Plan to secure borders faces vote in Senate

Backers say measure key to overhaul of immigration

WASHINGTON - The Senate is expected to vote today on an amendment to a broad immigration overhaul that would dramatically beef up efforts to secure the U.S.-Mexican border.

Proponents said passage of the amendment, offered by Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota, was the key to passing the immigration package. But critics maintained it would grant people who crossed illegally legal status before it could be determined whether the border-security efforts actually made the border airtight.

Arkansas’ Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, on Friday signed on as a co-sponsor of the amendment but has not taken a position on the underlying bill. Sen. John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, is supportive of the “concept” of the amendment, but needs to take a closer look at it, said his spokesman, Patrick Creamer, on Friday.

At issue is whether it is possible to determine exactly how secure the border is. Proponents of a secure border say that without a locked-down frontier, people will continue to pour illegally over the border, adding to the estimated 11 million people who are already here without papers. They say past immigration laws, such as a 1986 overhaul, failed on a promise to secure the border in return for giving a pathway to citizenship to millions.

Others say that net immigration has leveled out - there are just as many people leaving the country over the southwestern border as coming in. This, they say, is a result of huge increases of Border Patrol agents over the past 10 years and a sluggish economy that has provided less incentive for people to cross illegally to find work.

The underlying bill would provide $4.5 billion over five years for an unspecified number of unmanned drone aircraft to patrol the border, additional Border Patrol agents and remote sensors to detect people crossing the border. It would also provide $1.5 billion to construct about 350 miles of fencing along the border.

Corker and Hoeven seek to increase the total miles of new fencing to 700, along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. Currently, 652 miles are fenced. They would purchase 18 drones and add 20,000 Border Patrol agents to the current 21,000 officers. Over 10 years, the senators said, their amendment would cost more than $30 billion.

The two senators have taken a different approach than one rejected by the Senate on Thursday.

Last week the Senate voted to “table,” or remove from consideration, a border-security amendment offered by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas that would have allowed illegal residents to move from a “provisional” status to a full-fledged path to citizenship only if border security reached a measurable level of success.

Cornyn’s amendment would have required Border Patrol agents to apprehend at least 90 percent of those attempting to cross the border illegally. It also mandated 100 percent “situational awareness” of the southwestern border, which would be achieved by using fencing, drone aircraft and remote sensor devices. Corker and Hoeven’s amendment does not make a path to citizenship contingent on such requirements, known collectively as a “hard trigger.”

Arkansas’ Boozman and Pryor both wanted to keep Cornyn’s amendment alive and voted against tabling it.

“The border is more secure than it’s ever been, but we still know it’s very porous,” Boozman said. “If you don’t address the border, in a few years you’ll have another 11 million here illegally.”

Boozman said the United States should look to Israel, which in January completed a 140-mile fence at its border with Egypt. The fence cost an estimated $400 million.

“They know exactly who is coming in and coming out,” Boozman said.

Pryor said securing the border was essential. He said the underlying bill was “loaded” with border-security provisions, such as more money for fencing and unmanned drones.

“We’ll have our eyes and ears across the border,” he said. “This is the strongest border-security bill Congress has ever considered and the Corker-Hoeven amendment makes it even stronger.”

Both border-security proponents and supporters of amnesty like Frank Sharry are watching Pryor. Sharry is executive director of America’s Voice, a coalition of labor, religious and civil-rights groups. He said securing the support of Pryor, a self-described moderate Democrat up for re-election in a state that has trended Republican for the past two election cycles, is an important part of securing a victory for the entire bill.

“I think Pryor wants to get to yes, and this amendment helps him,” Sharry said.

Though Sharry characterized the increased border funding as a “bitter pill,” he said many liberals would support the Corker-Hoeven amendment if necessary to secure passage of the overall bill.

Immigration legislation without strong, verifiable enforcement mechanisms is a nonstarter for Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, a Washington group that wants decreased immigration.

He dismissed the Corker-Hoeven amendment, saying senators needed a “fig leaf” that would allow them to vote for a broad immigration bill while appearing to be tough on border security. Their amendment would not provide meaningful border security, he said, because it would allow people who entered the country to get work permits before the border was sealed.

“Once you legalize illegal aliens, the pressure to finish border security is pretty much off,” he said. “Amnesty ought to be a carrot at the very end.”

To know exactly how secure the border is, it is essential to know how many unauthorized immigrants attempt to enter the United States, and of those, how many are apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

“These questions sound simple, but they are difficult to answer for the obvious reason that unauthorized aliens seek to avoid detection,” Marc Rosenblum, a specialist in immigration policy at the Congressional Research Services, told members of the House Homeland Security Committee in February.“The missing information means analysts do not know the precise scope of the illegal immigration problem, nor can they calculate [Customs and Border Protection’s] enforcement success rate.”

Rosenblum said all border security measures are estimates, at best.

“No single, quantitative, off-the-shelf indicator accurately and reliably provides a metric or ‘score’ for border enforcement,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security said a huge increase in hiring of Border Patrol agents slowed the flow of immigrants crossing the border illegally. Between 2004 and 2012, the number of Border Patrol agents increased from 10,000 to 20,000.

The department links the increase in agents to a decrease in the number of apprehensions at the border, reasoning that their increased presence deterred people from making the trip. According to a study by Rosenblum, 880,000 individuals were apprehended by the Border Patrol in 2000, when illegal crossings were at their peak. That number dwindled to 269,000 in 2011.

In recent years, Congress has poured money into securing the border. In 2006, lawmakers appropriated $7.9 billion for agents, aerial surveillance, remote sensors and fence construction. Last year that number had increased to $11.7 billion.

The increased manpower, machinery and fencingat the border seems to have produced results, according to a study by the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan Washington group that advocates U.S. engagement abroad. But spending more money on agents and drones won’t necessarily make the border airtight, the report said.

“While it is difficult to predict future flows of migration, we seem to be at or past a point of diminishing returns of improving border security through increases in Border Patrol staffing,” the report said.

Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that advocates for lower immigration levels, agreed.

“The bang for the buck would be much greater if it were devoted to work site enforcement” and catching people who overstay their visas, Krikorian said. “You could stack border patrol agents 12 feet tall at the border like cord wood and it wouldn’t make any difference if you’re not fixing the other parts of the problem.”

No matter how the Democrat-controlled Senate acts, an immigration bill without strict border security provisions will be a tough sell in the Republican-controlled House.

Arkansas’ House members said they need assurances that beefed-up spending on the border actually seals it off before they vote for legislation that deals with the millions of workers here illegally.

Rep. Tim Griffin, a Little Rock Republican, said the House would require the Department of Homeland Security to develop objective measures of border security.

“The House approach is going to be a metrics-based approach,” he said. “That’s going to be necessary to get people like me and others in the House to support it.”

Rep. Steve Womack, a Republican from Rogers, agreed.

“I haven’t seen anything yet that gives me assurances that promises of border security are anything more than a paper tiger,” he said.

But he said holes along the frontier might never be totally filled.

“I don’t know that anything is ever 100 percent,” Womack said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/24/2013

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