The Obama administration and the new Mexican regime are taking some useful — if tiny — steps in the right direction regarding sending Mexican illegals back to the middle of that nation.
For decades the pattern has been to ship illegal aliens captured by our government back to our southern border, send them to the other side; then, all too often, the illegals try to cross again, frequently successfully.
If you are thrust into Juarez, and your village is, say, near Mexico City, then El Paso or even Denver are much, much closer than your home town. And if you find a job north of the line, the pay will be much better than in Mexico, even if below U.S. standards.
Most illegals from Mexico are not from the Mexican border states; they come from more populous, less prosperous areas in the central and the southern parts of the country. So it is better for us, and maybe even for them, if they are sent back to their home towns. It is called interior repatriation.
A couple of days ago, ICE announced that from now on there would be bi-weekly flights from El Paso to Mexico City, each carrying as many as 136 deported Mexicans back to Mexico City, presumably at U.S. expense. Then — and this is a switch — the Mexican government will buy bus fares for these aliens as they head to their home towns in Mexico.
This is the third (albeit small) step in a little-noticed progression.
The first step was taken several years ago when the Border Patrol started funding a summertime flight back to Mexico City program for volunteers among those who had been captured in the Arizona desert during the often fatally hot days of summer. The program only applied to volunteers, only to those without criminal records, only to the hottest months, and only to the Arizona border. It was sold more as a humanitarian gesture — it must have saved some lives — not as an enforcement tool.
For more on that program, see this 2010 blog of mine.
The next step came last year when, during the gap between the election of a new president of Mexico and his swearing in. PAN, the party that had held power but lost the 2012 election, worked out an experimental project with the United States involving El Paso-Mexico City flights for some 2,300 Mexican nationals, mostly with criminal records, and thus probably mostly, if not all, deportees. These were involuntary departures, a welcome change from the past, as we reported in a December 2012 blog.
The most recent development, as reported in a skimpy Associated Press story and an even more bare-bones ICE press release said that the new set of flights would be made twice a week from El Paso, typically filling a 136-seat plane. In one part of the AP story the arrangement was noted as "permanent" and in another Mexico's National Migration Institute said that about 6,800 people would be involved in flights that will "last six months".
Again, these will be involuntary departures, thus presumably deportees and thus most of them will have criminal records beyond their violations of the immigration law. Persons apprehended outside the immediate El Paso region will be taken to the Otero County (N.M.) detention center, processed there, and then bussed 90 miles or so to the El Paso airport for the flights south.
This is, of course, progress. It is well known than the recidivism rate for those involved in interior repatriation is a fraction of that of those who are simply dumped on the other side of the southern border. But the scale is so small as to be almost meaningless.
Let's assume that there is a steady flow of flights out of El Paso for a year; that would come to 14,144 (104 x 136) Mexican nationals. That could be compared to the 2012 estimate by the Department of Homeland Security that in 2011 there were 6,800,000 Mexican illegals in the United States. At the scheduled rate of departure it would take more than 480 years to complete the removal task, assuming there were no continuing arrivals of illegals.
When one compares the planned annual exit rate of 14,144 to the total number of removals of Mexican illegals (a number that has been inflated recently by the administration) one sees that only a tiny percentage of that number is likely to be flown back to the interior. Using a fairly safe number, the Office of Immigration Statistics total of aliens removed to Mexico in fiscal year 2011, we find 293,966. The projected airborne-departures would be less than 5 percent of that total.
The precedent has been set for the involuntary return of some illegal aliens to Mexico City, with the Mexican government picking up some of the costs. Though both governments may be doing this with little more than symbolism in mind, it is a baby step in the right direction.
