A recent Senate hearing featured a confrontation between two Arizonans known for strong wills and large egos.
They were Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who as governor of Arizona in 2005 declared a state of emergency on the state's southern border and now insists that the border is secure; and Sen. John McCain, who as a member of the House of Representatives in 1986 voted for the notorious Immigration Reform and Control Act and now vows that its failure will not be repeated.
McCain read an excerpt from an Arizona Republic editorial critical of Napolitano's protracted failure to produce a metric of Border Patrol effectiveness, a more empirical measure than the remarkably ambiguous and evasive Napolitano assurance that the border is as "secure as it has ever been".
The Republic complained that Napolitano's DHS "has failed to produce a simple standard for measuring border security, a project the Department of Homeland Security started in 2010 but apparently hasn't worked up much of a sweat to finish."
Some of us suspect that Napolitano is playing hide the ball until passage of an immigration reform bill. McCain, a principal sponsor of the bill, won't play along. He told Napolitano that if she can't provide the metric, "Then we will — in legislation. ... We will have a measure of border security. We owe that to the people of this country."
Napolitano's response was a tactic she has used before. She belittled the demand as a simplistic search for a supernatural solution. She warned against looking for "some magic number out there that answers the question".
"There are a whole lot of (border security) statistics, just like you have a whole lot of statistics on a baseball player", she said. "So you have to look at the picture and see what the trend lines are and the like."
Well, that sounds like a pretty good summary of what "operational control" became before Napolitano scorned it two years ago as "archaic". That 2011 declaration, made with the poker-faced cool that has long been a measure of Napolitano's style under stress, ensured that in the annals of border security, "archaic" will be listed as a synonym for "embarrassing to the Border Patrol and the DHS".
Before that epic evasion, "operational control" reported on exactly how much of the border was patrolled well enough to provide reasonable assurance that illegal crossers would be detected and either apprehended or turned back across the line.
McCain said a metric is essential to the task of ensuring that 2013 does not repeat the failure of 1986, when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act "on the proviso and the promise that never again would we have to worry about people coming into our country illegally because we were going to secure our border and take the necessary steps."
McCain added: "Now we have 11 million people, we owe it to the people of this country that there not be a third wave another 15 or 20 years from now."
While the Battle of Border Metrics (a chronology for which I've assembled) is an important part of the unfolding national discussion of the new immigration reform bill, it has left little time for the discussion of the equally important subject of worksite enforcement.
McCain has said the new bill will turn off the jobs magnet by requiring the use of E-Verify so that every person looking for a job will have to provide proof of authorization to work here. He insists that E-Verify will cut off the job magnet.
What we now need is intense evaluation of the likelihood that the new bill will measure up to that standard. For if it does not, the task of border security will be much more difficult, and a repeat of IRCA's failure will be inevitable.
