Editorial: The lesson in immigration agents' drug arrests
No one is immune from the temptation of quick if illicit cash, be they desperate illegals or the U.S. officials hired to police them. This is the lesson to be gained from the recent indictment of three immigration inspections agents on charges of accepting bribes to allow cocaine border crossings in vehicles.
This lesson is critical in this time of aggressive border police build-up driven by arguments that narcotics smuggling is endemic with illegal immigration.
"With illegal immigration comes drug traffic,'' said Nogales Mayor Cesar Rios earlier this year, welcoming news that this year will find Nogales with 85 more agents and four more border patrol helicopters.
His sentiment reflects an entrenched American attitude toward immigrants from across the southern border, an attitude that makes legislation and illegal immigration debates more vitriolic.
Increasingly, illegal immigrants over the southern border have been caricatured as a dark horde bearing all the frightening, ostensibly foreign evils associated with desperation and poverty. This caricature unfairly singles out the foreigner, and as all caricatures do, distort the actual issue in eliciting outbursts of emotion.
Certainly the emotion has served the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Services well. The number of border patrol agents has ballooned from 276 in 1994 to 1,100 by late last year. Congress last year also entertained an $81.6 million INS construction package in the Commerce-Justice-State-Judiciary Appropriations Bill for the 1999 fiscal year.
But like all caricatures, that for illegal immigrants is unjust. It singles out this sector as the villains in the tide of drug trafficking and paints them darkly in shades of crime and cocaine pathways.
So these periodic episodes when drug-related corruption is ferreted out from those whose ever-increasing ranks are fueled by this caricature, are needful reminders. The abject irony is both tragedy and vindication.
In 1997 customs Inspector General Michael Bromwich cited greed, need, and family or friend relationships as three main causes for U.S. border officials to go bad. The motivations for drug smuggling on the other side is much the same.
Ironies have tendency to multiply. Perhaps one positive irony will emerge from repeated situations like this: through commonality in crime, citizens on both sides of the border may soften the caricatures of the other.
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