WASHINGTON -- Perhaps the only point of agreement in the contentious debate about immigration in the United States is that the system is broken. The increase in illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border -- as well as the growing number dying in the attempt -- is the clearest indication that what is supposed to curb the influx does not work.
A decade of border initiatives that failed to slow the flow should serve as evidence that law enforcement alone can never solve the problem. What's more, border deaths should remind us that any system in which people are willing to risk their lives to circumvent is doomed to fail.
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Marcela Sanchez also reports daily in Spanish about local Washington news on Univision. Watch the Video
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Next week, President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin are scheduled to hold a mini-summit in Texas in which immigration will be on the agenda. In preparation for the gathering, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Mexico last week to foreshadow Bush's message: Washington is committed to an immigration system that is "humane,'' that "respects America's laws'' and that "recognizes the economic realities between Mexico and the United States.''
The Bush administration should be lauded for setting a goal to transform the reality of immigration. Indeed, it is when policy-makers grapple with the humanity of the situation that the search for solutions becomes comprehensive enough.
The question to be begged, however, is whether the reforms being contemplated would do enough to directly address the desperation that drives hundreds of thousands every year to risk crossing an ever more fortified border.
Bush favors a guest worker program that, as he explains it, would seek to match a willing foreign worker with a willing U.S. employer. To a degree, concern for the worker is part of the proposal. The program would give temporary legal passage to immigrants who have fulfilled the needs of U.S. employers. However, past experience with such a guest worker program was at best mixed. And religious leaders and other immigrant rights advocates fear the number of workers who would benefit under the Bush proposal would be so limited that illegal immigration would remain virtually intact.
Currently, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., are crafting legislation that would follow the guidelines of Bush's proposal. Meanwhile, Republican leaders in the House favor more enforcement and punitive measures rather than far-reaching reform. Their initiative, which passed the House in February, would restrict immigrant driver's licenses, and make it more difficult to obtain political asylum.
Neither Bush's nor the competing legislative proposals come close to the comprehensive nature of creating a North American Investment Fund in which money from Canada and the United States would help Mexico reverse its growing development gap with its northern neighbors. The idea for the fund was presented this week by the Council on Foreign Relations. The proposalis not new and skeptics doubt whether Bush's team will consider a proposal of such nature when the president meets with Fox and Martin.
Meanwhile, the major hope for development cash in Mexico and many other Latin American countries continues to be tied to immigration. Last year, immigrants in the United States, many of them illegal, sent to their relatives back home more than $45 billion in so-called remittances. This has exceeded foreign direct investment and foreign assistance to the region three years in a row.
Such "aid'' would seem to exacerbate the problem of illegal immigration. Had remittances not become the only conceivable way to change the fortunes of entire families south of the border -- where the gap between rich and poor is widening -- one might argue that so many people would not be willing to make the harrowing journey to find work in the United States.
Ten years ago initiatives such as Operation Gatekeeper were adding manpower, technology and resources to better enforce the U.S. southern border. But instead of dissuading illegal immigrants from crossing, those measures have only persuaded them to look for other less protected routes.
This has made crossing more dangerous and deadly. And sadly, according to Oscar Chacon, director of Enlaces America, a Chicago-based immigrant advocacy group, illegals still come as "life has turned much less hopeful'' among many in Mexico and Latin America.
Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.
