It’s Quiet--Too Quiet

An old truth about California is disintegrating. No one can say what this disintegration will mean for our future. But it’s happening every day here. Or, more precisely, every night.

The old truth goes like this: The border with Mexico will never, ever, be controlled.

For most of us, this truth goes back as far as we can remember. Each night the campesinos scampered across the Tijuana River and into the bean fields. They charged through the entry stations. They cut holes in the fence.

And we could not stop them. You could argue, perhaps, that we didn’t want to stop them. We’ll get to that dilemma a bit later. The fact was that, after 30 years, our efforts to close the border had produced more laughs than anything else.

Well, the comedy has ended. Earlier this month, Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, announced that the infamous San Diego stretch of the border was under control.

That’s right: under control. Meissner’s phrase left a little room for fudging, because some crossers still make it over the border. But that does not alter the importance of her statement: One of the historic truths about California no longer obtained.

The change has been occurring since 1994, when the U.S. Border Patrol put together its most recent plan. Called Operation Gatekeeper, initially it was met with what you might call skepticism.

“People laughed at us,” says Johnny Williams, the former chief of the Border Patrol in San Diego and one of Gatekeeper’s architects.

“They said, ‘You’re crazy to try this.’ They just didn’t think it was possible to control the border.”

Basically, the plan called for more of everything. More agents, more Ford Expeditions, more fences, more high technology. The Clinton administration, eager to establish its bona fides on the immigration issue, bought into the plan.

Money has been spent so fast and in so many ways that no one seems to know the total figure, but $1 billion probably comes close. I think it’s safe to say we are talking about the most expensive border operation in the world.

And the changes can be seen everywhere. Remember the old scenes on TV where the crossers walked through a frayed border fence with huge holes cut into it? That fence is gone. New, stronger fences stand in its place.

The new fences fall into several categories, but my favorite is the “bollard fence,” an ingenious construction of concrete pillars. It would take dynamite or a tank to knock it down.

Agent Mario Villareal took me out for a look at the area known as “the soccer field,” one of the favorite crossing spots in the old days.

“I remember,” he said, “when hundreds of people would gather here each night to cross over. You had taco sellers here. Shoe sellers. The crowds were so big that we did not dare come into this area. They had us outnumbered.”

Today the soccer field is quiet. No one gathers.

Partly, it’s because of the new fence. Partly, because the Border Patrol swarms over the area 24 hours a day. Partly, because motion detectors are hidden in the landscape, because choppers hover overhead, because night has been turned into day by banks of stadium lights.

In fact, the entire border along San Diego is now eerily quiet and peaceful. It’s the quiet that comes from control.

No longer do groups of desperate crossers make banzai charges past the entry stations and into border traffic. No longer do hundreds of crossers gather on the median strips of I-5 to be picked up by vans and carried north.

The whole, wild scene has slipped away. By 1997, the total numbers of arrests in San Diego dropped by half compared to the old days of 1995. And at Imperial Beach, which once accounted for 25% of all illegal crossings from Mexico, arrests have dropped by a stunning 71% this year.

To some degree, of course, the shutdown in San Diego has simply shifted the border crossings eastward. Areas around El Centro have seen increases in illegal crossings even as the San Diego numbers have plunged. But the increases in the east have been only half the size of the decreases in San Diego.

And Williams makes a more important point about the significance of the shutdown here. “San Diego was the worst place by far,” he says. “We knew that if we could succeed here, we could do it anyplace else.”

*

That’s what the Border Patrol intends. Even as we speak, Gatekeeper is being extended eastward to Arizona and Texas.

So that gets us back to our dilemma. After 30 years, we have begun to achieve what we claim we want. A closed, pure border.

But do we truly want it? Or was there wisdom in the old policy of talking about a closed border and doing very little about it?

After all, we had good reason for our apparent hypocrisy. Along with their obvious social costs, the new immigrants also brought undisputed benefits.

Big agriculture thrived from its use of the cheap labor, as did other industries. The rest of us discovered an endless supply of nannies, gardeners, ditch diggers and handymen. Modern Southern California may be the first region in America where the mere middle-class can afford servants.

So what happens now? If the San Diego experiment is extended eastward with the same success, will that pool of cheap labor slowly begin to disappear? Is it possible that 10 years from now we will wake up and wonder what happened to all the nannies?

I don’t believe anyone knows the answer. We can only wait as Gatekeeper marches east and, little by little, brings us the pure border that we thought we wanted.