Scorpions for Breakfast

by Jan Brewer

  Even those Americans for whom immigration seems a distant issue don’t fall so easily into the open-borders-versus-closed-borders dynamic, no matter how hard the media and Washington try to shoehorn them in. As polls have shown, most Americans favor getting control of illegal immigration but continue to support being open to legal immigration. They understand the distinction between illegal and legal immigration—between honoring the law and not—that eludes much of the media. And for those of us who live and breathe illegal immigration every day, the issue is far from a simple tale of good guys versus bad guys. It’s a practical, pressing issue of security and quality of life. For us, illegal immigration boils down to a few basic questions:

  First, do our laws mean what they say they mean? Often lost in the heat of the immigration debate is this undeniable fact: Crossing the border into the United States without the proper documentation is against the law. Period. We can either honor this law or we can abolish it. But our political leaders in Washington seem to uphold the law only when it suits them. The problem is, selectively honoring the law serves to undermine all of our laws. What’s more, breaking the law to come to the United States too often leads to other law breaking. Employers break the law by hiring illegal aliens. And then the illegal aliens break the law by obtaining and using false identification—as do those who supply these documents. And that’s just for starters. Illegal immigration is feeding a growing violent subculture of drug and human smuggling in the Southwest—a culture that is spreading across the country as they are beginning to diversify into other criminal activity like extortion and racketeering—just like the mafia. In the vacuum left by unenforced immigration laws, a new kind of organized crime is coming to America.

  Second, who gets to decide who becomes an American? Should it be the criminals who profit from smuggling drugs and humans across our border? Should it be the immigrants who cut the line to come here illegally? Or should the citizens who make the laws and pay the taxes decide who their fellow citizens will be? Americans have different views on whether there should be more immigration or less to our country. I happen to believe that we should keep our borders open to legal immigrants. But few are neutral on the question of who decides who is admitted to our country. Illegal immigration takes this decision from the citizens and puts it in the hands of others; it takes it from the law-abiding and puts it in the hands of lawbreakers. No country in the history of the world has ever willingly done that and survived.

  Finally, we come to the question that really hits home for me and my fellow Arizonans: Who will pay the costs of uncontrolled illegal immigration? The hundreds of thousands of mostly poor, mostly uneducated illegal aliens who enter this country every year impose real costs on our communities. The sick need health care. The hungry need to eat. The young need to be educated. While many Americans mistakenly believe that illegal aliens are ineligible for public services, many do receive benefits, mostly through their U.S.-born children. And then there is the cost of the crime and violence that increasingly accompanies illegal immigration.

  Who’s going to pay for all this? The communities and states that just happen to be along the border? Or the federal government whose job it is to protect the border and enforce the law? (That is, if we decide that our laws should be enforced to begin with!)

  These are the real, unavoidable questions that Americans who live along the southwestern border have to deal with every day. The degree to which our leaders in Washington fail to consider these questions is beyond distressing. They seem to prefer to treat immigration as a purely political exercise. They look at it in terms of the votes they will gain or lose, not the individuals whose lives and property are destroyed. They look at it as a way to buy favor with this or that special interest group, not as a fundamental question of our national security and sovereignty. They look at it in terms of their self-interest in political advancement, not in terms of our national interest in the rule of law.

  The failure of Washington to take illegal immigration seriously does a disservice to Arizonans and the people of the border states, of course. Unlike those who pontificate about the issue from Washington, New York, and other far-off centers of power and influence, we live with this problem every day. And like the Arizona ranchers who blame “political forces” on both sides of the border for fueling it and making it worse, we border-state Americans are angry about it.

  But illegal immigration is not just “our problem” anymore—it is also yours. Increasingly, border states like Arizona are, for illegal aliens, simply transit points to cities and towns across the United States. The organized crime and drug and human smuggling rings that control the flow of humans across the border don’t limit their North American operations to the Southwest. As we will see, they are global operations, bringing illegal crossers from all over the world into Mexico and then funneling them through Arizona to destinations in virtually every state in the union. And as go the criminals who run these organizations, so goes the violence, exploitation, and lawlessness that accompanies them. Americans in every state must wonder how a federal government that has grown so big and increasingly asserts its authority to interfere in every aspect of our lives can be so impotent in the face of a clear threat to our security and safety.

  The irony is that the crisis of illegal immigration in Arizona is due in large part to our success at stopping it in other states along the southwestern border. That’s right, folks: We can secure our border if we just summon the will to do so. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

  In the early 1990s, 75 percent of all illegal crossings along the 1,951-mile Mexican border occurred in San Diego or El Paso. Arizona was barely in the running. It was then that the U.S. government made the conscious decision to redirect illegal aliens east from San Diego and west from Texas by shoring up the border in these two locations. The idea was to push illegal crossers into more remote areas where they would have to make long, arduous crossings and would presumably be easier to apprehend. But it was an imperfect solution, and it came at a price for our state. As the Los Angeles Times acknowledged in 1993, “Arizona would bear the brunt of redirected migratory patterns, experts say.”

  In other words: California and Texas get more secure borders. Arizona doesn’t. Washington decides; the rest of us just have to live with it.

  It’s already getting hard to remember what a problem it once was, but San Diego used to be a major transit point for illegal crossers. There was kind of a carnival atmosphere at the border. Vendors sold food, and impromptu soccer games broke out as thousands of would-be immigrants gathered near San Ysidro to make their break. They would wait until dark and then make a treacherous but brazen run across the eight-lane Interstate 5 freeway. It got so bad that the state of California put up signs showing the silhouette of a man, woman, and child to warn motorists to watch out for people crossing the highway.

  By 1994 the people of San Diego were tired of illegal aliens darting in front of them in traffic and running through their backyards. Californians decided they had had enough. So their political leadership, aided by the Clinton administration, launched the project known as Operation Gatekeeper. A fourteen-mile fence with eight-foot-high steel panels was built in the San Diego area. Then another fence was constructed. Hundreds of new border agents were added to the area. Stadium lighting, infrared night scopes, and motion sensors were installed. The result was dramatic. Apprehensions of illegal aliens dropped from 524,231 in 1995 to 126,908 in 2005 in the sixty-six-mile San Diego sector. Federal and local officials also reported that rapes, killings, and other violent crimes sharply declined.

  The effects of shoring up the border in El Paso were equally dramatic. Once again, when the political will is summoned to secure the border, it can be done. The El Paso sector, running from the Arizona–New Mexico state line all the way through the two westernmost counties in Texas, used to be a busy spot for illegal crossings. In the twenty miles of border between El Paso and Ciudad
Juarez, an estimated 8,000 illegal aliens crossed each day. But about the same time California’s border security was beefed up, the feds boosted security around El Paso. Operation Hold the Line gave up on the failed strategy of trying to catch illegal aliens after they’d entered the United States and instead focused on preventing them from entering in the first place. It reassigned agents to the border from other duties and doubled the number of Border Patrol agents. Apprehensions went from about 1,000 per day to 150 per day. Crime declined, as did human-rights-violation charges against the Border Patrol. The operation enjoyed broad support, including from the Mexican American community.

  California and Texas are real-life refutations of the lie that securing our border is an impossible dream. The major downside of their success, however, is that it created a funnel effect, squeezing the flow of illegal aliens from the west and the east until it formed a gushing stream right through—you guessed it—Arizona. Now, California and Texas haven’t solved their illegal immigration problems, not by a long stretch. But even their limited success has meant that hundreds of thousands of illegals who still want to cross the border every year now have to go through my state. Arizona has become the path of least resistance—the chokepoint through which illegal aliens enter the United States every year and then fan out across the country.

  Of all the states in the union, Arizona is the site of the most illegal crossings. More illegal aliens are detained in Arizona—and more drugs are confiscated in Arizona—than in any other state. Although the numbers have declined overall since the onset of the recession, the federal government currently estimates that about half of all illegal border crossings—of all borders in America—are through the Grand Canyon State. This is a considerable change from 1992, when fewer than 8 percent were recorded in Arizona. In 2009, Customs and Border Protection apprehended almost as many illegal aliens in Arizona as in California and Texas combined. That year, the Border Patrol caught more than 550,000 illegal aliens, and over 240,000 of these apprehensions occurred in the Tucson sector. Since 2009, well over 400,000 people have crossed illegally into the United States in the Tucson sector—the equivalent, according to Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, of an invasion of twenty divisions.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, the Border Patrol estimates that it apprehends only one in four illegal border crossers. That means the actual number crossing into Arizona every year is at least a million. That’s about twice the population of the city of Tucson. And for every illegal immigrant who’s a criminal and who gets arrested crossing the border—a gang member, a drug dealer, even a child molester—three are missed and find their way into neighborhoods in other states all across America.

  So it’s not for nothing that parts of Arizona have been called lawless free-for-alls when it comes to illegal immigration. And the reason is not that law enforcement and Border Patrol agents are failing to do their job. These men and women are being threatened, shot at, sometimes paying the ultimate price, and still doing a heroic service for their communities and their country.

  No, the reason for the crisis of illegal immigration is that our leaders in Washington are failing to do their job. Despite their protests that the border is “as secure as it’s ever been,” the experts tell a different story.

  The federal government’s own independent research group, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), admits that of the nearly 2,000 miles of border between the United States and Mexico, less than 44 percent is under the “operational control” of the Border Patrol. As if that isn’t bad enough, consider that the feds define “operational control” as not necessarily the ability to locate and apprehend illegal aliens at the border itself, but up to 100 miles from the border. In fact, only 15 percent of the border is under full control in the sense that crossers are caught then and there.

  Fifteen percent. If 15 percent in control means the border is “as secure as it’s ever been,” we’re in bigger trouble than even I realized.

  Arizona has dealt with the challenge of illegal immigration for a long time. Mexico is our neighbor, after all. And like all neighbors, we have had good times and bad. But for the most part, for those of us who have lived, worked, and raised families in the Southwest, our Mexican neighbors are people like us. Most of them want what we want: to provide for their families and live in safety and security.

  But a few years ago, Arizonans began to notice a change in the character of many of the people crossing the border. Although most illegal aliens were still just looking for an opportunity to provide for their families, another, more sinister type was now haunting the border. As usual, it was the people who live along the border itself, like Rob Krentz, who noticed it first.

  The cattlemen told us that more and more of the illegal aliens they saw on their land were no longer wearing their traditional clothes. Now they were wearing black—they even painted their water jugs black—to be less detectable at night. And instead of carrying Circle K plastic bags with their shoes and other personal items like they used to, more and more were carrying automatic weapons. Homes were being broken into. Women at home alone during the day reported menacing men staring at their houses and refusing to leave. Rob Krentz himself made the observation to a group of ranchers around that time that if something didn’t change, it was inevitable that someone would be killed.

  Up in the interior of the state, we realized that things had changed for the worse when violence spiked in places like Phoenix. In 2003 alone, we had a 45 percent rise in homicides that the police traced to fighting among gangs smuggling drugs and illegal aliens and a 400 percent rise in kidnappings, home invasions, and extortion linked to illegals.

  A home invasion is every bit as terrifying as the name suggests. Rival drug gang members have been known to dress in uniforms similar to those of the Phoenix police and carry military-style rifles to target homes of other smugglers where they believe large amounts of cash, drugs, or weapons are stored. During the attacks, residential neighborhoods have been sprayed with hundreds of rounds of automatic-weapon fire. Earlier this year, eight armed men broke into a west Phoenix home at three A.M. looking for drugs while a mother and father and their six-year-old daughter were asleep. They beat and stabbed the father, and one of the intruders died in a shoot-out with police. Since then, stories of home invasions and the ensuing armed clashes with police have become routine in the Phoenix area.

  And of course, we started to find more bodies along the roadside and in the desert, the innocent and not-so-innocent victims of the growing violence entering our state from the southern border.

  I vividly remember the crisp November morning in 2003 when we got one of the first of many wake-up calls about this new and very frightening level of violence. I was at my office in the Capitol when reports started coming in that Department of Public Safety officers had come upon bodies scattered along the median of Interstate 10 southeast of Phoenix. They were the grisly remains of a forty-mile, high-speed shoot-out between illegal-alien-smuggling gangs.

  I did a mental inventory of everyone I knew who might have been traveling along I-10 that morning. As the details came in, each was more unbelievable then the next. The shootings had occurred at eight thirty in the morning. In broad daylight. During rush-hour traffic on a well-traveled interstate highway. Four people were believed to be dead.

  What happened was this: After crossing the border with a group of illegals, a human-smuggling gang had its “cargo” hijacked by a rival gang about eighty-five miles from the border, just north of Tucson. The two groups of smugglers, with the robbers and their human cargo in the lead, took off heading northwest on I-10 toward Phoenix. The original smugglers caught up with the rip-off gang just north of Casa Grande, about thirty miles from Phoenix. They pulled up alongside them and opened fire—still speeding up the freeway—with automatic weapons. The back-and-forth gunfight continued along the freeway for more than thirty miles, until they ran into the morning rush-hour traffic h
eading into Phoenix. The vehicles were so shot up that police found one man crouched by the side of the highway, holding the toe that had been blown off his foot in the gunfire.

  Looking back, it’s clear that the I-10 freeway shooting was just a taste of things to come. Smuggling humans across the border had become big business. So much money was at stake—and so little risk of capture or lengthy incarceration was involved—that rival groups had taken to stealing each other’s “cargo.” But not only were the lives of illegal aliens being lost, but the lives of Arizonans themselves were being threatened. Even now, I look back and shudder at the thought of someone I love being caught in the crossfire that morning.

  The rapid growth of human smuggling in the Southwest desert is first of all a tale of human greed. At critical points, the criminals that operate along the border saw potential for yet more money to be made off of human misery, and at each point the levels of violence and suffering increased. Along the way, it became a story about something else as well: a story of total indifference to the sanctity of life.

  But perhaps the worst part of the story is our government’s utter failure to protect us from this evil. A government’s most fundamental job is to protect its citizens from those who prey upon the vulnerable and put profit above human life. The outrage of human smuggling in America isn’t just that these kinds of criminals exist. It’s that our federal government has chosen to ignore them for so long.

  Once upon a time, Mexicans, Central Americans, or others seeking to cross the border into the United States illegally might pay a “mom-and-pop” guide a few hundred dollars to help them across. But the security crackdowns following the attacks of September 11, 2001, made crossing America’s borders, for a time, more dangerous and difficult. Where illegal aliens used to slip across relatively easily with the help of small-time guides—commonly known by their Spanish name, coyotes—after 9/11 the crossing got more perilous. Illegal aliens could still cross, but now they needed more help. Greater danger meant greater demand for coyotes, and that, of course, meant higher prices. These higher prices in turn attracted a more organized, sophisticated, and brutal criminal element.