Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Take your pick. Cities and towns on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico are among the safest in the country. Or: Mexican drug gangs have turned the longest stretch of the 2,000-mile border, the line between Texas and Mexico, into a war zone.

The first version is President Barack Obama’s. He has crime statistics on his side. The second comes from an alarmist 182-page report by two retired generals, including former drug czar Barry McCaffrey. Among their assertions: “Living and conducting business in a Texas border county is tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies as well as citizens are under attack around the clock.”

(True enough for large parts of Mexican territory south of the border, where more than 42,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug mafias five years ago.)

The stark contrast between the two versions speaks volumes about the war of words generated by the issues of immigration and border security during an election campaign. Most of the Republican presidential hopefuls have been competing on who sounds toughest on illegal immigration and on the height of the wall they want to build between the two countries.

Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman, fired the opening salvo in the who-is-the-toughest contest by saying there should be a barrier “every mile, every foot, every inch” to keep illegal immigrants out. Herman Cain, a front-runner in the Republican primary contest according to latest polls, upped the ante by suggesting a division reminiscent of the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences, minefields and manned watch towers that divided Europe during the Cold War.

“It’s going to be 20 feet high,” he said on October 15. “It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying ‘It will kill you – Warning.’” A day later, Cain told a television interviewer he meant that as a joke. Another day later, he said he believed a border fence was in fact needed and it could be electrified.

The electrified fence flip-flop followed Cain remarks in the summer holding out the Great Wall of China, at around 5,500 miles the longest wall ever built, as a model for separating the United States and Mexico. He failed to mention that the Chinese wall did not do what it was meant to do – keep out the northern barbarians against whom it was mean to protect.

A refresher course in history would be useful for Bachmann, Cain and a host of others who talk of “securing the border” as the essential first step on the way to reforming an immigration system almost everybody agrees is dysfunctional. There has never been an impenetrable border though that indisputable fact did nothing to prevent Congress, in 2006, from passing a bill that set an impossible target.

OPERATIONAL CONTROL

That was to establish “operational control” over the world’s busiest border (about 350 million crossings a year). The Secure Fence Act defined operational control as “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism and other contraband.”

To do that, the U.S. Border Patrol has been doubled in size (to around 20,000 agents) under a build-up begun in the administration of George W. Bush and continued under Obama, who won the presidency partly thanks to Latino voters who believed his campaign pledge that he would push through “comprehensive immigration reform” within one year of taking office.

That reform is meant to tackle all aspects of the system, from complicated entry visa regulations to the presence of an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants, the majority Mexicans, already in the country. Once in office, he made little effort to fulfill his promise but his administration steadily stepped up the pace of deportations. They reached a record 400,000 in the fiscal year that ended in September.

The irony of so much emphasis on deporting illegal immigrants under a president who promised so much more has not escaped the Latino community and groups supporting a balanced approach to the complex problem. Joanne Lin of the American Civil Liberties Union noted that the record deportations came at a time when “illegal immigration rates have plummeted, the undocumented population has decreased substantially and violent crime rates are at their lowest in 40 years.”

Violent crime across the United States has been dropping every year since 2006, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Does that hold true for the border region the generals’ report describes as a war zone under assault from Mexican gangs?

In May, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steve McCraw, listed violence his agency had identified as “directly related to the Mexican cartels.” Between January 2010 and May 2011, he said, there were 22 murders, 24 assaults, 15 shootings and 5 kidnappings — 66 incidents in all in a state with 23 million people.

That translates into 3.9 per month. Not much of a war.

There’s good news and bad news on the war on drugs in Mexico and the United States. The good news: cooperation between U.S. and Mexican security forces has rarely been closer. “Unprecedented,” President Barack Obama termed it in a message of sympathy for 52 people killed in an arson attack on a casino in northern Mexico.

The unprecedented cooperation he referred to ranges from the United States providing intelligence drawn from wiretaps and aerial surveillance by U.S. drones to taking part in planning operations to capture drug lords.

American agents, according to accounts from both sides of the border, had a role in hunting down 21 of the 37 men on Mexico’s list of most-wanted organized crime chiefs.

The bad news is that closer cooperation in taking out the CEOs of illicit business enterprises has done little to curb violence in Mexico or throttle the flow of drugs north and the smuggling of guns and cash south. One CEO goes, another one steps in his place. Real change would require an admission by political leaders that conventional drug war strategies have failed and, more importantly, that there’s a need for significant societal changes in both countries.

In the United States, millions of Americans would need to stop snorting, sniffing or injecting the drugs produced in Latin America and smuggled across the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. In Mexico, deeply-rooted traditions resistant to assistance from outside allow crime syndicates to flourish – acceptance of corruption as a way of life and “dreadfully little respect for the law,” in the words of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda.

In an insightful new book — “Manana Forever – Mexico and the Mexicans” — he writes that “Mexico has no way out of its drug wars … unless it changes its attitudes towards the law. This is not occurring.”

Statistics tell the story of the drug wars’ failure on both sides of the border. In the United States, where President Richard Nixon declared “war on drugs” 40 years ago, they are at least as easily available now as they were then. The laws of supply and demand proved more powerful than progressively harsher enforcement. “The market forces of replacement and adaptation make the drug-dealing industry resilient even in the face of heavy enforcement,” Mark Kleiman, a widely respected drug policy expert, writes in a thoughtful essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

“The United States sends five times as many drug dealers to prison today as it did 30 years ago, but this has not prevented the 80-90 percent reductions in the prices of cocaine and heroin over that time, which came as a result of falling dealers’ wages and increased efficiency in trafficking.”

Numbers tell a similarly bleak story in Mexico, where President Felipe Calderon formally declared war on his country’s drug traffickers and sent the military into action shortly after taking office in December 2006. That opened the bloodiest chapter in Mexico’s history since the 1910-1920 revolution. By the end of 2007, the body count stood at 4,300. It climbed steadily: 5,400 deaths in 2008, 9,600 in 2009, 15,000 in 2010 and around 7,000 so far this year.

GOVERNMENT SPIN AND COMMON CRIME
The government long insisted that criminals killing other criminals in often gruesome ways (beheadings became commonplace) accounted for around 90 percent of the dead, soldiers five percent and innocent civilians the rest. That account glossed over an enormous wave of common crime, from murder and kidnapping to the protection racket apparently behind the Monterrey casino attack.

The criminal-on-criminal story line died on August 25, when gunmen set fire to Monterrey’s Casino Royale. Of the 52 people who died, 42 were bingo-playing middle-class women, most of them asphyxiated when they found the emergency exits locked. The attack highlighted the scant respect for rules and regulations Castaneda complains about.

The casino had been ordered closed by the Monterrey mayor’s office for various code violations but a local judge reversed the move and ordered the place reopened. Like many of the casinos that sprouted during Calderon’s presidency — from 198 in 2006 to 790 now, according to the magazine Proceso — its functions are said to have included laundering dirty money.

As he has done frequently, Calderon took the casino attack as an opportunity to rebuke the United States for not doing enough to “drastically reduce” Americans’ consumption of drugs and curb the flow of cash and guns from the United States to Mexico. But in a speech on September 2, he also listed what he called the most important challenge facing his government: “Repair the fabric of society torn by lack of opportunity for the young, the disintegration of families and the loss of values.”

That will take time and meanwhile, the drug wars continue, with strategies that have a proven record of failure. Could the wars be waged more effectively? Yes, says Kleiman, in his Foreign Affairs essay headlined Surgical Strikes in the Drug Wars.

In the United States, shrinking the market could be done by reducing the use of hard drugs (i.e. non-cannabis) by what he estimates are around 3 million people. This small minority of drug users, according to Kleiman, accounts for around 80 percent of hard drug use and an even larger share of crime associated to their addiction, with about 75 percent having at least one felony arrest in the course of a typical year.

Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers an unorthodox idea for Mexico: rather than fight all criminal groups with equal force at the same time, publicly identify the most violent through a scoring system taking into account the overall number of its killings, its targets (dealers, enforcement agents, ordinary citizens, journalists, community leaders etc), and kidnappings.

Then, wipe out that group and start the process again, going after the next group. “The process could continue until none of the remaining groups was notably more violent than the rest. In effect, such a strategy would condition the traffickers’ ability to remain in business on their willingness to conduct their affairs in a relatively nonviolent fashion.”

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But so is the idea that there is a way to stop people from using drugs.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

After breaking a promise to tackle immigration reform in his first year in office, President Barack Obama now thinks the time has come to deal with the thorny issue “once and for all.” It’s a safe bet that he will fail to repair America’s broken immigration system. Why? George W. Bush helps explain.

The immigration reform Bush championed would have provided tighter control over the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, a new visa system for temporary workers, and a path to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. The bill failed in 2007 after running into stiff opposition from congressional leaders of his own Republican party.

In his memoir, Decision Points, he says the debate over the reform had been affected by “a blend of isolationism, protectionism and nativism,” apocalyptic warnings of a “third world invasion and conquest of America” by TV radio hosts and commentators and last but not least the influence of ideological extremes in Congress.

“The failure of immigration reform points out larger concerns about the direction of our politics,” Bush writes in a perceptive passage. Since members of Congress in safe districts do not have to worry about challenges from the opposition party, their greatest vulnerability is getting outflanked in their own party. The result is a drift towards the extreme, he writes, and “this is especially true in the era of bloggers, who make national targets out of politicians they deem ideologically impure.”

That trend was obvious in the 2010 mid-term elections that gave Republicans a 49-seat majority in the House of Representatives and brought in many extremely vocal guardians of ideological purity, adherents to the populist tea party movement.

It is not a congress with an appetite for fixing what Obama, like his predecessor, has described as a broken immigration system. And the obstacles for him are even bigger than they were for Bush. Isolationism, protectionism and nativism are still running strong in the debate. The talk radio hosts and TV commentators Bush complains about in his book treated him, a fellow Republican, much more gently than they do Obama, whom they tend to portray as the devil incarnate.

So Obama’s remark, in his State of the Union address on January 25, that the debate “will be difficult and take time” sounds like the understatement of the year. Particularly because it came just a few weeks after anti-immigration hard-liners added a new element to the long-running political battle.

ANCHOR BABIES” AND THE CONSTITUTION
That involves a constitutional amendment, dating back to 1868, providing U.S. citizenship to almost all babies born in the United States. (The children of foreign diplomats are excluded). In the terminology of proponents of tighter immigration rules, children born to illegal immigrants are “anchor babies,” meant to ensure legal status for their parents and prevent their deportation.

The phrase adds a toxic element to the immigration debate but it is misleading. Until such children reach the age of 21, they cannot sponsor their parents for legal immigration status. That has not stopped an anti-anchor baby movement from gathering momentum.

Two days after Obama’s “once and for all” remark, two Republican senators, Rand Paul and David Vitter, introduced legislation that would end the right to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S.

A day earlier, Arizona Republicans filed similar legislation, part of a coordinated drive in several U.S. states to highlight claims that the federal government is not doing enough to curb illegal immigration.

The aim is to fuel debate over the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution which guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Interpreting the second half of that sentence will boost the income of lawyers but do little to repair the immigration system.

The key to doing that is what Bush pursued and Obama echoed in his State of the Union speech: a way to “protect our borders, enforce our laws and address the millions of undocumented workers who are now living in the shadows.”

There are at least 11 million of them and to the ideological purists, any proposal to give them a path to legal status is tantamount to “amnesty,” like “anchor babies” one of the terms that touch emotional buttons and tend to drown practical considerations. Common sense would dictate that border security, an out-of-date visa system and the status of millions of people already in the country must be dealt with simultaneously and in one package.

But for long, leading Republicans have insisted on a sequence – first, there must be full “operational control” over the border, defined by law as “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics and other contraband.”

The ambitious, or elusive, nature of that requirement was best described by Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I will show you a 51-foot ladder.”
And the solution?  None in sight. If Obama has a plan on how to solve the problem, he has yet to spell it out clearly.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)