What does the vicious sneak attack by Hamas terrorists against Israel — which has sparked a new eruption of the old war in the Middle East — have to do with U.S. immigration policy?
Quite a bit, actually.
As a Mexican American journalist who has written about immigration for more than three decades, I have for many years heard Republicans and, yes, also Democrats imply that border barriers are a kind of silver bullet, arguing that they would deter the smugglers who make hundreds of millions of dollars each year bringing illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants into the United States to satisfy America’s thirst for both.
Incredibly, there are Americans who know so little about desperation that they believe human beings will make their way across hundreds of miles of dangerous terrain to the U.S.-Mexico border, see a giant wall, and then simply shrug and walk back home.
I’ve visited the border several times, in California, Texas and Arizona. U.S. Border Patrol agents have told me that, from their experience, there is no barrier long enough, deep enough or high enough to keep out someone who is determined to get past it.
That was the case in Israel, which until a few days ago was considered one of the most fortified countries on the planet. The Hamas attackers penetrated the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel using explosives and bulldozers before shooting down scores of Israeli civilians at an outdoor music festival and carrying out more killings and kidnappings in several villages.
Critics will say, “Well, the Gaza barrier was just a fence, and what we need along the U.S.-Mexico border is a brick-and-mortar wall that would be much harder to penetrate.”
There are indeed portions of the 2,000-mile border that have only fencing, and other portions with no barrier at all because the international boundary line goes over a river, an Indian reservation or private land. In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act to authorize the construction of 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.
But the larger point is about deterrence vs. determination. When the two square off, it’s smart to bet on the latter. One example: Some of the Hamas terrorists hang-glided or paraglided above the barrier into Israel before the deadly attacks.
The debate about walls and fences must seem strange to Border Patrol agents on the front lines.
About a decade ago, I spent three hours at an off-the-record lunch with a Border Patrol supervisor who told me that — while he didn’t oppose walls and fences per se — he worried they were a distraction from the three things the agency needed: the most sophisticated high-tech surveillance equipment, tunnel detection technology and roads along the border to give agents better access to police it.
Politicians would rather talk about the kind of structure that Donald Trump envisioned as his “big, beautiful wall.” That was just another one of Trump’s broken promises. His administration built only a few hundred miles of border wall.
