The U.S. Closes In on Its Most Contentious Border

The U.S. National Guard started its deployment along the border with Mexico yesterday, in compliance with an order given in May from President Obama, to strengthen security in an area affected by illegal immigration and swept by drug-trafficking cartel violence. The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that a total of 1,200 troops will be placed this month in the four southern states along which the 3,100 km border runs.

During the first few weeks of August, 524 soldiers will arrive in Arizona, 286 in Texas, 260 in California and 82 in New Mexico. The remaining 48 will coordinate tasks among the military units. According to National Guard officials, the entire operation will be in place by the end of September.

Yesterday the preliminary work began: selecting soldiers and training tests. The troops will be on the border, in principle, for one year, and they will perform support duties for the border police and customs officers. They will neither take part in raids nor arrest suspected delinquents or undocumented immigrants.

The president ordered the deployment in May, in the days immediately following the passing of the controversial Arizona immigration law, which would in principle allow police officers of any state to ask for immigration papers from those citizens whom they suspected of being in the country illegally. Thanks to the Obama administration’s lawsuit, a judge temporarily blocked most of the law last week.

The same day as the military deployment began, the president strongly reproached the Arizona state government for approving the law. “I understand the frustration of people in Arizona,” said the president in a televised interview for CBS. “But what we can’t do is demagogue the issue, and what we can’t do is allow a patchwork of 50 different states or cities or localities where anybody who wants to make a name for themselves suddenly says, ‘I’m going to be anti-immigrant, and I’m going to try to see if I can solve the problem ourselves.’ This is a national problem.”

The current administration, like that of the last president, George W. Bush, has tried to convince Congress of the need to approve a reform of immigration law at a national level, opening the way to legal residency for the 12 million undocumented immigrants who live in the country and help sustain the economy. Since the 1980’s, great attempts in this aspect have failed. In 1986, Ronald Reagan did something that for many Republicans today would be unthinkable: he granted amnesty to all those illegal immigrants who had entered the country before 1982.

It is also true that he increased border controls and approved high fines for those businesses that hired illegal immigrants. However, 3 million people in total benefited from that process of legalization. Like Reagan, Obama has argued that the immigration reform should be applied equally to all states by Washington.

His decision to order the deployment of the National Guard was criticized as being not enough by the most conservative governors of the border states. As Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said in a press release in mid-July, “While the announcement of more resources is welcomed, it does not appear to be enough, or tied to a strategy to comprehensively defeat the increasingly violent drug and alien-smuggling cartels that operate in Arizona on a daily basis.”

The deployment of the National Guard along the border was originally a petition from Arizona Senator John McCain — who joined forces with Bush in 2007 — and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. They proposed an unsuccessful amnesty law and national reform of immigration policy. McCain, who at the end of this month faces the tough primaries in the Republican Party in his state, has changed his mind since the last presidential elections, which he lost, and now supports harsher measures, such as a substantial increase in police and soldiers along the border.

Before Obama, Bush ordered the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops along the border in 2006. They served there for two years, mostly performing administrative tasks and traffic control, allowing for the arrest of 162,000 undocumented immigrants. Even though, as before, the soldiers that arrived in Arizona yesterday will not make any arrests, numerous protest groups have united in a campaign to say they want to avoid the militarization of the border.