Is Fence Protection or Political Gesture?

CONGRESS’ FAILURE to enact comprehensive immigration reform continues its toxic spill.

The Texas Border Coalition, which includes several of that state’s border cities, has filed a lawsuit charging that in its hellbent rush to erect a 700-mile fence along part of the border with Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security has run roughshod over property rights.

If so, who’s surprised? The Bush administration has casually laid waste to no end of policies, regulations and laws to get its pet project built. Thirty environmental and land use laws have been waived.

The fence looks to be a major environmental blunder in the making. Sundering habitats, barring animals from their water sources and uprooting vegetation, the project threatens, among other wildlife, ocelots and jaguars. In one four-county area of Texas, 17 animal and plant species are threatened or endangered.

And all this for a whimsy that virtually no one with experience in the field believes will do much more than marginally lower illegal immigration – and that only temporarily until ways around, under and over the fence develop.

The fence is more a political gesture than a border protection.

Even so, surely the areas most impacted by illegal immigration are pleased at even a little relief. Umm, maybe not.

Certainly not in small Postville, Iowa, where nearly 400 workers in a local agricultural processing plant were recently arrested. Civic and school officials are uneasy with the arrests and local merchants are anxious at best.

The payroll and its resulting customers have been vital to the town. There are no replacement workers at hand.

Families that had become familiar neighbors and friends have been decimated. The local Catholic church offered sanctuary to many, with the apparent sympathy of much of the general community.

Arizona, where illegal immigrants account for 12 percent of the work force, double the national average, last year enacted the nation’s toughest enforcement statute. Businesses that knowingly hire an illegal lose their licenses for 10 days. For a second offense, the business license is revoked, period.

With business forgoing expansions as a result and shutting down some operations, and with companies outside Arizona hesitating to expand there, now the legislature is hurrying to set up a temporary guest-worker program to bring in the workers it acted only a year ago to keep out.

Deportations nationally have been stepped up from a little more than 500 six years ago to nearly 5,000 a year currently. But as is so often its way, the Bush administration has bungled the operation.

Deportees are piling up in makeshift detention centers. Health care is iffy and some detainees have died from apparent medical neglect. Hundreds, to make their removal easier, have been injected with psychotropic drugs, with some being virtually dragged onto airplanes.

This array of human pain, economic disruption and national embarrassment is thanks to hysteria whipped by nativist bloggers and media demagogues. Congress, panicked, rejected reforms that would have made border enforcement more effective by making accommodation for longtime illegal residents and for licensed temporary workers where the need for them could not otherwise be met.

At least the illegal immigrants show up for their jobs. That’s more than you can say from the quailing members of Congress.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail him at teepencolumn@earthlink.net.

(c) 2008 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.