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Border Security? It’s Better Than Ever

Posted July 2, 2010 by Leslie Josephs
Categories: Federal Immigration Policy

The United States’ southern border is more secure than ever, and calls to secure it are just a means to hijack comprehensive immigration reform, a panel of experts, including a lawmaker and a former Department of Homeland Security official said this week.

The Center for American Progress’ report “Brick by Brick: A Half-Decade of Immigration Enforcement and the Need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform” by Stewart Verdery, Jr., the former assistant secretary for Policy and Planning at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, found that the border is more secure than ever, with more security agents on the ground, and more barriers, fencing, and surveillance in place.

Some members on the Center for American Progress panel, held after the report’s release, said that politicians are disseminating erroneous information about border violence in order to push their immigration agenda, including the contentious SB 1070.

“Talk about this border violence has really escalated fear,” Arizona state Representative Kyrsten Sinema said, arguing that it prevents politicians from addressing real problems in the system.

“People who talk about border enforcement first keep moving the goal post,” David A. Martin, principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security. Martin slammed the myth that undocumented immigrants are creating crime waves in border towns. “It’s artificial to separate border security and make that a prerequisite for further reform… Crime levels in border towns have remained flat or have dropped,” he said.

The safety of the border was echoed by President Barack Obama in his July 1 immigration speech, in which he called on Congress to pass comprehensive laws to reform the “creaky” immigration system. Reform would require bipartisan cooperation not typically seen in an election year.

In his speech, Obama said that reform was the answer to deal with the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and brushed off the idea that security can be achieved simply by sealing off the border.

“The southern border is more secure today than at any time in the past 20 years,” he said. “But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a champion of SB 1070, has demanded funding from Washington to complete a fence along the border with Mexico, as well as more troops, based on claims about border violence and drug smuggling.

Tags : arizona, border security, jan brewer, sb 1070

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