Rio Bravo (Rio Grande): US-Mexico Border
I’ve been reading this book by some researchers I work with (sort of). It’s Chad Richardson & Rosalva Resendiz. The book is “On the Edge of the Law.” It’s a sociological look at life in the Rio Grande Valley, with lots of interesting information about immigration (legal and illegal), etc.
This whole area of inquiry is teaching me things I did not know before. For that matter, I did not know they were known by anyone. But they’re things I’ve wondered about, and things that get tossed around in rhetoric during political campaigns. Perhaps a sampling of some of this information….
This is all what appears to be true from bodies of research spanning anywhere between 5 and 100 years (depending on the domain), and like all empirical knowledge, it’s subject to change. But if you want to challenge these findings, you have to do your homework and demonstrate your ideas empirically. I guess that’s why politicians rarely cite sources.
- Immigrants are more likely than long-time citizens in the U.S. to express and act on patriotic American sentiments.
- Immigrants (even illegal immigrants) in the U.S. are less likely to commit crimes than citizens who have lived here longer than one generation.
- Globalization has, in general, not been good for the average Mexican citizen.
- The U.S., globalization, and NAFTA in particular, can very credibly be seen as the reasons for increasing illegal immigration from Mexico.
- More drugs are seized every year along the Texas/Mexico border than in the rest of the U.S. combined (including Cocaine, now being pushed through Mexico by agreements between Mexican and South American cartels).
The drug trade is almost certainly heavily implicated (and some would say almost completely responsible) for political corruption and crime in Northern (and maybe the rest of) Mexico, and in some border communities on this side of the border (**coughLaredo!**).
There are tens of millions of legal individual border crossings in South Texas every year, and double or triple that for automobile crossings. The border is 3,141 km long. So, if we stationed reservists or border patrol agents at every 200m along the border (as is being done in some parts), that would make 15,705 individual posts. If we ran people in 8-hour shifts, and gave them 2 days a week off, we’d need about 66,000 agents or soldiers or whatever. As long as nobody ever quit their job or took a vacation.
In 2005 we had just over 11,000 Border Patrol agents. Some of those need to keep the evil Canadians out, unfortunately, so we still need quite a few if we want to seal the US-Mexico border.
It is probably absolutely impossible to stop the bulk of drugs that flow across the border without huge allocations of manpower, technology and other resources. Unless, of course, we did something to stop the demand by the tens of millions of me-generation Americans who insist that their right to use drugs is inviolable (no matter what the sociopolitical consequences), and that all the crime is really being caused by (pick one):
- The wimpy liberal U.S. government for failing to keep the drugs out,
- the evil right-wing U.S. government for insisting that drugs be illegal,
- the nasty immigrants who insist on coming to the U.S. and picking our spinach and cucumbers, or
- the Mexican government for failing to eradicate the drug trade in and through Mexico.
So, I guess I’ll be blogging about this for a while.
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