For more than a decade, there has been tension in American politics about what to do about security at the Mexican border. Some see illegal immigration from Latin America as a problem to be solved by paths to citizenship or open borders. Others consider a strong, strategic wall the answer. Yet despite popular support for the latter, the former continue to muscle forward. In states like Arizona — where violence by illegal immigrants has led the legislature to pass and the governor to sign a tough new law mandating aliens to carry immigration documents — the border remains porous, devoid of funding for concrete and cameras, with Washington standing idly by.
It wasn’t always this way. Thirteen years ago, the Border Patrol began to build a wall extending 14 miles along the Mexican border south of San Diego. Part of it was made of old landing mats from Vietnam; other parts were erected from steel mesh. Before the wall, it was estimated that over 500,000 illegal immigrants streamed across that stretch of California each year. By 2005, the New York Times reported, that number was down to 138,000. The area’s crime rate also dropped significantly.
In the light of those statistics, and growing national concern about illegal immigration, Rep. Duncan Hunter, a San Diego Republican whose district contained much of the wall, began to push for walls or fences to be built along the rest of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. Other House Republicans rallied to the cause. By the end of 2005, the GOP-controlled House was able to pass, 239 to 182, a bill to build vast border fences on the nation’s southern frontier. Thirty-six Democrats joined with Republicans on the effort. Together, they promised to spend more than $2.2 billion to build five double-layer fences on nearly 700 miles of California and Arizona border, at $3.2 million a mile. “For the first time, I can go out on the stump and say our party has done right on the issue of immigration,” Rep. Tom Tancredo (R., Colo.) said at the time.
Soon thereafter in the Senate, the path-to-citizenship crowd tried to water down the bill. Unlike in the House, where fences and border security reigned, in the Senate, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) were intent on passing a “comprehensive” measure that also included guest-worker programs. Many conservatives viewed such initiatives as amnesty. Republicans raised flags in House hearings, and eventually the proposed bipartisan deal was deemed to have moved “too far” from a focus on border security, according to then–Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R., Tenn.). The public pressure against any bipartisan compromise was too great.
Four springs ago, fences and enforcement were, as they are today, the top priority for the majority of the American people. Consider a handful of polls. In April 2006, 60 percent of Americans, according to a CBS News poll, described the illegal-immigration problem as very serious, while 81 percent of respondents in a USA Today/Gallup poll characterized illegal immigration as “out of control.” Seventy-five percent of Americans, in an ABC News/Washington Post poll, added that the U.S. was not doing enough to keep illegal immigrants out of the country. Those stats are mirrored by today’s. A CBS/New York Times poll this week finds that 83 percent of Americans believe that illegal immigration is a serious issue, with 60 percent describing it as “very serious.”
Such sentiments came to the fore in the summer of 2006, when Brian Bilbray, a Republican, won a special election for a vacant congressional seat in San Diego County. He ran on a pledge to build a better border fence. Taking notice, Frist recalculated the GOP’s immigration strategy; by September 2006 he was admitting that more fences were the best policy and should be central to any legislation going forward. Congress shelved the McCain-Kennedy ideas and, later that month, easily passed the Secure Fence Act, by a vote of 80 to 19. The wall was on its way.
Or not. Congress approved only a $1.2 billion bankroll for the fence, at least $5 billion short of the estimated cost of building the planned 360-mile fence in Arizona and a 170-mile stretch in Texas. “It’s one thing to authorize. It’s another thing to actually appropriate the money and do it,” lamented Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas). Nevertheless, President Bush quickly signed the fence legislation into law in October 2006. His support for the idea of a fence was tepid. Within the White House, the hope for more comprehensive, Kennedyesque immigration reform was still alive.
After the Democrats swept into congressional majorities in November 2006, they immediately scurried to roll back the fence program, hoping to tee up path-to-citizenship legislation in the Senate as soon as the new Congress was sworn in. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, set about evaluating the fence, as did other Democrats uncomfortable with the fence policy. Bush, too, was far from ready to content himself with the Secure Fence Act as his immigration policy. As 2006 rolled into 2007, he began negotiating with a small cadre of policymakers, including McCain and Sen. Jon Kyl, another Arizona Republican, about the possibility of wider immigration reform. The path-to-citizenship folks were back and driving the debate.
While Bush and company spent the summer trying to piece together support for their new immigration bill, Rep. Hunter criticized Michael Chertoff, then the secretary of Homeland Security, for building too few fences too slowly. Chertoff brushed off Hunter’s complaints. “Fencing has a symbolic value, and it has usefulness in some parts of the border,” he told CNN. “The idea that fencing alone is a solution, I think, is overly simplistic.” Then, suddenly, in June 2007, after much buzz and stalling, the Bush-McCain-Kennedy immigration efforts failed to garner enough votes to reach the Senate floor. Indeed, even with little press attention, the fencers had won another victory.
By April 2008, just 309 miles of fencing were up, mostly because of controversies over what to build, and exactly where. During Bush’s final spring in office, Chertoff did attempt to speed up construction, issuing waivers to bypass environmental reviews for 470 miles of wall construction along the Mexican border.
At the same time, as the presidential campaign heated up, both parties nominated men who had voted for the Secure Fence Act. Yet one of them, the GOP nominee, was McCain, a champion of path-to-citizenship. But his views proved so unpopular on the campaign trail that even the outspoken McCain had to mute them, shuffling away from his support of the 2007 immigration bill and reiterating his commitment to securing the border. At the same time, his opponent, Illinois senator Barack Obama, also promised to strengthen the border. “I think all Americans think that we should be able to regulate who comes in and out of this country in an orderly way,” he said in an interview with CNN’s Larry King, “not only for the sake of our sovereignty, but also to avoid the hundreds of people who have been dying across the desert.”
By the time Obama was sworn in as president in January 2009, over 600 miles of fencing and vehicle barriers had been erected along the border. In the first few months of the new administration, Obama took care to talk up the “virtual fence,” the section of the border fitted with an array of electronics instead of an actual wall, calling it a “better approach.” Still, since the Mexican drug wars were in full swing — with reports of violence near the border a daily occurrence — the president was by no means eager to halt fencing projects already in operation. As Greenwire reported last April, “almost three months into the new administration, neither Obama nor Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano” were publicly addressing fencing or immigration, all while “construction is beginning on two new sections of the fence, one through the Rio Grande Valley near Brownsville, Texas, and another in the Otay Mountain Wilderness in California’s San Diego County.” The reason those fences were allowed to be built? Simple: Napolitano did not want to get into a kerfuffle about fulfilling Bush-era contracts.
But once President Obama turned all his attention to health care, he fell silent on immigration, and the Democratic Congress, buoyed by its 2008 gains, got to work on pulling apart the fence program. In October 2009, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to require 300 additional miles of fencing. The South Carolinian said he wanted to make sure that Congress followed “through on the three-year-old promise . . . to secure the border under the Secure Fence Act of 2006,” since “to date, only a fraction of the promised double-layered physical fence has been erected.” Opponents of DeMint’s amendment ignored his complaints and leaned on a September 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office. That report showed that building and maintaining the balance of the fence would cost $6.5 billion over 20 years. DeMint was not convinced. “Democrats are gutting the best tool we have to secure our borders,” he railed.
The gutting never ceased. By March of this year, Napolitano and friends had axed the “virtual fence,” citing “cost overruns and missed deadlines.” A total of $50 million was cut from the fence budget and diverted toward other technological tools for the U.S. Border Patrol. Obama then cut the budget of the Secure Border Initiative — established by the Department of Homeland Security in 2005 — from $800 million to $574 million. The Washington Post called the decision “a likely death knell for the troubled five-year plan.” Which leads us, of course, to Arizona, the state that felt compelled to act on illegal immigration this month because of the federal government’s fading support. Now, things have soured so much that Kyl and McCain, past brothers in the battle for comprehensive reform, are asking for National Guard troops to be deployed along Arizona’s border and — you guessed it — for more fences.
Will more fences, as so many times before, be debated, maybe even enacted, only to be forgotten? Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, along with other GOP lawmakers, hopes not. “It’s the will of the American people, and certainly what the folks in Arizona want,” he told NRO. “If you’re serious about reducing illegal immigration, you’re going to need some sort of physical barrier or fence.”
In the wake of Arizona’s new legislation, the Democrats may prefer to debate the politics of profiling, but Smith says Republicans should focus on how best to improve border security. Public support is there, he believes, for new physical structures. “The American people are frustrated with an administration that wants to do amnesty on the cheap,” he continues. “In Arizona, they know that the virtual fence hasn’t worked. It could be a supplement to a physical barrier, but not a substitute.” He then points to a new Rasmussen poll — which shows 70 percent of Arizonans in favor of its new state law — as proof of a growing wave of support for better fence and enforcement policies.
“The virtual fence didn’t work at all,” adds Iowa congressman Steve King, the GOP’s ranking member on the House subcommittee on immigration. “I’m not arguing that we build 2,000 miles of double and triple fence, but we need to keep building until illegal immigrants stop going around the ends.” Despite the hopes back in 2005 that building a wall would reduce border-security expenses, King calculates that the U.S. is “now spending $12 billion a year on border security, and $6 million a mile,” nearly double the amount pledged in the 2005 bill, with little to show for it.
Just because the “virtual fence” has failed doesn’t mean that it’s time to quit, says Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), a colleague of King’s on the immigration subcommittee. “We need to lock down the border. That’s not a radical position. The majority of Americans want a secure border. They know that enforcement by itself is not going to solve the problem.”
If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) brings an immigration-reform bill up for debate in coming weeks, Smith, King, and Chaffetz are ready to fight. Yet they may not even have to. A prominent path-to-citizenship Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday that we must first “secure our borders” before anyone tries, once again, to rally for comprehensive immigration reform. “If immigration comes up this year, it’s absolutely devastating to the future of this issue,” he said.
And if that debate comes in 2011 or 2012, rather than taking the Democrats’ bait and becoming mired in identity politics, the GOP should push for completing a physical barrier. It could be the start of a welcome corrective to the sorry history of the American wall.
– Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.