The United States: A Gated Community
by Lillie Binder
“H.R. 4437.” “The Sensenbrenner Bill.” “The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.” These are all names for one controversial bill that passed through the House of Representatives on December 16, 2005, which called for harsh new treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States. The bill, penned by Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, contained some fairly radical ideas. For instance, it would make current illegal immigrants felons, and make anyone who helped them along the way – for example, employers or church personnel - eligible for years of jail time. The Sensenbrenner bill most infamously proposed a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border at common points of escape. Mexican President Vicente Fox has called it the “new Berlin Wall.”
The Senate debated the bill for months, and all the while H.R. 4437 was wildly protested throughout the U.S. Most visibly, on April 10, the “National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice,” hundreds of thousands of citizens and non-citizens joined together in 102 U.S. cities to demonstrate their opposition to the bill and rally for their citizenship. As an example, in Manhattan alone, an estimated 125,000 demonstrators marched to make their presence in the New York City community known. A series of marches and protests continued in the U.S. and Mexico throughout April and May.
So what makes this bill, and particularly the proposed fence, so controversial?
Besides being unsightly, is the fence unfair from a human rights standpoint?
According to the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,”
every human has the right to “to seek asylum in other countries,” “to
work [and] equal pay for equal work,” and simply “to leave any country”-
all reasons to immigrate to the U.S. More abstractly, each human also
has the right to “life, liberty, and the security of person,” and “to
a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself
and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care
and necessary social services”- also important (if not legal) reasons
for coming to the U.S.
If these rights hold true in the U.S., when immigrants cross the border
into our country for purposes of survival, to find work, to raise families,
to seek refuge from a corrupt government, is it their right to be here?
Are human rights above the law? This question is essentially the core
of the current immigration reform debate. How should potential illegal
immigrants be kept out, and how should the illegal immigrants currently
living here be treated? Is there room to write compassion into our laws
of citizenship?
President Bush reacted to these questions in a televised address to
the nation on May 15 with a comprehensive five-step plan to reform immigration
with the purpose of improving border security. The most important point
was his first one. Step number one: the U.S. “must secure its borders…
[keeping them] open to trade and lawful immigration and shut to illegal
immigrants, as well as criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists.” Mr.
Bush supported Sensenbrenner’s fence solution, adding that this fence
would be equipped with all of the latest technology. He also elaborated
on Sensenbrenner’s plan, adding that 6,000 National Guard members should
be dispatched to protect the southern border until the specially trained
Border Patrol can be increased by that number. The President assured
that, “we have enough Guard forces to win the War on Terror, to respond
to natural disasters, and to help secure our border,” and that the participating
National Guard members would only temporarily work on the border, for
one year.
There are several practical reasons to justify the construction of this fence. There are many areas on the U.S.-Mexico border from New Mexico to California where the border is not even marked. It is in these places where the illegal immigration most often occurs, and Mexican officials have also complained about U.S. officials accidentally patrolling in Mexican territory. From a national security standpoint, Republican Representative Duncan Hunter (from the state of California, where a high percentage of illegal immigrants cross over the border) said in January that, “The world understands that if you want to get into this country illegally, you come across the land border with Mexico… You have to know who’s coming into the country.” Others have contended that Mexico deserves this treatment as punishment for ignoring the problem of illegal immigration for so many years. California Republican Representative Dan Lundgren also said that month, “Mexico has not been serious about helping us control our border, so this griping about what we are doing seems to be a little fatuous.”
However, Governor Jose Reyes Baeza of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico said in May in response to Bush’s address that militarizing and building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border would not only “increase the physical and emotional risk to people who are merely seeking opportunity,” but also “[would put] the good bi-national relationship between Mexico and the United States at risk.” The risk the governor feared most was possible human rights violations that would be inflicted upon the Mexicans by the U.S. National Guard. The governor also feared that this bold, undiplomatic gesture of the fence signified that the U.S. was becoming more and more xenophobic, going to such great lengths to keep immigrants out.
Already, drug and human-smuggling into the U.S. has become a $10 billion-a-year industry, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Immigrants from all different continents convene in Mexico to make the journey into the U.S. For a price of thousands of dollars, secret guides wait at the border to direct hopeful immigrants into the U.S.
This is not to say that crossing borders is an easy endeavor. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, 473 immigrants died last year while trying to cross over the border from causes like dehydration and sun exposure in the southern U.S. states’ deserts, or from drowning in the Rio Grande. Also, many citizens have reported incidents of government and police corruption associated with their sneaking over the border. From these accounts, immigrants are more likely to be extorted for money once they are caught at the border by patrollers than to be deported. The smugglers that immigrants hire also often abandon their clients along the way, leaving them to survive without direction.
With all of these human rights struggles at the border under the U.S.’s watch, we now have a responsibility to revise our immigration policy to accommodate more Mexicans or help strengthen their economy in some way. Point number two of the president’s televised speech addressed this issue, as Mr. Bush revived his “temporary worker program” that he first proposed in January 2004.
With this program, President Bush acknowledges the U.S. economical dependence on foreign workers who often work for much lower wages than are standard for U.S. citizens, filling the jobs citizens refuse to do. He also acknowledges that the intentions of the majority of illegal U.S. immigrants are innocent. His plan, not fully outlined yet, would “create a legal path for foreign workers to enter our country in an orderly way, for a limited period of time.”
According to U.S. government statistics, the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants (an approximate half of whom are Mexican) that are already working here send about $20 billion a year back home to families. The income they get from the U.S. economy is great news for their homelands, via Mexico, but it is a drain on the U.S.’s resources. They are being paid, but much of their paycheck is being invested into their native country’s economy. It would be an advantage to the U.S. to accommodate more of these workers and their families legally, in order to benefit from their wages more.
As a part of the guest-worker program, Mr. Bush’s point number three proposed a new foreign-worker identification card to hold employers responsible for the legality of their workers. President Bush envisions that these high-tech counterfeit-proof cards would discourage foreigners from trying to sneak into the U.S. in the first place.
Mr. Bush’s point number four asked U.S. citizens to accept the inevitability of an illegal immigrant presence and it tells non-citizens in the U.S. that they should expect to “pay their taxes, to learn English, and to work in a job for a number of years before applying for citizenship.” The President made it clear that his temporary worker proposal should not be interpreted as “amnesty” to the illegal immigrants already here, as “amnesty is unfair to those who are here lawfully, and it would invite further waves of illegal immigration.” He stated that it was just “neither wise nor realistic” to deport millions of people with “deep roots” in the U.S.
In the fifth and last point of President Bush’s address, he evoked the image of the “great American tradition of the melting pot… [that] made us one nation of many peoples.” He reiterated the need for immigrants in our culture and economy, since our whole country was founded upon immigrants’ different cultures and labor. All of our ancestors once joined this U.S. community a few years, decades, or centuries back, too.
Our country’s official spokeswoman, the Statue of Liberty, still invites people of all countries: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” But who, now, should the U.S. invite into this now-exclusive gated community? While we should not offer amnesty, we should offer compassion to those who seek refuge. In accordance with our purported open-arms spirit and commitment to human rights, at the end of his address, Mr. Bush assured the American (and Mexican) public that, “The United States is not going to militarize the southern border. Mexico is our neighbor and our friend.”
In the days following President Bush’s address, the Senate debated
his guidelines. His proposed guest worker program and path to citizenship
were, as Mr. Bush anticipated, interpreted by many conservative senators
as being “amnesty.” Many liberals found the fence measure too extreme.
But in the end, the Senate finally passed a revised bill on May 17 that
plans for the construction of an 370-mile stretch of military vehicles
and triple-layer fence in targeted areas to fortify our border. The
guest-worker program is still being debated, but President Bush remains
steadfast in promoting it. Hopefully, this will also be approved, because
it will benefit both the U.S. and Mexican economies and will foster
a better sense of “friendship” between the two countries who are becoming
increasingly interdependent. Just as the U.S. has used Mexican labor
in the past to grow its economy, perhaps the Mexican economy needs help
from the U.S. economy for a period of time in order for it to eventually
strengthen its own and fully support its population with basic provisions
like jobs and social services.
