Opinion: Out in the West Texas town of El Paso...
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...I fell in love with a Mexican girl right before she got busted coming to work in a citrus farm.
From the Star of the Southwest comes an interesting comment on immigration reform from the area’s chief Border Patrol agent. Victor M. Manjarrez Jr. tells the Associated Press that the Patrol is being forced to divert attention from catching criminals and potential terrorists to the pursuit of people who are jumping the border in search of work:
‘Most of these people are economic migrants but we have to deal with them between the ports of entry because we have not, in terms of a legislative fix, determined what we do with these people,’ Manjarrez said. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious that the country has a need for economic migrants. To what degree, I don’t know. That’s for the country to decide and for the politicians to decide.’
Full story here. Manjarrez estimates that of the 75,000 border crossers arrested in the 268-mile El Paso sector in 2007, at least 87% were coming for work. Without this ‘clutter,’ he says, agents would be better able to focus on securing the border against actual threats.
This was essentially my point a few years back, when I made the case for visaless exchange among the NAFTA countries. That’s a bit more ambitious than the kind of ‘comprehensive reform’ that usually amounts to issuing more guest worker visas. But I don’t see the downside in ensuring that all non-criminal traffic into the United States (and out of it: read the story for details about how historically visaless entry has actually encouraged out-migration) is routed through legitimate border crossings where the feds can know who’s who.
If you do know of a downside, the comments are wide open.