Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration

6. Breakdown: Failure in the Post-1986 U.S. Immigration System

105 Chapter 6 Breakdown: Failure in the Post-1986 U.S. Immigration System I f there is one constant in U.S. border policy, it is hypocrisy. Throughout the twentieth century the United States has arranged to import Mexican workers while pretending not to. With the sole exception of the 1930s, when the Great Depression effectively extinguished U.S. labor demand, politicians and public officials have persistently sought ways of accepting Mexicans as workers while limiting their claims as human beings. Only the formula by which this sleight of hand is achieved has changed over time, shifting from the legerdemain of a legal guest-worker program between 1942 and 1964, to the Potemkin Village of circular undocumented migration from 1965 to 1985, to the smoke and mirrors of “prevention through deterrence ” after 1986. Despite these charades, the benefits of Mexico-U.S. migration have historically exceeded the costs for all concerned. Since 1986, however, the self-contradictory policy of working to consolidate North American markets while blocking the integration of one particular market has needlessly driven up the costs and reduced the benefits of transnational migration. Although the balance may still be positive, the ratio is far from optimal, and in many ways the United States is doing serious damage to the social and economic fabric of both nations. In an era of massive state-sponsored integration and continent-wide free trade, the costs of U.S. hypocrisy have become unaffordable. The Sham of Border Control “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has it really fallen?” That is the well-known conundrum posed for meditation by Zen Bud- 106 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors dhism. It seems that politicians and officials in charge of U.S. border policy have meditated extensively on this thought, for post-IRCA border policies have had less to do with stopping undocumented migrants than with pushing them into remote sectors of the border where they will be neither seen nor heard, and most important, where they will not be videotaped. During the undocumented era the brunt of Mexican immigration was directed toward California. According to an analysis of census data by Jorge Durand and his colleagues (2000), 63 percent of all Mexicans who arrived in the United States from 1985 to 1990 went to California, more than four times the number of those who went to the next most popular destination, Texas, which accounted for just 15 percent of all arrivals (followed by Illinois at 5 percent). Given that California is the nation’s largest state, that Los Angeles is the nation’s second-largest city and the world’s media capital, and that San Diego is a large and politically conservative metropolitan area, the geography of undocumented migration practically guaranteed that it would become politically salient and socially visible in the context of a severe economic recession on the West Coast. By far the most active sector of the border during the 1980s was that separating San Diego from Tijuana, followed in order of importance by El Paso–Juarez and Laredo–Nuevo Laredo. Among undocumented migrants apprehended for illegal entry by the INS in 1986, for example, 45 percent were arrested in the San Diego sector alone, 21 percent in the El Paso sector, and 17 percent in the San Antonio sector (which includes Laredo). Through 1986, in other words, 85 percent of all undocumented migrants entered the United States through three narrow corridors, which together made up only a tiny fraction of the two-thousand-mile border (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 1987). Reflecting the geographic concentration of undocumented migration , the Border Patrol’s enforcement resources were likewise distributed unequally. Historically agency operations focused overwhelmingly on the San Diego and El Paso sectors; when the massive militarization of the border began in 1993, these two districts naturally led the way. Operation Blockade was launched in El Paso in 1993, and Operation Gatekeeper followed in San Diego in 1994. As the new “tortilla curtain ” of deterrence went up in these cities, migrants naturally began to go around the reinforced portions of the border, prompting U.S. authorities to extend their lines of enforcement outward. This pattern of deployment, response, and counterdeployment influenced the geography of migration in two ways. First, Operation Gatekeeper, by far the largest deployment of enforcement resources, deflected migrants Breakdown 107 Figure 6.1 Apprehension Probabilities and Border-Crossing Locations, 1980 to 1998...