Arizona has proved to be a precursor of how poorly that would work. A strict new law, which [Governor Janet] Napolitano signed with some regret, would force any business that knowingly hired an undocumented worker to lose its license after two offenses.
Thus far, there have been thousands of tips about people who look like illegal workers, prompting police to chase innumerable bogus complaints. But so far, not a single reported citation. Not even from Phoenix, home of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed toughest lawmen in the West, part of the Lou Dobbs Gasbag Hall of Fame.
Of course, the law has been on the books for only three months. But if they can’t find a single lawbreaker in a state with an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants — a state that is the nation’s busiest gateway for illegal crossings — imagine how hard it would be to round up a population the size of NewYork City and Los Angeles combined — breaking up families and ruining businesses.
A little less than a year ago, Prairie Weather set off in the trusty Honda with camera and notebook on a four-hour drive to a Texas border city to attend a meeting at the office of a Democratic member of the House. The meeting was about the border wall.
The other attendees were local ranchers, local (to the Rio Grande valley) law enforcement, officers from Border Patrol, politicians, one or two members of the press, Congressional staffers, and some people whose names got lost in the shuffle (deliberately, we believe) who represented Republican corporate friends with huge financial interests in the nutty, Alice-in-Wonderland project to build a fancy, useless all. Even local ranchers with huge spreads along the river -- men in suits and boots and flag lapel pins who were Bushies -- had nothing but scorn for the project. Most of all they resented what the wall would do to their land. They were prepared to fight against Washington's high-handed proposal to take whatever acreage it wants to build a wall, a wall which would keep their cattle from water in the Rio Grande while not doing a damn thing to end illegal immigration.
Keep in mind that in this meeting with a Democratic member of Congress, no note-taking was allowed and no cameras were allowed. The identities of the unknown VIP attendees were never given out -- not even after repeated phone inquiries to Congressional staff in Washington during the two weeks after the meeting was over. Hanging over that meeting, a year later, is the dark cloud of political corruption. It seems more than obvious that the wall was conceived as a gift to corporate friends and a huge bite out of tax revenues.
Over the past year there have been skirmishes between towns and Washington, ranchers and Washington, states and Washington. It looks like the people have won. Timothy Egan writes in today's New York Times that the Tucson area has provided a pretty good idea of how the wall idea is working out.
The bottom line is that the Bush administration's wall is not working out. It's failing. It's had it. And Democratic governor Janet Napolitano -- possible Obama vice president -- has shown she knows how to do it right. Even John McCain has shown some brain activity when it comes to border issues.
The wall has hit a wall. You remember the wall, er, fence: nearly 700 miles of obstruction along the border, promised by year’s end. Nightly, someone with a microphone or a seat in Congress has wondered why we can’t just slap together the mighty divide, lickety-split.
“Show me a 50-foot wall,” says Napolitano, who prosecuted hundreds of illegals before she moved to the Statehouse, and “and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” It’s not just the pull of the world’s largest economy.
The wall has run into a foundation of the modern Republican Party and a bedrock American principle at that: property rights. A federal judge Andrew Hanen of South Texas, an appointee of George W. Bush and a man with solid Texas values, as W. likes to say, has put a big roadblock before the fence-builders. He ruled that the government must adequately compensate property owners before running over their land in the rush to build the wall.
Bad enough, the wall is a curtain to the natural world, to water and sixth-generation family farms that don’t conform to a straight line on a map. But the Bush administration has been suing property owners by the dozens, trying to force them to let the feds divide their land. Now that the bully tactics have backfired, the border will most likely not be fenced by year’s end, if ever. Oh, well.
