New rules, same old problem.

• Author: McGill, Craig
• Position: Law & Justice - Immigration issues in the United States - Excerpt

IMMIGRATION IS A TRICKY TOPIC--and nowhere more so than in the U.S., a country founded, made great, and, eventually, turned into the only superpower on the plan, et by immigrants. Despite the romanticized notion of America s foundings, immigration was not always welcome. As long as their have been ships sailing to the States, there have been people been trying to get in on the fly. In 1820, for instance, the first Chinese immigrants to arrive at San Francisco came from the Fujian province. San Francisco also was the area that suffered the most in the anti-Chinese riots of 1880, which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barfing unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the country.

Figures from the Census Bureau estimate that there are 7-9,000,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S. and, in recent years, the number of individuals becoming legal immigrants is around 1,000,000 annually. It is interesting to look at the legal-illegal situation for a moment because both share one thing--the breakdown of where people come from and where they are going. People from the following six countries--in order of numbers--make up most of those trying to get in: Mexico, India, China, Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Where are they all going? Again, ranked by popularity: California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois.

For many, it is the lure of the American Dream, lit by liberty's torch, that attracts them to this country. Yet, it is becoming a dim light as border walls try to discourage illegal aliens from being drawn to the perceived brighter opportunities. In the early 1990s, reforms were announced to deal with the rising problem of immigration, which increasingly was becoming a political matter. The plan was known as "prevention through deterrence"; the aim, to make it so risky and dangerous that there would be no point in trying to sneak into the U.S. In that sense, the plan is a failure. More than 3,000,000 illegals still try to pour in from south of the border every year.

What the initiative has done, however, is "militarize" the borderline through a number of operations. These include what were known as Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Operation Rio Grande in McAllen, and Operation Safeguard in Tucson. Operation Gatekeeper was the first and appeared to prove that deterrence worked. Initially, it concentrated on five miles of Imperial Beach in an area that accounted for nearly 25% of all illegal border crossings nationwide. Once the border patrol regained control of this heavily trafficked stretch, Gatekeeper was expanded to include the entire 66 miles of border under the San Diego sector's jurisdiction. As a result, apprehensions in 2001 reached a 28-year low in the sector, a reduction from...