Brownsville Herald offers joke article about border security

Remember the old joke?

Q. Why are there so many trees on the streets of Paris?
A. So the German soldiers can march in the shade.

Now, in an attempt to do that old chestnut one better, Sara Ines Calderon offers "Border violence likely affecting migrants":

A recent wave of violence against Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley has the potential to harm immigrants who pass through here.

..."When millions of Mexicans crossing the border are perceived as enemies, they are going to try to respond to that situation," said Ignacio Corona, professor of Mexican and Latin American Cultures at Ohio State University.

...Increased enforcement at the border — more Border Patrol agents for example — makes migrants more desperate, driving them to extreme measures or dangerous geography, according to Karl Eschbach, a demographer who studied the causes of migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1990s through 2003.

"It would affect the ordinary labor migrant who attempts to come across, and I can't imagine that it's affecting them for the good," Eschbach said. "As enforcement becomes more effective, there becomes a motivation to act in a desperate way."

Some call this trend "increased militarization" of the border, which Corona said is bound to increase violence. A stronger militarized presence at the border makes smugglers, and by extension immigrants, more desperate, a perfect recipe for violence.

"Forces are going to be opposed, and they are going to provoke some kind of response, some kind of retaliation," he said. "If you don't have a weapon, you are going to use a stone."

Keep planting those trees.

Immigration · Mon, 01/30/2006 - 02:53 · · Importance: 1