Borderline Politics

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 21, 2000 | by Sean Paige

Buchanan visits the U.S.-Mexican border to listen and defend his position on the need to fight against the constant and growing stream of illegal aliens.

In a brazen daylight foray onto foreign soil, Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan briefly led an invasion of Mexico on Jan. 19, with a call for better U.S. border enforcement as his battle cry. But the incursion was unplanned: So indistinct is the international boundary here, just two miles west of Douglas, Ariz., where an escalating tide of illegal immigrants has turned the town hair-trigger tense, that Buchanan had crossed the line inadvertently while leading a platoon of journalists in search of a

"If they got me, they wouldn't let me know," Buchanan quipped when reminded by one of his party that he was standing on foreign soil and before leading the camera-toting brigade on a hasty, 10-yard retreat to the U.S. side, where they received a stern rebuke from a sheriff's deputy for their momentary disregard for Mexican sovereignty. "I didn't know where the border was," said Buchanan, shaking his head, after climbing back into the truck in which he was riding.

He hardly can be blamed for his mistake, however, given the wide-open, poorly fenced frontier that has made the area a favorite route for illegal aliens and a veritable yellow-brick road for the smuggling gangs that exploit them. On the day before Buchanan's visit, U.S. Border Patrol agents in Douglas station made 1,437 apprehensions of illegal aliens, and less than three weeks into the new year the station already had detained 17,229 people trying to cross there. This put it on pace to shatter last year's monthly record of 27,215 apprehensions set in March.

But, by coming to Douglas, Buchanan had crossed another boundary as well -- breaking a code of silence on the issue by presidential contestants from both major parties, who seem in tacit agreement that the question of what to do about the human tidal wave breaking over the southern U.S. border is a subject just too hot to handle.

Though polls consistently show immigration, both legal and illegal, to be a major concern of average Americans, it hardly has come up during the presidential-primary debates and seldom seems worthy of serious discussion. But after several hours spent kicking up a cloud of Sonoran desert -- of seeing the broken, rusted or nonexistent fence line, dusty pathways beaten hard by thousands of footsteps, a landscape littered with the plastic and paper detritus of unrelenting nightly invasions, and of hearing the stories of area residents -- Buchanan had seen enough to call the situation in Arizona a "national disgrace."

"This is a travesty and a tragedy and the whole country has known about it for months, if not years," Buchanan said. "To see, after all this time, these wide-open spaces and fences torn down and inconsequential barriers suggests that the Clinton-Gore administration doesn't give a hoot about the sovereignty of this nation and protecting its borders against a wholesale invasion of America."

Buchanan came to Douglas at the invitation of Cochise County Concerned Citizens, a group of local residents and ranchers that has had enough and wants the government to do something about it, including calling out the National Guard if necessary. "It is a disgrace; it is overrun; it's treated with contempt by the Mexican government, by illegals, by these so-called `coyotes,'" Buchanan fumed as he toured the rutted border country.

Along the way he stopped by the tidy, humble, but heavily fenced yard of 82-year-old Theresa Murray, who says her place has been broken into by illegal aliens at least 30 times since 1982, most recently last Thanksgiving. Three of her dogs have been poisoned, again presumably by illegals, according to Murray, who shook hands with Buchanan and fielded a few questions from the media. "I feel sorry for them, I really do," a frail but still feisty Murray said of the invaders. "But I don't feel sorry for the ones that rob me. It's just a bad situation out here and something has to be done about it."

Though she's lived there all her life, Murray said she would gladly leave the acreage if she could only find a buyer. But who wants to live in a war zone? "Here is an American citizen, who has been on this ranch her whole life, but who now is living in what looks like a maximum-security prison, and nothing's being done about it," fumed Buchanan. But in a Buchanan administration, he pledged, something would be done about it, including the installation of a double-line security fence, a crackdown on employers who make a habit of knowingly employing illegal workers and the possible use of the military -- though Buchanan was fast to say that the latter probably wouldn't be necessary.

Meeting at a local college, the candidate heard even more from ranchers and Douglas residents, who told of privacy being invaded, property being damaged and stolen, dogs being poisoned and too little government help, often coming too late. "I'm Hispanic and my grandparents came from Mexico, but I do object to this lawlessness and people who come here and destroy our property and put us under siege," said one. "We are not vigilantes," said another, responding to criticism he had taken for detaining aliens trespassing on his land. "What are we supposed to do --just turn our property over to thousands of illegal aliens that go through on a daily basis? Do we let the drug lords take over?"