harmful (“Cattle are dumb—they’ll eat plastic water bottles”) and break cisterns trying to get fresh water. But Mr Walker regards such things as fairly minor nuisances.
He is more concerned about the drug-traffickers who once tried to run him over. So are others. “I’m not a bit afraid of the little Mexicans coming across the border to work,” says one woman who runs a ranch near the border. “It’s the drug lords that worry me.” She is right to be worried.
New Tijuana moods
Though the drug trade and the violence that goes with it have long been features of the border, the past few years have seen both a rise in violence and a change in its nature. The decision of Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president, to use the army against drug-trafficking gangs has led to an arms race and provoked turf wars along the border, from Tijuana to Matamoros. The city of Nogales, Sonora (across the border from Nogales, Arizona) has seen 72 murders so far this year, compared with 44 in 2007.
Despite talk of a united front, the Mexican authorities are divided over how to tackle the problem. Marco Antonio Martinez Dabdoub, the mayor of Nogales, reckons the federal government ought to be more heavy-handed. “This should be like the famous surge in Baghdad,” he says. Yet Arturo Ramirez Camacho, the head of Nogales’s police force, says that the deployment of the army has served only to provoke more violence. It has been hard to replace the 188 officers who have been sacked for corruption.
So far the surge of violence in Mexican border towns has been largely confined to the narcos and the police. One journalist in Nogales estimates that all but one of the murders so far this year have involved someone connected with the drug trade. Alvaro Navarro Gárate, who is in charge of promoting economic development for the city of Juárez, south of El Paso, says the violence has not yet deterred economic investment. Although some executives fret about being kidnapped, the lack of infrastructure is more off-putting.
The rise of organised crime has, however, changed patterns of illegal immigration. Ten years ago people-smuggling was a casual, low-margin business—a “mom-and-pop” operation, as locals call it. As crossing the border became harder, and the coyotes’ fees rose from about $500 to more than $2,000, the cartels saw a chance for profit. Many of those who traipse through western Arizona these days do so at the pleasure of the Sinaloa cartel, which also runs drugs across the border (although rarely at the same time as people). Its henchmen can be brutal and dishonest, but they are also pretty good at their jobs.
Counting fish in the sea
The fence is undoubtedly changing patterns of illegal immigration. But is it staunching the flow? The Border Patrol points to the fact that they are catching fewer people. Yet this is a very imperfect measure, rather like estimating the number of fish in the sea from those hauled up in fishermen’s nets. The figures do not count those who make it, and they double-count people who keep trying. Remittances to Mexico (see chart above) provide a better picture. These were rising until recently, largely because immigrants began to send more money through formal channels. Now they are falling, but not by much.
For more than ten years, Wayne Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego has been surveying people in high-emigration areas of Mexico. He finds that fewer than half of all would-be illegal immigrants are apprehended on any given trip, and virtually all get through eventually. Mexicans keep trying even though they know the border has become more dangerous. In an unpublished study, Mr Cornelius reports that more than 30% of Oaxacans who plan to steal across the border know somebody who has died trying.
There is a more obvious reason for the recent slowdown in illegal immigration. Construction and landscaping jobs, a common source of employment for Latino immigrants both legal and illegal, have disappeared as the housing market has collapsed. In the past year the Hispanic unemployment rate has risen from 5.4% to 8.0%. Among Hispanics aged 16 to 19 the rate is 22.8%. This deters would-be workers from crossing the border and curtails the ability of people already in America to pay for their relatives to make the trip.
Even if tougher border enforcement has slowed the movement of people, this is not quite the good news it seems. Until recently Mexicans crossed back and forth across the border as work and family demanded. Many years ago Mr Walker’s ranch employed a couple of “wetbacks” (the term was not so derogatory as it is today) who would work half a year each, returning to their families in the off-season.
These days, says Ms Rubio-Goldsmith, migration is not circular but linear. If people come they tend to stay, because the cost and difficulty of crossing the border have increased so steeply. They are more likely to bring their families: in the Sonoran desert, says Mr Johnston, about a quarter of the immigrants are women and children. As immigrants put down deep roots in America, villages in Oaxaca that once lacked young men are becoming utterly depopulated. The border fence may be deterring illegal immigration, but it is not reducing the number of illegal immigrants. It is also annoying people.
Not neighbourly
Ten years ago a group of mayors and other officials on both sides of the line formed the Texas Border Coalition. At first it promoted infrastructure projects, but it is now focused on fighting the fence, which almost everyone in South Texas opposes. They say that it is not neighbourly, that it will be a waste of money, and that it will cut Texans off from the Rio Grande, which marks the border in much of the state.
Texas’s two Republican senators are keener on the fence, but not much. Kay Bailey Hutchinson wrote an amendment to a spending bill that allowed the Department of Homeland Security greater latitude to decide where it should run. Hardliners argued that this was a way of “gutting” the more specific Secure Fence Act of 2006. The state’s other senator, John Cornyn, insists that despite voting for the Secure Fence Act, he doesn’t think it will be built.
Such coolness, which may seem strange in such a politically conservative state, is partly a product of economics. During the first half of this year almost 80% of all US-Mexican trade by value passed through Texas. The state’s border towns have benefited from NAFTA, which was signed 15 years ago. In July unemployment in the McAllen area was 7.8%, down from 25% in 1990.
Texans’ sanguine attitude is also a matter of demography. When the last census was taken, in 2000, Arizona, California and Texas were all between one-quarter and one-third Hispanic. But their border regions look utterly different. Arizona, which is currently America’s fastest-growing state, has experienced a wave of white immigrants—the Midwestern “snowbirds”—who have little experience of Latino culture. Its four border counties were 34% Hispanic in 2000.
California’s two border counties, which are thick with retirees and military families, were just 28% Hispanic. Texas’s border counties, by contrast, were 85% Hispanic.
Margaret Dorsey, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who studies Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley, says many local families can trace their roots to the mid-18th-century Spanish land-grant programme. Border Texans often speak fluent Spanish and have family and friends on the other side of the river. Students commute from Mexico to the university in El Paso, crossing in a special line that allows them to make it to class on time. They even pay instate tuition rates.
That would be unthinkable in Arizona, where the fence is broadly popular. Yet Arizonans have plenty of gripes about the tightening border. Increasingly, the problem is less the ease of illegal immigration than the difficulty of legal migration.
Roughly three-quarters of people who cross legally from Mexico into Arizona do so in order to shop. As a result, streets close to the fence have become emporiums for things that are more expensive or harder to come by on the other side. That means handbags and children’s clothes on the American side, pharmaceuticals and beer on the Mexican side. Because most twin towns are bottom-heavy (Nogales, Arizona has just 20,000 inhabitants, compared with 190,000 in Nogales, Sonora), American towns depend a lot more on Mexican shoppers than the other way around.
Jaime Fontes, the city manager of Nogales, Arizona, reckons Mexican visitors account for roughly 65% of all retail sales in his city. As border officers become more finicky about documents and more zealous in searching vehicles, he worries trade will suffer. Local businessmen say it already has. Chang Lee, who runs a clothes shop just north of the border, explains in fluent Spanglish that Mexicans are spending “too mucho time” waiting to cross, which leaves too little time for shopping. They come running into his shop, clutching fistfuls of bills and begging him to sell them something before they have to return. He estimates that trade has fallen 20-30% in the past year.
In Douglas, the number of vehicle passengers crossing during the first half of this year averaged 321,000 a month—down from 708,000 a month in the first half of 2002. There are more pedestrians, but pedestrians do not buy as much. Manufacturing firms that have set up maquilas in Mexico are suffering too. Two years ago a group of economists calculated that delays at the Tijuana border were costing San Diego County and Baja California more than $4 billion each year.
The tortilla curtain
Over time such gripes are likely to become louder, while complaints about illegal immigration will probably become more muted. Hispanics are slowly acquiring political heft to match their large presence in America; in some states, such as California and New Mexico, they are already powerful enough to punish tough talk. Perhaps more important, Mexico is changing. The country has zoomed towards a first-world birth rate. In the late 1970s the average woman could expect to give birth to five children; now she gives birth to two. As a result, the potential supply of border-crossers will gradually drop.
Yet they will not stop coming. If the Mexican border is, in the old expression, a “tortilla curtain”, it is still floppy enough to allow people and drugs through. A truly impregnable border, of the kind that Mr McCain is demanding, would involve two layers of fencing 2,000 miles long, with a large no-man’s land in the middle and plenty of watchtowers. The fence would have to look as it does near San Diego, or as it used to in Berlin. This would involve virtually rasing several towns.
Travelling through Texas in the 1850s, Bartlett encountered plenty of immigrant workers. They found employment in the copper mines for the same reason they now toil in America’s building sites and lettuce fields:
“Labour is cheap and abundant in Mexico. At El Paso, Mexican labourers could be had for sixty-two and a half cents per day, they finding themselves; but men could doubtless be procured at even less price.”
While the wage gap between America and Mexico persists, Mexicans will continue to “find themselves” in the American labour force, fence or no fence.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12332971
Saturday, September 20, 2008
McCain, Obama Mislead on Immigration
Washington Post
September 20, 2008
INTERVIEWER: "You voted for the construction of the wall between Mexico and the United States..."
JOHN MCCAIN: "I didn't vote for an...I am not sure what you are talking about, but we can secure...our borders with walls and/or fences in urban areas, and then virtual fences, vehicle barriers.
INTERVIEWER: "But, you did vote for the wall."
MCCAIN: "I didn't vote for an...I don't know what you are exactly what you are referring to."
--Interview with Univision, Sept. 15, 2008.
Trolling for the votes of Hispanic Americans, John McCain distanced himself this week from plans to build a 700-mile wall along sections of the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border. He suggested that he preferred a "virtual" electronic wall, with actual physical fences only in urban areas. But that claim misrepresents his vote back in September 2006, when he helped pass the "Secure Fence Act."
The Facts
As a leading proponent of immigration reform, the Arizona senator long took the view that action designed to stop the flow of illegal aliens into the country should be combined with offering a path to legal citizenship to those that were already here. But he changed his position in 2006 as he prepared for his presidential bid, and voted for a law that was focused almost exclusively on keeping illegal aliens out. The law stipulates that a large stretch of the new wall would be built in McCain's home state of Arizona.
Most of the top presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, joined McCain in voting for the "Secure Fence Act," which passed the Senate by 80-19.
Questioned by the Spanish language television station Univision about his support for the fence, McCain claimed that he did not know what the interviewer was talking about. But the language of the legislation is very clear. Section 3 of the Act orders the Department of Homeland Security to oversee the construction of "at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors" along five sections of the border, totaling 700 miles.
In the meantime, the Obama campaign has also put out a television adaccusing McCain of "lying" to win Latino votes while supporting hardline Republican policies on immigration and other matters. The advertisement attempts to link McCain to the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who appears on screen along with quotes like "Shut your mouth or get out."
As several bloggers have pointed out, here and here, the Limbaugh quotes have been taken out of context. The attempt to link McCain to Limbaugh is also unfair, given the fact that the radio host has frequently criticized McCain, particularly on the issue of immigration reform.
The Pinocchio Test
Both McCain and Obama have taken liberties with the truth in seeking the support of Hispanic-Americans, who are emerging as a crucial voting bloc in the presidential election. McCain had a politically convenient memory lapse in forgetting his vote for a physical wall along long sections of the Mexican border, while Obama incorrectly suggested that his rival shares Limbaugh's ideas on immigration.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/09/mccain_obama_mislead_on_immigr.html
September 20, 2008
INTERVIEWER: "You voted for the construction of the wall between Mexico and the United States..."
JOHN MCCAIN: "I didn't vote for an...I am not sure what you are talking about, but we can secure...our borders with walls and/or fences in urban areas, and then virtual fences, vehicle barriers.
INTERVIEWER: "But, you did vote for the wall."
MCCAIN: "I didn't vote for an...I don't know what you are exactly what you are referring to."
--Interview with Univision, Sept. 15, 2008.
Trolling for the votes of Hispanic Americans, John McCain distanced himself this week from plans to build a 700-mile wall along sections of the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border. He suggested that he preferred a "virtual" electronic wall, with actual physical fences only in urban areas. But that claim misrepresents his vote back in September 2006, when he helped pass the "Secure Fence Act."
The Facts
As a leading proponent of immigration reform, the Arizona senator long took the view that action designed to stop the flow of illegal aliens into the country should be combined with offering a path to legal citizenship to those that were already here. But he changed his position in 2006 as he prepared for his presidential bid, and voted for a law that was focused almost exclusively on keeping illegal aliens out. The law stipulates that a large stretch of the new wall would be built in McCain's home state of Arizona.
Most of the top presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, joined McCain in voting for the "Secure Fence Act," which passed the Senate by 80-19.
Questioned by the Spanish language television station Univision about his support for the fence, McCain claimed that he did not know what the interviewer was talking about. But the language of the legislation is very clear. Section 3 of the Act orders the Department of Homeland Security to oversee the construction of "at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors" along five sections of the border, totaling 700 miles.
In the meantime, the Obama campaign has also put out a television adaccusing McCain of "lying" to win Latino votes while supporting hardline Republican policies on immigration and other matters. The advertisement attempts to link McCain to the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who appears on screen along with quotes like "Shut your mouth or get out."
As several bloggers have pointed out, here and here, the Limbaugh quotes have been taken out of context. The attempt to link McCain to Limbaugh is also unfair, given the fact that the radio host has frequently criticized McCain, particularly on the issue of immigration reform.
The Pinocchio Test
Both McCain and Obama have taken liberties with the truth in seeking the support of Hispanic-Americans, who are emerging as a crucial voting bloc in the presidential election. McCain had a politically convenient memory lapse in forgetting his vote for a physical wall along long sections of the Mexican border, while Obama incorrectly suggested that his rival shares Limbaugh's ideas on immigration.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/09/mccain_obama_mislead_on_immigr.html
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