The Border: A Debate Between Wall And Wallet

Dear editor,

It seems as though every day there is a scapegoat in the news. Headlines say something about the Iraqi War, some scandal going on, or something about the United States and Mexico border and immigration. There are the groups that do not want any illegal immigration into the U.S., and there are those people that would like illegal aliens to practically take the jobs American's do not want.

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the definition of an "immigrant" is "a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence" (Webster). Sounds innocent, right? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an "illegal immigrant" is defined as "someone who goes to live or work in another country when they do not have the legal right to do this" (Cambridge). Now, when I look at the second definition, I think of those that illegally invaded America first--people like Christopher Columbus and his squad who initiated the start of the United States and took land from the Native Americans. One of the ironies of the current debate is that unless you can trace your family tree to a Native American, that you, too, are an immigrant.

Every day, there are dozens of immigrants trying to come into the U.S. and find a better life for their family back home. "Every year, Mexicans risk their lives by trying to sneak across the border, looking to escape poverty," according to Reuters. However, millions of Americans are outraged that our own government is allowing this to happen, that aliens are taking social services, healthcare, and jobs.

As for the threat immigrants pose to American workers, the failure of our education system to effectively train American citizens for highly skilled jobs has little to do with our immigration policy. American workers face the same competition from workers born in other countries whether or not those foreign workers move here. According to Ruben Navarrette, a columnist in San Diego for CNN,

It wasn't Congress that profited from the robust economies that come from having cheap labor, or collected property taxes from illegal immigrants and the companies that hire them, or used cheap labor to fuel growth by building homes and streets and schools...the same entities are now shocked...devising ways to get rid of them...It illustrates America's schizophrenia on the issue and the built-in tension between the need to control our borders and the profits we reap from keeping it open.

In other words, Americans would like to close the border, enforce the laws that illegal migrants should be subjected to--but without losing the illegal workers supposedly "taking away jobs natural-born citizens should have" which do the work for cheap.

U.S. lawmakers would rather build a fence that would span most of the border, from California to Texas, which Mexico borders. This fence would incorporate a physical fence, land features such as cliffs and mountains, and then an "electronic fence", with motion sensors, cameras, and other technology. However, no matter the height, length or width of the fence, it would only curb the immigration numbers, not stop, because if you build a 10 foot wall, someone will come by with an 11 foot ladder, or even dig under the fence as some drug dealers have done in Nogales that have been uncovered. "The Nogales area has a number of underground culverts that run between Mexico and Arizona and are used by drug smugglers to dig tunnels that often terminate inside one of the many private homes in the hills along the border" (NewsMax).

The problem with the guest-worker program is that although President George W. Bush has proposed such a program that would allow