Where Are My Juice and Crackers? Citizens along America's southwestern border have organized a Neighborhood Watch
Custred, Glynn
Where Are My Juice and Crackers? Citizens along America's southwestern border have organized a Neighborhood Watch. BY GLYNN CUSTRED 1tN EASTERN AND CENTRAL ARIZONA...
...In an article in the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald reports that illegal aliens account for 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (out of a total of 1,200 to 1,500...
...Minutemen, however, said that their presence proved that border controls could work if serious vigils were mounted similar to the one they operated during the month of April...
...federal government proposed to spend $4 billion partially to reimburse doctors and hospitals, many native-born working poor asked why they should be burdened with debt to pay medical bills while their taxes subsidize the free care of people who are in the country illegally...
...Husbands and wives cannot go out for an evening together unless they have someone to watch the house while they're gone, and since the distances are great in the borderlands—the minimum time of response for a 911 call to the sheriff is around 30 minutes—everyone is armed...
...Since March 2003 the Border Patrol has been a part of the Department of Homeland Security with the revised mission of preventing terrorists and terrorist material from crossing the border—this on top of its already demanding mission of interdicting drug smuggling and the control of illegal immigration, tasks made all but impossible by the massive stream of illegal migration pouring across the border...
...It was shut down in 2004...
...and as a potential means for manipulating the American political system (as frankly revealed by such Mexican leaders as former President Ernesto Zedillo and former national security advisor and later U.N...
...Joe Dessaro, a recently retired Border Patrol agent and union chief, wrote in his farewell letter to the union that the Border Patrol is "one of the most inefficient and misleading agencies in the history of government...
...Border crossers also know the routine...
...miles to the west, the nocturnal movement ceased...
...When asked about the paltry sum, outgoing Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said that money for such purposes is "fool's gold...
...Yet when asked about the Minuteman Project, President Bush bristled, calling the volunteers "vigilantes...
...Since the formal democratic process remains closed to the majority of the public on this issue, it will take more such demonstrations before the political elites become responsive to a major policy issue that involves such serious consequences both for the short and the long term...
...This began under President Clinton when he stopped enforcing employer sanctions, penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, and by reducing border management to nothing more than an expensive, dishonest, and demoralizing display of empty ritual...
...With a broad grin he said in English, "The United States...
...From the town of Douglas to the tiny settlement of Naco, and from there all the way to the other side of the San Pedro River some 40 JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 WHERE ARE MY JUICE AND CRACKERS...
...During the next to the last week of the vigil Richard Humphries, a Minuteman coordinator and local resident, took me in his jeep along the border between Naco and the San Pedro River...
...Recently the National Research Council estimated that the total cost to the taxpayer of illegal immigration, which is carried mainly by local and state governments, is $11 to $22 billion a year for education, criminal justice, and medical care...
...Groups of migrants emerge from the mesquite and the arroyos where they have hidden all day to avoid detection from aircraft...
...One frustrated agent says this unprecedented policy is the equivalent of putting a ten-yard limit on bank robbery: if the robber gets beyond that point he can keep the money...
...He calculates that the net annual gain, as of1999, was only about $8 billion per year...
...The elderly say they feel like prisoners in their own homes...
...When they are picked up and put in vans, some ask, "Where are my juice and crackers...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 GLYNN CUSTRED In 1992 when the flow of illegal entrants created such havoc on the border and became such an obvious drain on public services, the people of California passed, by a margin of 59 percent, Proposition 187, a ballot measure designed to deny public benefits to anyone in the country illegally...
...On the whole Americans regard them as industrious, good-hearted people looking for a way to better their lives and those of their family by hard work...
...Many Americans, especially those who live along the border, admire 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 GLYNN CUSTRED their perseverance, saying that in their place they would do the same...
...Que tal...
...ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser...
...He writes that they are more likely to remain poor and live in segregated communities...
...Echoing this sentiment another agent hundreds of miles away observes that "the whole thing is the biggest bunco job in history, spending millions not to do the job...
...Dogs no longer barked all night long, and people said they had not slept so well in years...
...The Mexican government likewise dispatched police, as well as Mexican army troops, by one estimate 1,600 strong, to their side of the border to dampen potentially damaging publicity because of the presence of observers on the American side of the line...
...It was the quietest month we've had in many years...
...The interna- ional line is marked only by 19th century obelisks of concrete or iron, standing just a few feet high in the desert brush, spaced at intervals of 0.14 to 4.91 miles...
...Sociologists Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rimbaut, in Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, say that the "transformative potential, for better or for worse," of the second generation "is immense" with the possibility that it will "catalyze a quantum leap in social problems...
...All along the way on the U.S...
...THE CONSEQUENCES OF MASS MIGRATION AMMERICANS ARE BECOMING increasingly resentful f the government's refusal to do anything bout illegal immigration...
...But the president's budget allocated only enough money for 210 agents, not even enough to cover attrition...
...We should gain control of our borders...
...Soldiers interdicted would-be border crossers, loaded them into trucks, and transported them to points along the border where they could cross illegally into the United States beyond the eyes and ears of the Minutemen...
...as a cash cow for Mexico in the form of remittances to the tune of $14 billion each year, the second largest source of income for Mexico after oil...
...The Livermore Sector of the Border Patrol in the San Francisco Bay Area was, according to one former senior Border Patrol official, "man for man the most productive in the country...
...Illegal immigration also feeds the growing membership of violent gangs...
...close the border to illegal aliens...
...Residents have put locks on their houses, their barns, and their out-buildings...
...Yet by dragging down wages for those native born at the lower end of the economic scale, Borjas estimates that some $160 million per year is shifted away from workers and toward employers and consumers of public services...
...Chris Simcox promises more border watches along both the Mexican and the Canadian borders...
...and then gave a big thumbs-up...
...There is also a darker undercurrent within the uncontrolled stream of illegal immigrants—the influx of hardened criminals who come to commit crime...
...The countryside was deserted except for a rancher driving his pick-up truck on the other side of the rickety border fence, and a lone man casually walking towards a corral near the San Pedro River which is used as a staging ground for illegal crossings...
...California alone has a net cost of $3 billion dollars in a single year for such services...
...The Mexican elite regard the massive exodus from Mexico as a safety-valve that protects their own privileged position...
...The project, organized by Chris Simcox of Tombstone, Arizona, and James Gilchrist of Southern California, was based on the neighborhood watch model, a civilian association whose function, according to the Neighborhood Watch Institute, is to provide "eyes and ears for law enforcement...
...The problem is most critical for hospitals...
...The Bush administration completed the process by ending what remained of interior enforcement and by continuing the charade of border controls...
...BY GLYNN CUSTRED 1tN EASTERN AND CENTRAL ARIZONA the border between the United States and Mexico runs in a straight sur- veyor's line through mile after mile of scrubland...
...we asked (meaning: "Hi...
...In 2005 frustrated citizens tried another ballot initiative, Proposition 200 in Arizona, but given the kind of obstruction we know so well it will probably never be enforced...
...One means employed by the public to get around special interest obstruction is the ballot initiative...
...We chatted with another on-duty agent for a few minutes...
...PURPOSELY POROUS BORDERS DESPITE THE DOWNSIDE of massive sustained illegal immigration, the government has systematically abandoned the enforcement of the nation's immigration laws...
...The project worked...
...They put on their backpacks and pick up their water bottles, then head north...
...As we were leaving he called out, "I'm not supposed to say this, but you guys are doing a great job...
...When asked how things were going, a Border Patrolman on duty smiled and said suggestively, "Quiet...
...Where are you going...
...Remittances each year also remove billions of dollars from circulation within the American economy, and the underground economy created by illegal immigration is, according to some economists, growing at perhaps a faster rate than the legitimate economy, thus costing the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in lost taxes, money that if collected would wipe out the current budget deficit...
...Americans do not resent the migrants themselves...
...When the JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 23 WHERE ARE MY JUICE AND CRACKERS...
...But breaking the law is not the best way to start a new life in a country that claims to be based on the rule of law...
...They have built fences and installed motion sensor lights, and have posted guard dogs that bark all night long in order to gain a sense of uneasy security For with a massive uncontrolled migration passing by your back door night after night you never know who will come to rob and assault you, especially since desperate men transporting drugs sometimes travel with the passing migrants...
...Moreover, he says, the inexhaustible influx of cheap, exploitable labor adds little to the overall economy...
...CITIZEN RESPONSE SPECIAL INTERESTS AND a growing illegal immigration lobby have been able to completely trump majority opinion on immigration, leaving the public little opportunity to express its wishes...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005 Juice and Crackers...
...Then on the first of April 2005 the migration came to a sudden halt...
...Many walk only as far as pre-arranged points along a country road where smugglers pick them up, sometimes in stolen or hijacked vehicles, then race at high speeds in the dark with their lights off...
...But when the sun sets, the quiet landscape comes alive...
...The Clinton administration did not act alone...
...As long as our borders remain porous, they are just as open to criminals and terrorists as they are to illegal aliens," says T.J...
...you made us feel safe...
...The Minuteman Project was yet another attempt by frustrated and increasingly angry citizens to express their opposition to a de facto open-border policy...
...By law anyone coming to an emergency room must be treated...
...Critics say the project did nothing more than push the stream of migration around the manned observation posts...
...If that is what he had in mind he was one of the very few that month, at least along that stretch of the line...
...Since June 2004 the Border Patrol has been restricted to the border itself and to stationary points, thus ending one of its traditional missions—sweeping interior regions for illegal aliens...
...Once a child is born to illegal aliens, the child is eligible for welfare since people born in the United States are American citizens...
...A federal judge and later a Democratic governor, both using questionable means, showed contempt both for the people's will and the democratic process when they jettisoned the new law...
...Many others walk for miles into the interior where they can continue in comfort to their final destination, which may be anywhere within the United States, for once beyond the border American authorities have no further interest in them...
...The Border Patrol management seems to have thought that the Minutemen had done an effective job, because after the project had ended and the volunteers had gone home, agents at Naco were told not to arrest illegal aliens in their section for fear that a jump in the apprehension rate would confirm the project's success...
...As we traveled the rutted road we saw no signs of illegal entry along what had been just three weeks before a major route of illegal entry...
...None of this is lost on those who would cross the border illegally...
...side of the border one sees trash of all kinds littering the route of this vast migration...
...Bonner...
...This much is certain: People along the border where the Minutemen held their watch appreciated the peaceful month it gave them...
...In a similar vein Harvard scholar and political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, warns in his latest book Who Are We?that "nothing less than our national identity is at stake" if the historically unprecedented wave of mass migration is allowed to continue...
...Today it is one of the many routes of mass migration northward...
...This is totally unacceptable from the standpoint of homeland security andnational security...
...Border Patrol union president T. J. Bonner, of the National Border Patrol Council, rightly observes: "Even if a terrorist is one-in-a-million occurrence, with several million people coming into the country each year, very soon they reach that critical mass necessary to carry out another attack on the magnitude of September 11...
...Dust devils occasionally swirl upward and spin furiously across the creosote plain, and tumble weeds lifted by sudden gusts of wind sometimes sail over the border fence and bounce on the dirt road before bumping into the cactus and desert brush on the other side...
...Men wear sidearms at work and mothers put handguns in their purses when they walk their children to the school bus...
...The exploitation of cheap immigrant labor is therefore by no means cheap for taxpayers who are in essence subsidizing many special interest groups that profit from cheap foreign labor...
...The reason: the presence of a small group of civilian volunteers called the Minutemen who mounted a month-long vigil to demonstrate that, with proper vigilance, the stream of illegal migration could indeed be stopped...
...The public is also becoming increasingly aware of the cost to taxpayers of supporting high levels of illegal immigration...
...Taxes paid by immigrants as a group are low due to their disproportionately low-skill status and thus their low level of income, while their consumption of tax-supported services are high due to their high fertility and poverty rates, factors made far more significant by the large proportion of illegal immigrants among them...
...This figure is up by two-thirds for all felony warrants (17,000...
...Dave Stoddard lives just north of the border near the San Pedro River, the route the Spanish explorer Coronado used in 1540 when he entered what would 308 years later become a part of the United States...
...One agent says he caught the same man three times in one shift at the same place on the fence...
...The only indication of the border between the markers is a fence strung by ranchers to keep cattle from straying and a rough dirt road that runs beside it...
...If any law enforcement agency needs this kind of help it is the United States Border Patrol...
...The 9/11 Commission recommended an increase in the manpower of the Border Patrol, and in 2005, following those recommendations Congress authorized the hiring of 2,000 more Border Patrol agents...
...Illegal residents who have such "anchor babies" can tap into the welfare system, thus adding to the total bill the taxpayer picks up for illegal immigration...
...Some members of the very Congress that passed the laws in the first place pressured enforcement agencies not to enforce the law at the behest of businessinterests that profit from an unchecked flow of tractable labor...
...In a half-page ad in the Sunday Sierra Vista Herald local residents told them: "Thanks for doing what our government won't...
...Harvard economist George Borjas, in his book Heaven's Door, says that today's immigrants, of which a major percentage are illegal, possess fewer skills and are more dependent on public assistance than their predecessors, and that their children, unlike the children of previous waves of immigrants, are less likely to follow the upwardly mobile tract...
...JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25...
...In order to avoid unwanted publicity, the Border Patrol assigned 500 more agents for quick response to reports from Minutemen of illegal movement...
...After 9/11 George Bush called for public participation in homeland security...
...Since illegal workers are not covered by insurance, they use emergency room service as their sole source of health care...
...The cost falls to the hospital, whether private or public, to the point where some facilities have simply closed their doors...
...That the second generation of immigrants will not assimilate in the way other waves of immigrants eventually did poses another troubling problem...
...They know that once across the line they are home free, and that if caught at the border they will be returned to try again until they make it...
...The "eyes and ears" of citizens on the border is the last thing Bush and the Mexican government want...
...A donde va...
...Uncontrolled illegal immigration is pushing down wages at the lower end of the income scale, incurring high costs to the taxpayer, and depriving the government of revenue it needs to meet its obligations...
...Though poll after poll reveals that the public wants the government to bring illegal immigration under control, the President is content to keep things just the way they are since it creates the de facto amnesty he has promised Mexican president Vicente Fox and that he has been unable to pass through Congress...
...Illegal aliens are some of the most violent criminals in the United States today...
...It is a vast and empty terrain punctuated by barren moun- tains that rise sharply above the desert...
...By day the countryside is quiet...
...And a border watch is planned for California in August or earlier, apparently with the approval of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger...
...Stoddard says that Americans living near the border and those who live in the interior along the favorite routes of migration complain of a constant crowd hurrying past their homes all night long, especially between 1:00 and 3:00 in the morning...
...A.: Glynn Custred is professor of anthropology at California State University, Hayward, and coauthor of the California Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209...
Vol. 38 • July 2005 • No. 6
