The Arizona Law and the Border

K. Benton-Cohen on the Arizona Law

THE IMMIGRATION law signed last week by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer made me angry. I live inside the Beltway, but I am an Arizona girl. My family’s roots go back a century in Arizona, and my professional career has been built on the state’s history. My first book was about Cochise County, Arizona, which shares eighty miles of border with Mexico, and it traced how “Mexican” and “white American” came to be seen as separate racial categories in a region once marked by racial ambiguity and fluidity.

For much of the last decade, the county has had the highest number of immigrants apprehended along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. It has also been home for more than a century to the family of Robert Krentz, the rancher and environmental activist who was recently murdered on his property by a suspected Mexican national.

Robert Krentz’s murder was the impetus for Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature to pass the state law mandating that law enforcement officers question the immigration status of anyone they deem likely to be undocumented. The law allows citizens to sue law-enforcement agencies that do not question residents’ immigration status with enough intensity. These expensive stipulations make the law at best fiscally irresponsible for a state government with a budget deficit so large that it has considered selling the state legislative buildings to private investors.

Unlike Washington, where partisan impasse is a way of life, in Arizona the Democrats (who tend to be more blue-dog than blue-state) do not normally draw lines in the sand. But in this case, not a single Democrat voted for this bill–an indication of just how deeply and fundamentally they saw this as wrong. But more than that, the law is shortsighted. The person who killed Krentz was apparently a murderer, likely a drug trafficker, and within twenty desolate miles of the border, and it is fair to say that the new legislation would not have served as a deterrent to this kind of crime.

Still, the U.S.-Mexico border needs help. It is easy for people from other states to dismiss Arizona’s complaints as simple racism or economic sour grapes. But the problem of border security is real. The number of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol from Yuma to El Paso is down from a peak of 750,000 (three-fourths the population of Tucson) in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2008. Most of these crossers want nothing more than a job, and most border residents—whether Anglo or Latino, Democrat or Republican, Border Patrol or civilian—recognize this.

But the situation is different now than it used to be—not just in degree but in kind. Along the border, some ranchers report dozens of migrants crossing their land at a time—hundreds in a year. Many cut fences and leave trash. Some steal household items. And, as rancher Robert Krentz found out in the worst way, some are dangerous. Amazingly little of the appalling violence south of the border has bled north, but there are signs now that some is beginning to seep over. Phoenix has seen a rise in cases of human smuggling and kidnapping. Most people I know who once roamed southern Arizona’s back roads without a second thought—including myself—don’t dare to anymore.

Arizonans need an immigration policy that will create a secure and safe border but that will also protect basic civil rights (not to mention Arizona’s vaunted libertarian values). On the border, federal immigration policy is inseparable from local law and order. Arizona has a long history of demanding that the feds pay more attention to the border. The Border Patrol was not created until 1924 after Arizona officials had been clamoring for it for over four decades. After the Shootout at the OK Corral in 1881, Arizona’s territorial governor demanded a “mounted border patrol,” to keep an eye out for American criminals going south–not Mexican workers coming north. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration did not begin to count border-crossing migrants until 1908, and the federal government exempted Mexicans from immigration restrictions in 1917, 1921, and 1924. In 1942 it created the Bracero Program, which was a deeply troubled guest-worker program that invited undocumented migration.

Mexican laborers, in other words, have a long history of believing they are invited here, but only through the backdoor and only temporarily. This implicit invitation combines with the realities of geography. Most people who have lived along the border understand that no fence can be built high enough to close it. Even the friends and neighbors of recently murdered rancher Robert Krentz say as much. They want safety and rule of law, not a hermetic seal. They want more boots on the ground along the border—more Border Patrol and, at least temporarily, the National Guard. I have come to believe, not easily or comfortably, that they might be right.

But we also need a new border policy that does not force people who want to work in the United States to walk through the remote desert. They do so because of border policies initiated under President Bill Clinton that push migrants away from cities and into remote desert channels. The only way to stop this is by creating flexible quotas large enough to meet demand and a much easier path to citizenship.

We need a policy that leaves only the criminals and drug traffickers to attempt the trek through the desert. I want the Border Patrol spending their time catching the bad guys. Checking the identification of every day laborer in Phoenix won’t bring back Robert Krentz, and it won’t stop violent crime at the border. It will only perpetuate hatred and stalemate.

Katherine Benton-Cohen is assistant professor of history at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2009-2010. She is the author of Borderline Americans: Racial Divisions and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009) and is currently writing a book about the politics and study of immigration restriction in the early twentieth century. Photo: Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico (Gordon Hyde / U.S. Army / Wikimedia Common)