Getting Smart at the Border

SAN DIEGO -- Recently, after I took a jab at right-wingers with closed minds who want closed borders, a reader asked:

"Are you for open borders and the elimination of the Border Patrol? If you are not, please tell your readers what level of enforcement you would be for. Please come clean with your readers."

Fine. Let me come clean.

I used the phrases "closed minds" and "closed borders" deliberately. Your mind has to be at least partly closed if you embrace the simplistic thinking that we can seal the U.S.-Mexico border -- which stretches for nearly 2,000 miles -- by just throwing more tax dollars at the problem.

By the way, the U.S.-Mexico border is the only border that right-wingers care about; the longer boundary between the United States and Canada isn't a concern. That's not likely to change even after last week's tragedy in Ottawa, where 32-year-old Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Canadian-born convert to Islam, killed a soldier at the Canadian war memorial before storming Parliament and being shot dead by the sergeant-at-arms.

What if this type of incident had occurred in Mexico City? Imagine the reaction of those Republican members of Congress who have for several weeks irresponsibly claimed, with no evidence, that Islamic State militants have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. They'd go ballistic. It's the North American double standard, where the people many Americans are most afraid of seem to be those with a darker complexion.

Speaking of double standards, many conservatives vehemently resist the concept of buying your way out of a fix when it comes to spending for education or health care or inner-city development, but they can't wait to embrace the tactic when discussing the border. All of a sudden, money solves everything.

How is that working out? Every year, Americans spend more than $60 billion on the budget for the Department of Homeland Security. And last summer, a bunch of child refugees from Central America brought the immigration machinery to a grinding halt.

In fact, throwing money at the border sometimes backfires. When we build walls and fences, we think we're keeping out migrants but we're ensuring that we'll end up with more of them. We cage them in on this side of the border by making it hard for them to go home because they're afraid they won't be able to return -- not without paying a fortune to smugglers.

According to what I've been told by Border Patrol agents and supervisors, the coyotes (human smugglers) on the other side of the border give would-be migrants a menu of choices of how to get across. What you pay is determined by where you want to enter, how soon you'd like to make the trip, and whether you prefer to go by land, sea or tunnel. Once you make your selection, the smuggler quotes you a price. But the final price is determined by the difficulty of the journey and the amount of risk involved. When Americans build higher walls and fences, or increase the number of Border Patrol agents, we increase the risk -- and so smugglers respond by raising their rates.

Fifteen years ago, a migrant who wasn't picky about how he crossed could make the trip for $500. Today, the average rate for expedited passage is closer to $5,000. If Americans spend another $500 million to build more fencing or hire more agents, human traffickers will probably raise their rates by another $1,000 per migrant. So, every time we fire off a round at our adversary, we put more money in his pocket, and that makes him stronger. That's self-defeating.

Here's what I support. And it's not open borders, or eliminating the Border Patrol. Like any country, the United States has the right and responsibility to secure its borders -- both of them -- to keep its people safe. But you don't do this by simply doubling the size of the Border Patrol from about 20,000 agents to more than 40,000 -- as the Senate immigration bill proposed. You do what the experts -- those rank-and-file Border Patrol agents -- suggest. They don't want more agents. What they really need are better roads, tunnel-detection devices and the latest computerized surveillance equipment so they can track who's trying to cross the border from miles away and send agents to stop them.

I'm all for being tougher on the border. But can't we be smarter too?

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.