EL PASOANS MIGHT'VE BEEN CANARIES IN IMMIGRATION COAL MINE:

By Richard Estrada

The Houston Chronicle

Sunday, November 28, 1993

(Richard Estrada is an associate editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News.)

For anyone who has spent time on the U.S.-Mexico border over the last 20 years or so, the autumn of 1993 will stand out as a season in which history was made.

In El Paso, a resolute chief Border Patrol agent named Silvestre Reyes ordered a few hundred of his subordinates to station themselves along a 20-mile stretch of the international divide, beginning in mid September.  They immediately accomplished what most U. S. border residents had despaired of ever seeing:  They stopped illegal immigration in its tracks.

Where thousands of undocumented immigrants were crossing illegally from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso on a daily basis before "Operation Blockade," the numbers today are negligible.  Record highs have given way to record lows.

Reyes has been vilified by pro-illegal immigration advocates on both sides of the border.  Jealous of their own country's sovereignty, Mexican diplomats have lashed out at what they term the Border Patrol's "unfriendly act."  Even Reyes' own superiors at the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been less than supportive, pointing out the negatives of the operation while massively understating its effectiveness.  This may be an accurate reflection of where the Clinton administration really stands on the subject of illegal immigration.

Interestingly, national news stories about what is now called "Operation Hold the Line" seldom get around to asking the opinion of the average citizen in El Paso -- the day laborer from the barrio of Chihuahuita or the elderly residents near the Border Highway.  Local polls have found overwhelming support for the border control measure.  Why?

Though authorities report a decrease in crime in El Paso since the operation began, non-reimbursed social service expenditures for Mexican citizens have long been an issue there and elsewhere along the border.  El Paso County residents are acutely aware that they have had to absorb a number of tax hikes in recent years in order to pay for non-reimbursed social service costs stemming from immigration.

Thomas [sic] General Hospital officials in El Paso estimate that their institution or the property taxpayers who support it must spend $5 million annually on non-reimbursed health care for illegal border crossers.  [Most of those charges would be from pregnant women who come across the border to have their babies at Thomason General so that the baby will be a US citizen! They are not "ill" at all. MM] Earlier this year, just before it passed the budget reconciliation bill, Congress stripped a provision that would have appropriated $300 million for those states that are suffering disproportionate fiscal impact from immigration.

Recently, I reported that officials at Dallas' Parkland Memorial Hospital believe that most of the Hispanic infants delivered there are born to undocumented parents.  Non-reimbursed medical care is a major concern there, too.  Subsequently, however, the chief executive officer of Parkland, Dr. Ron Anderson, informed me that he had actually said the majority are believed to be documented.

Yet because Parkland and other hospitals in Texas are prohibited from asking the legal status of patients, there is really no way of knowing.  What is known is that community leaders, food bank volunteers and other social service providers throughout North Texas are currently reporting a powerful surge in the number of impoverished, undocumented Mexican immigrants in the region.

Meanwhile the latest news from California is that the costs of social services for illegal and legal immigrants may be as high as $18 billion a year.  Critics talk of eventual "net" benefits, and perhaps they're right.  Still, it is taxpayers at the state and local level that are having to pick up the tab here and now.

As bad a fiscal and economic conditions are now, few along the border deny that a massive influx from south of the border could easily make things worse still.  Immigration experts agree that it will take several years for the recently-passed North American Free Trade Agreement to reduce the influx.

The lesson should be obvious.  Unless measures such as "Operation Hold the Line" and the enforcement of the employer sanctions law are seriously undertaken now, the rest of the country may someday come to see El Pasoans as having been the canaries in the coal mine.