Re: ...America is being flooded with Mexican and South American illegal immigrants. It provides coverage for the Middle-Eastern type Israelis as they scout out their next targets.
Emile, how are you faring with your Alsatian hounds? They must feel exhausted criss-crossing the bush, eh? <g>
Across the borderline: America tightens control of Mexican border
Mexicans are trying to enter the United States illegally in greater numbers than ever. Now a 2,000-mile fence is planned - and those who offer migrants aid are being prosecuted. Andrew Gumbel reports from Arizona
Published: 20 December 2005
[...]
Hardline Republicans want the fence to run all the way from San Diego on the Pacific shores to Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico. Another wants to send in the military. Yet another is talking about sending all the foreign agricultural labourers home and replacing them with prison inmates. A group of almost 100 Republican members of the House of Representatives, meanwhile, is thinking of ways of ending the automatic right to citizenship extended to anyone born on US soil - something that was enshrined in the constitution at the time that slavery was abolished.
A tough line on immigration is proving to be a vote-winner at election time. Last November, Arizona passed a draconian ballot initiative that, if fully implemented, would deny key public services to undocumented foreigners, including schooling and health care for their children. Candidates in all of the border states are beginning to work immigration into their campaign platforms, and some of the more extreme anti-immigration campaigners are themselves now running for office.
Just last week, the leader of a vigilante group called the Minutemen, Jim Gilchrist, stood in a special congressional election in San Diego, California, and snatched a remarkable 25 per cent of the vote away from the mainstream Republican candidate. Only a few years ago, Gilchrist would have been seen as an extremist on a par with Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.
The changing political mood has had a direct impact on the ground. Although the Border Patrol is itself split between hardline enforcers and some of the older guard who regard their stand-off with the migrants as a slightly absurd game of cat-and-mouse, its funding and resources have been steadily increased over the past couple of years. Out in the borderland brush, one finds brand-new barbed-wire fences and video surveillance equipment. Some heavily frequented spots are also fitted with ground sensors to alert roving patrols.
Much of the pressure on the Border Patrol comes from highly visible activists such as Glenn Spencer of American Patrol, whose house, just a stone's throw from the international boundary about 90 minutes' drive south of Tucson, bristles with surveillance equipment, including satellite transmission receivers, a pair of high-powered binoculars and a spotlight. Spencer, a retired systems analyst for the Pentagon, lives alone with seven Alsatian dogs, which he is training to sniff out human beings much as hunting dogs might sniff out their prey. "We're hunting the most dangerous of all animals - man," he says with a laugh.
Among the gadgets he has developed, and passed on to the Border Patrol, is a 6ft-long unmanned plane equipped with a custom-designed infrared camera as well as a video camera. He and his colleagues are working on a user-friendly Global Positioning System device that would simply give Border Patrol officers the direction and distance of the nearest migrants - or "suspected border intruders", as he prefers to call them.
With his trademark military-style cap and two-way radio always at his hip, Spencer is a man with a single-minded sense of purpose. He wakes up to the sound of the Border Patrol scanner, and spends hours each day monitoring and editing new video footage from his organisation's many hidden cameras. At least one Hollywood producer has invited him to use his footage as the basis of a weekly migrant-hunt series on television.
Spencer is far from a stupid man, and at first the conversation suggests he is not all that far apart from the left-wingers in his analysis of the border problem. He, like them, deplores the creation of a two-tiered society in which undocumented foreigners do the dirty jobs and accept sub-minimum wages to do them. He, like them, wishes the Border Patrol had a more clearly defined role so the country's immigration laws could both make sense and actually be enforced.
But then come the hints of distinctly marginal thinking - including Spencer's firm conviction that the Mexican government is using the migrants in a long-term secret effort to seize territorial control of the United States. "These people are not just looking for jobs, they are looking to make this country part of Mexico," he said.
The fact that such views are now creeping into mainstream discourse speaks volumes about how far the immigration debate has veered to the right in the past decade or so. The heightened immigration flow is not invented - the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1994, has created economic shifts that have encouraged Mexicans either to come north to work in cheap-labour border town factories known as maquiladoras, or to cross directly into the United States. The fact that many of the maquiladoras are now closing under competitive pressure from China has only made the States an even more tempting option.
The fear and hostility, however, seem to be out of all proportion to any threat - economic or other - that the migrants pose. "Every decade or so, we've seen these periods of hysteria emerge over illegal immigration," said Joseph Nevins, a border expert at Vassar College in New York. "It's such easy political hay for politicians, both Republicans and Democrats. Who loses on this? It provides the perfect smokescreen for a whole host of other problems they'd rather not talk about."
It may be no coincidence that the latest wave of anti-immigrant frenzy coincides with the collapse of American aspirations for easy conquest and democratisation in Iraq, and with the more general collapse in the fortunes of the Bush administration. The Republicans, in particular, have become adept at stirring up fears of external threats to win electoral support. Having used Saddam Hussein as their bogeyman in the first Bush term, it now appears they are resorting to Mexican migrants instead.
To the handful of humanitarians who still travel almost daily to the borderlands with water, food and medical supplies and shout out under bridges and along dry riverbeds to see if anyone needs help, this prevailing attitude is deeply disheartening. "They see all these migrants as just clutter, they don't even see them as people," a defiant Shanti Sellz said. "It's blatant racism - fear of the other. That's almost an American value at this point."
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