Fenced In

President Bush signed the fence bill into law this morning in a ceremony in the White House's Roosevelt Room. The law would authorize the construction of about 700 miles of fence along the US/Mexico border. The total cost for this segment of the fence is not really known, but a prior spending package authorized spending $1.2 billion for the segment.

Mexican officials have criticized the fence. Outgoing Mexican President Vicente Fox, who has spent much of his six years in office lobbying for a new guest worker program and a chance at citizenship for the millions of Mexicans working illegally in the U.S., calls the fence "shameful" and compares it to the Berlin Wall.

Others have doubts about its effectiveness.

"A fence will slow people down by a minute or two, but if you don't have the agents to stop them it does no good. We're not talking about some impenetrable barrier," T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union representing Border Patrol agents, said Wednesday.

Customs and Border Protection statistics show that apprehensions at border crossings are down 8 percent nationally for the budget year that just ended, Bonner said. Apprehensions were up in the San Diego sector, he said, an area of the nearly 2,000-mile border that has the most fencing.

Mexico needs those illegal immigrants to cross into the US because they're a major source of income for the Mexican government. Mexico's economy is a mess, which is one reason why so many make the hazardous journey across the frontier into the US. They risk their lives not only because of the environmental hazards of crossing deserts, but with the human smugglers who charge large sums to aid those crossing.

The fence is designed to keep illegal aliens out of the US - not to keep people in, which was the reason the Soviets built the Berlin Wall. Of course, Fox doesn't mention that his country is doing all it can to police its Southern border to prevent illegal immigrants from the South to enter Mexico. Not only are Mexico's immigration policies far more strict than the US policy such as it is, but the penalties are far more harsh.

The thing is, unlike the U.S., Mexico doesn't have to "get tough." It already is. Mexico deports more people than the U.S. each year, even though it has only a third of our population. In Mexico, it's a felony to be illegal, punishable by fines, prison time or deportation.

Under Mexico's General Population Law, foreign visitors have their visa status recorded, are carefully monitored while in the country and have their rights to speak out on Mexican politics severely curbed. Mexico lets people stay permanently based only on "their possibilities of contributing to national progress."

By the way, Mexicans also get automatic priority over foreigners for jobs.

And if you somehow maneuver through all this and become a citizen, but move back to your country of origin for five years, sorry — you lose your citizenship.

Last year, according to California state Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, Mexico deported some 240,000 people back to Central America — enough to fill 10 to 12 buses a day. By contrast, just 15,000 immigrants have been naturalized over the past five years.

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