Keeping Illegal Workers Male, Young and Fit
MURRIETA, CALIF. — The most visible aspect of the Clinton administration’s immigration policy is Operation Gatekeeper, an unprecedented buildup of law-enforcement manpower and technology in San Diego County to stop illegal immigrants. Gatekeeper’s top priority is to “secure the border,” says INS Commissioner Doris Meissner. By preventing the entry of undocumented immigrants, the jobs of U.S. workers, presumably, will be safeguarded.
But a closer look shows that the government is, through Gatekeeper, acting as a de facto agent of business, ensuring the orderly supply of undocumented laborers to the United States, not eliminating them. One need look no farther than the disparity between enforcement resources and the severity of punishment meted out to undocumented workers, and to the people who employ them.
So contends Gary Huspek, a professor at Cal State University, San Marcos. In an unpublished paper, Huspek contends that Operation Gatekeeper is not an expression of the public will so much as an attempt to create a public will. “Gatekeeper is simply an instance of the state intending to dupe the public without in any way damaging the interests of capital,” he writes.
Spokespersons for the Border Patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Department of Justice do not contest Huspek’s statistics, but they dispute his conclusions.
Operation Gatekeeper began in October 1994 with the promise of $3.1 billion in federal money to add 462 front-line Border Patrol agents to the San Diego sector, bringing the area’s total to 2,127 field agents. The Border Patrol has been provided with the latest military and paramilitary technology: infrared night-vision scopes, portable ground sensors, low-level-light TV cameras, and “improved image-enhancement vehicles,” which include helicopters and light planes, and the ever-present Ford Broncos. It also gets more support from other agencies, including the Army, Marines and Air Force, the National Guard, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
As a result, the U.S.-Mexico border has been militarized in San Diego County; the “enemies” are primarily Mexicans. (Ninety-five percent of undocumented people arrested in the San Diego Border Patrol sector are from Mexico.) Men and women illegally entering the United States in search of work are stigmatized as drug smugglers, wannabe welfare queens, purveyors of fraudulent documents, thugs and hoodlums. Yet, seldom in the public debate is heard anything about the U.S. citizens who employ this “enemy.”
There isn’t much mystery as to why Mexicans come. The U.S. minimum wage of $220 a week is attractive to workers still suffering from the peso’s devaluation, a five-year drought in northern Mexico, the continuing displacement of agricultural workers because of industrialization and from a Mexican pay scale that ranges from $35 a week for a construction worker in Tijuana to $65 a week for maquiladora workers.
Operation Gatekeeper aims to channel the immigrants from the easily traversed beaches of western San Diego County into harder-to-navigate mountains and deserts. It appears to have succeeded. Arrests in the westernmost section, Imperial Beach, have declined from 138,000 in 1994 to 75,000 in 1996. Yet, apprehensions, overall, in the San Diego sector have increased slightly, from 450,152 in 1994 to 483,815 in 1996. Meanwhile, arrests in the county’s easternmost section have increased from a mere 2,330 in 1994 to 79,000 in 1996.
Gatekeeper, Huspek contends, has not significantly changed the number of immigrants attempting to enter the United States. But it has changed the type of worker who succeeds in getting across the border. By directing border-crossers into the mountains, the Border Patrol weeds out older and weaker men, and most of the women and children. Young, physically fit males are most likely to make it through the eastern wilds. “This shift in the type of worker gaining entry into the U.S.,” Huspek says, “amounts to a strengthening of the labor pool available to U.S. employers while restricting access to those who have been likeliest to draw upon the state’s social relief programs.”
Rudy Murillo, INS spokesman in San Diego, says that women and children traditionally try to cross the border close to ports of entry, or even through a port of entry, by using fraudulent documents, primarily for reasons of physical safety. To stop them, Operation Gatekeeper has created the Impostor Program. Entry without inspection, a misdemeanor, can be prosecuted as a felony, punishable by two years in prison, if entry is attempted after the person has been arrested for use of a false document. Re-entry after deportation, even if false documents were not used, can be prosecuted as a felony, punishable by five years in prison, though such infractions have seldom been prosecuted as felonies until now. “Gatekeeper doesn’t change the law; [(U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin] prosecutes it more vigorously,” says Scott Marvin, INS spokesman in San Diego. Such prosecutions have increased by hundreds of percent.
Measured against the prospect of hard time in prison, U.S. employers who hire undocumented workers face penalties that are laughable. Usually, these employers face sanctions only after an “educational visit” from the INS. In most cases, the INS workplace visit is preceded by a telephone call, giving the employer three days to “get his paperwork together,” says INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice. Even after an employer is fined--the penalty ranges from $100 to $2,000 an illegal immigrant hired--its total is reduced through negotiation by an average 59%, according to the General Accounting Office.
But workplace visits--the famous INS “raids”--are few and far between. The INS has only 23 workplace inspectors in the San Diego sector, 13 of them recently added through Operation Gatekeeper. The ratio of workplace-enforcement agents to street agents is about one to 100. And these agents can hardly be said to be overzealous. An Urban Institute study of 10 major cities found that in El Paso, Texas, the city where employer sanctions are most likely to be levied, only one fine was assessed for every two months of agent service. In Chicago, the rate was one fine for every two years of agent service.
Clearly, U.S. employers are not suffering from our “war” on the border, though they are violating federal law as surely as the people who work for them. Furthermore, Huspek contends, what amounts to Gatekeeper’s hands-off policy toward employers of illegal immigrants redounds to the disadvantage of all documented workers, as employers are able to use undocumented workers not only to keep wages depressed but also to stave off any movement toward unionization.
Isolated by language, hidden from the government by employers who also are breaking the law, without social or legal recourse, and increasingly--and unfairly--criminalized in the public mind by high-ranking officials of both political parties, undocumented workers are, in Huspek’s words, “the perfect workers.”
