Bush's Border Folly

LOS ANGELES--Conservative Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said that President Bush finally "got it" when he pledged in his nationally televised address to dump thousands of National Guard troops on the border to help border agents halt the tide of illegal immigrants. Sessions was ecstatic for good reason. Bush gave conservatives what they have demanded from him. He latched onto the troops-on-the-border issue in part to show that he can get at least one policy initiative through Congress, and in greater part to appease conservatives' fury at him for backing what they see as a too-soft immigration reform bill.

But even if the troop deployment is only a temporary measure, as Bush says, to assist beleaguered border patrol agents -- and presuming that the feds can find the money to pay for the troops -- it still won't do much to stem the tide of illegal immigrants entering the country.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, more than 500,000 illegal immigrants enter the country each year, a number that has remained more or less steady in the past decade. Yet during those years, the Clinton and Bush administrations spent more to arrest, detain and deport illegal immigrants. The increased spending also included the construction of bigger and stronger border fences along more than 100 miles of the border in California, Arizona and Texas.

The fences and the added agents didn't stop the thousands of desperate foreign workers from south of the border from getting in. And it certainly didn't stop smugglers from bringing them to eager labor contractors. They found unguarded crossing points, trails and roads, and dug tunnels to enter. It would take thousands of National Guard troops to fill up the 700-mile stretch of mostly open land through which illegal immigrants enter the country. The troops would have to be deployed on the border for longer than a few months to have any real impact on immigration control. Neither Bush nor Congress has said where the money is going to come from to maintain a prolonged troop presence there.

But even if the Bush and Congress bankroll guard troops for months on the border, the number of illegal immigrants who get into the country still wouldn't appreciably drop. That's because up to one-third of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States didn't come across the Mexican border illegally, or even at all. They came in on planes and boats as tourists with student and work visas. They came from Asia, Africa, Caribbean countries, Canada, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, not just Mexico. When their visas expired they simply stayed.

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