America's borderline insecurity

Some of my e-mail correspondents in the U.S. forward me nutty chain letters from time to time. Beneath several layers of e-mail addresses is an anonymous rant that someone either made up or copied from a website somewhere without attribution. Topics range from Barack Obama's secret Muslim origins and plans to ruin America, to how all government is unproductive and bad, to how everyone in Western Europe and Canada is a communist because they have health care they can afford.

I often wonder whether the original sender — the one afraid to include his name — is some paranoid kid in his parents' basement or whether he's a psychology professor doing an experiment on people's belief in rumors.

Last week's chain letter was a little surprising, however, in that its assertions were true. It showed pictures like this of dry riverbeds in southern Arizona filled with plastic bottles and backpacks that illegal immigrants had left behind.

After walking hundreds of miles — often all the way from Honduras or Guatemala — these immigrants are led through the desert, across the Mexican-U.S. border, by people-smugglers who are often armed. After another 30 miles (50 km), they get close to civilization and leave their junk behind in a national park, so that they're not as easy to identify.

Between 10 and 20 million illegal immigrants — three to six percent of America's total population — live in the U.S. Many of them work on farms for very little money, which keeps the food in supermarkets inexpensive. This has been going on since the 1960s and possibly before that. It seems to benefit an entire industry enough that the federal government has never taken serious steps to stop it.

In the 2008 presidential primaries, several Republican candidates tried to make immigration an election issue, but the voters weren't interested. In the end, John McCain (who represents Arizona in the Senate) and Barack Obama decided not to spend much time talking about it.

Illegal immigration has actually declined since then, because word has gotten around that less work is available. Some people do continue to come in, however, and the government still hasn't been stopping them. So others have tried to do what the government wouldn't.

Obama under pressure

In Arizona, vigilantes — including the authors of the anonymously e-mailed website text — go into the desert and look for illegal immigrants, whom they report to the U.S. Border Patrol. And in a bold move this spring, the state of Arizona gave itself the power to arrest illegal immigrants in what was seen as a contest of state vs. federal authority.

Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderón, meeting last week in Washington, condemned that move. Calderón, of course, can only be happy to get rid of the poorest layer of his society. But soon after the meeting, Obama came under political pressure. He's now decided to send as many as 1,200 National Guard troops to help patrol the border.

This temporary measure may help. After all, what good is it to fingerprint tourists at the airport when anyone can bring in drugs and weapons across the desert?

What would really help is a visa program for agricultural workers. And what would help even more is using America's economic power to fight the poverty that causes the exodus from Central America in the first place.

By the way: the illegal immigrants aren't all from Central America either. Nearly 20 percent come from Europe, Canada, Asia and the rest of the world. They just don't come in through Arizona.