Mexico’s Responsibility

Katherine Corcoran writes in the San Jose Mercury News:

That our U.S. leaders continue to try to solve a two-sided problem without enlisting the other side is baffling.

At the same time, it’s no surprise that the latest attempt at a legislative solution crashed and burned in the U.S. Senate, though there was still talk last week of a revival. The total sum of the United States’ one-sided strategy vacillates between “keep ’em out” and “let ’em in,” even though we’ve tried both and neither has solved the problem. What did amnes ty in 1986 bring us? The same thing the 1994 enforcement crackdown called Operation Gatekeeper brought us: today’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants with no path to citizenship, and no end in sight to the flow of people crossing the border.

Even conservatives concede that walls won’t stop migrants as long as wages here are seven to eight times those in Mexico on average, with the disparity much more drastic for the very poor who live on less than $4 a day. Even liberals admit that amnesty only creates more illegal immigration.

So why not address the forces that cause people to scale walls, no matter how high we build them? Because that would require neighbors to work together on matters of economics, and that would be too hard.

On the U.S. side, it’s easier to scapegoat the very people getting squeezed, not so different from what happened to the Chinese who came in droves in the mid-19th century to work the gold mines and build the railroads. Click here for the rest of the column.

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