One of the reasons bad legislation gets passed is that lawmakers often think they know an issue and don’t read all the details of the legislation on which they vote. They rely on information from advocates and lobbyists, even though that information is biased and often extremist.
Reliance on misinformation leads to horrific incidents like the one that occurred in January when a Virginia politician showed up at the National Butterfly Center in Mission demanding to be taken to the place where fleets of rafts were bringing swarms of illegal aliens across the Rio Grande — and then attacking the center’s director when told that such a scene didn’t exist.
Such scenarios justifiably raise concerns when we learn that incoming Texas Republican members of Congress, whose party will take control of the chamber in January, have prepared a package of bills addressing border security and immigration. Those issues certainly need congressional action, but not the kind that we heard from many of these legislators during their campaigns for the November elections.
The lawmakers on Dec. 8 revealed a list of border measures they will file when the next Congress convenes. Items include finishing the wall across our entire southern border; clearing terrain along the border regardless of environmental concerns; requiring that all immigrants be detained for the duration of their application process or turned away if that isn’t possible; giving full deportation authority to Immigration and Border Enforcement officials rather than relying on immigration courts; and other measures.
Several of those measures likely will create more problems than they address, and focus on symptoms rather than causes of our border and immigration problems.
Yes, we need secure borders, but that is best achieved with active surveillance using the best technology available, not by simply dropping slabs of concrete and shipping containers along the river’s edge. Simple measures created by simple minds simply don’t work.
And yes, we need to reform our terribly ineffective immigration policies, but not by simply trying to keep people out. We need to refine and speed up the process so that people who deserve to be here and can contribute to our national progress receive legal status within a reasonable length of time, and those who shouldn’t be here are deported quickly.
Border residents know firsthand that many of the assumptions upon which many of these proposals are exaggerated or false, that immigrants are just as human as everyone else, and many have valid reasons to be here.
Thus, lawmakers from the Rio Grande Valley and other border areas should do their best to inform their colleagues of the realities rather than the hype, and seek solutions that can reduce our immigration problems effectively, such as reducing the wait for visas so that migrants no longer believe they have a better chance of living as fugitives than they do of gaining legal entry.
It will be hard to overcome inaccurate perception and demagoguery, but the effort must be made to pursue the most effective and most humane border policies possible. Our national security, and our progress as a nation, depend on it.
