La Jornada: Julio Hernández López
Seal the border now and regularize migrants afterwards. This is the meaning of the U.S. leadership's project of ''immigration reform", which is, in reality, one more section in the broader national security wall of the United States. Yesterday, the Senate approved completion of the gringo wall between the two nations, of which some 1,200 kilometers [746 miles] remain to be built. Also, the number of agents on the boundary line will be doubled, and more and better surveillance technology systems will be used, among them, the famous drones.
The strong police and technological barrier aims to prevent the arrival of Mexicans and Central Americans to a nation living under the growing fear of terrorist attacks committed by foreigners arriving illegally in its territory. In fact, the Calderón administration that was so dependent on Washington allowed the development of an inhuman policy of containment of travelers from southern Mexico toward the imperial north. Aggression against migrants, mostly Central Americans, has been a barbaric form of inhibition of the flow of irregular labor, with the cartels as enforcers, the Mexican government as an accomplice by omission and tolerance, and the United States as the final beneficiary.
Now, Washington has offered Mexico a presumed whole enchilada, which is really is just a hot dog. It couldn't be otherwise, since what is in the process of legislative approval is not the product of an organized struggle by Mexicans in the United States, but the calculations of the elite of that country, naturally and understandably attentive to their interests and in no way attentive to the interests of the labor force from the neighboring yard. That is why the first desires being served are those of the most conservative segments, the taking of full control of their part of the border with Mexico, and then approving a complicated and long process of stages of regularization for millions of undocumented Mexicans.
The Republicans are on track to clearly and forcefully get what they are most concerned about, national security, while the Democrats, especially Barack Obama, receive a long-term package of immigration reform. The political winks of this reform generate hope in the world of Mexicans under constant threat of deportation. But even though a number of them may be eligible for regularization in more than ten years, the fact is that this process generates doubts and rejection among leaders of migrant advocacy organizations. For them, this is a trap against which they have openly called for a fight.
Unlike the outbursts of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón on the topic of immigration reform, the administration headed by Enrique Peña Nieto has preferred a low profile, not sticking its head into the political inner workings in Washington, with the understanding that the definition of these policies belongs to the full sovereignty of U.S. bodies. Leaving aside the discussion about the role the Mexican government ought to play in the drafting of legislation that impacts its inner reality, as well as the prolongation of the economic exile of its countrymen, the fact is that Los Pinos [The Pines, the Mexican "White House"] should show at least some degree of concern, seeing that its border is about to receive a doubling of armed agents and air and ground technological equipment that will serve not merely to detect people in transit to the United States illegally.
To close the doors of access to the gringo labor market to thousands of Mexicans without jobs and opportunities at home is a way to encourage destabilization. It even has to be said that sealing the border in the face of an economy so dependent on the drug trade, as is Mexico's, will generate greater confrontations between cartels and widespread social violence. It is as if the problem of drug addiction had a unilateral cause, the producers and suppliers, and not the counterpart of consumers and the mafia of politicians and police that, as much there as here, benefit from this market chain. Spanish original