Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [70]
Chertoff likened illegal immigration from Mexico to “tall grass” that we need to “cut down to expose the people we’re really worried about.” It’s “a distraction,” he said, and it stretches our limited resources. “When you have a guy spending the day transporting, booking, processing, and deporting an economic migrant, he’s not on the border watching for drug dealers and gang members,” said Chertoff. “So both strategically and tactically, it’s a drain on resources.”
Tom Ridge, Chertoff’s predecessor at DHS, struck a similar note. “Immigration itself and Mexican immigrants don’t rank very high in terms of my concern about terrorism, ” he told me in an interview. “It’s the [smuggling] network and ‘other-than-Mexican’ potential clients that can take advantage of that network” that he worried about. “It’s not so much viewing the [Latino] immigrants themselves as security risks, because I don’t think they are,” said Ridge. “I’ve seen some of these young people that we’ve got detained at the detention centers and some of the ones that we’ve sent back. By and large, I think they just want to come here to work.”
Neither Chertoff nor Ridge is averse to physical barriers along portions of the border, but both rejected the notion that we can simply wall off the terrorism threat. A more comprehensive approach is needed. Protecting the homeland, they insisted, requires deference to certain economic realities. “I don’t think you can put up three thousand miles of fencing, but I think the five or six hundred miles that [Congress is considering] should be built,” said Ridge. “But even if we maximize the defense approach as best we can, there will still be an economic incentive to get across the border. I don’t see how you can have a good security policy without a good guest-worker program.” As globalization continues, our relationship with Canada and Mexico will be even more important, he said. “And at the end of the day, both a defensive posture along the border and a means to legitimize those who seek to work here is . . . in our economic interests, our security interests, and our global interests.”
Chertoff told me he was astonished by the arguments he heard coming from the political right during the 2007 debate over the Senate immigration bill, which would have created a path to legal status for illegal immigrants already in the country and a guest-worker program for future labor flows. “I’ve been surprised at how many conservatives don’t really believe in the free market when it comes to immigration, ” he said. “And I’m only being partly facetious. First, some people just don’t accept the figures. They don’t accept that there’s an expanding economy, that we’ve got low unemployment. They won’t accept the fact that if you look at the demographics, my generation”—he was born in 1953— “is getting older. We will not want to be picking lettuce at age eighty and eighty-five. Everybody across the globe is facing this and we are, too, in terms of simply needing people to do certain work. Bringing in people to work ends up expanding the pie. They get money. They pay taxes. They buy goods and services.”
Like Ridge, Chertoff said that any increased security measures aimed at stemming illegal immigration from Latin America should be paired with more lawful ways for migrants to enter the country and fill jobs. “The only way to truly get enforcement done is to create legal pathways to satisfy what is an undeniable work need,” he said. Chertoff also favors