What it means to “close the border”

THE ABSURDITY of nativist calls for "border control" hit me between the eyes during the year I spent living in Laredo, Texas.

Do those in the close-the-border crowd have the faintest idea what the kind of border control they want would require?

It would require stopping and searching every single car, every single truck and every single container entering the U.S. from Mexico. It would require interdicting every Mexican air flight and tracking every passenger (although seldom mentioned, many "illegals" are people who entered the U.S. legally and never left). It would mean erecting and guarding a virtual Maginot Line across almost 2,000 miles of open desert.

The cost of sustaining such an operation would run into the billions. Probably tens of billions.

Meanwhile, all that endless stopping and searching would cripple U.S.-Mexico trade. That would suck additional billions out of both the U.S. and Mexican economies and drive even more Mexican nationals north.

And what about calls to deport the undocumented already here? That would require locating, apprehending and deporting a population of 12-15 million people, spread out over a discontinuous land mass covering some 10 million square miles.

Yeah. Good luck with that. It will never happen. It will not happen because it cannot happen.

If the U.S.-Mexico border is to remain porous enough to facilitate trade--which everyone knows is beneficial--then it will remain porous enough to facilitate illegal crossings and smuggling. There is just no way around it.

Yes, the U.S.-Mexico border "leaks like a sieve." Borders between rich and poor countries always do. And they always will.
Dennis Fritz, Chicago