NAVARRETTE: "THERE IS A STAGGERING AMOUNT OF DISHONESTY IN THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE."

(Ed's. Note: The following is an interview with Ruben Navarrette, by the Midland Reporter-Telegram published Sept. 14. Navarrette, who has a twice-weekly column which is syndicated worldwide by the Washington Post Writers Group, touches on issues he will discuss this Sept. 16 with former Mexican President Vicente Fox and his wife Mata at Midland College’s Beal Plaza, located outside the Scharbauer Student Center during Mexican Independence Day celebrations there.)

MRT: When talking about dealing with these kids, you’ve been really critical of President Barack Obama and laid out in a June column five things he could do to improve the situation, one of which was sending the National Guard to assist Border Patrol. You also wrote in July that Gov. Rick Perry sending National Guard troops to the border was the right thing to do, but for the wrong reasons. Do you stick with your other points of improvement going forward?

Navarrette: I want to go back to the Perry plan for a second. What often happens in this business, because you’re writing columns in the moment, and then things might happen and they get overwritten or you find out more information. At the very beginning, the perception I had was that the Perry use of the National Guard on the border was going to mirror what Bush did twice as president, which was to support Border Control. That I wholeheartedly agree with. And then a couple of weeks later, I learned the border National Guard troops were still being trained, they were not adequately trained, and that they were in fact going to have the ability to detain these people, while they called Border Control to come to the scene. Now we have a different thing. We have an evolving role for the National Guard. I’m reserving the right to come back to that and say, ‘You know what? There was a blueprint and you guys didn’t follow it.’ For that reason, I’m sort of held hostage by what Gov. Perry does. He could implement this in a way that’s different from a way President Bush did.

In terms of the rest of my points in the plan holding true, I think the immediate action has to be to provide better care for these kids. The most disgraceful part of the story has been that they were not given adequate food, blankets. It took Glenn Beck, really, who now lives outside Dallas, to take $2 million of aid down to McAllen to the churches down there to give them food and clothing and the like. When you’re in a position as liberal Democrats to be embarrassed by Glenn Beck, to be shown up by Glenn Beck because he’s coming off as more compassionate than you are, then you have a problem. I think that for all the talk, the main priority is to take better care of those kids while we have them here, and then like I’ve said all along, you have to concede that those who want to get rid of all 65,000 are wrong, and those who want to keep all 65,000 are wrong.

Everybody now needs to come around to the idea and go case-by-case and see who might have a legitimate claim to credible fear applications for asylum. The Obama administration has been very quietly tightening those requirements and has been making it harder to apply the credit fear and therefore turning down less asylum claims.

I’m concerned about stories that they’re going back to threats of death or certain death and some of them may have already perished. The thing I deal with a lot in the immigration debate, and after 25 years of writing about it — and this is an offshoot, more about refugees but a lot of it’s getting wrapped up in the immigration debate — but after 25 years, the clearest thing in my mind is that there is a profound, a staggering amount of dishonesty in this debate. In the immigration debate in America, everybody lies about everything all the time. And a lot of the lies coming out about these border kids is the lie that President Obama has put forward that he is this compassionate person who wants to give them due process and everybody’s going to get a hearing. When the facts on the ground say that’s not true, that they’re being shipped back and that some are dying in the process. For me, the No. 1 agenda item is the same. This is the strongest item I could say to you: No matter what the individual issue is, my No. 1 agenda item is clarity. And the way you get to clarity is the truth.

MRT: Does either party get it more right than the other? Or are there parts they get right?

Navarrette: No. There are elements of the Democratic Party that have the right idea, and there are elements of the Republican Party that have the right idea. Ironically, someone [recently] asked me on a radio show about what do I think the Republican version of immigration reform looks like? I said, I think it looks like a three-legged stool and the same model that George W. Bush put forward when he was president. That is: guest workers for companies that can’t find Americans to do these jobs, which, by the way, is going to speak to the audience in Midland. There’s a lot of folks in Midland who are business owners in that audience and they are first-hand knowledgeable about the fact that Americans will not do these jobs. And they are first-hand knowledgeable about the fact that it’s not about wages. They live in the real world. They don’t live in New York City in some TV studio. So that’s the first thing. That’s the favorite Republican part of it. That’s what the Republicans get right.

What the Democrats get right is the second leg of the stool, which is you’ve got to do something to legalize some of the 11 million that are here. Some from the far left say, ‘Yeah, legalize them all.’ And some of the far right say, ‘You can’t legalize a single person because then it’s amnesty.’ And again, the answer is in the middle somewhere. Five, six, seven, eight, some number of them have to be legalized, either the ones who have been here the longest, who have the cleanest records, and it can’t be a cakewalk. It’s got to be difficult. That’s the part the Democrats get right.

The last one is something I think both parties do agree on, and that is border security. That’s the low hanging fruit. Every single time we do immigration reform in Congress, the only thing these two parties can agree on, because they fight over the first two legs of the stool, is more border security. Which I used to believe, when I lived in Dallas for those five years, and I wrote a column for The Dallas Morning News, I was part of that huge camp of Americans that thought, ‘Yeah, spend more on border security. The more, the better. Higher fences. It’s all good. More Border Control agents.’

And then I came to San Diego and I live now in a border city, and living in a border city and seeing from this perspective for the last eight or nine years, I now see how wrong I was before, and how wrong most members of Congress who are Republican, who think that you can spend your way to border security, by putting dollars at the border; they’re just stuck on stupid. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. When you get down here and you actually see it, you realize we’re playing this twisted game with the human smugglers and the drug smugglers, where every single time we spend $10 on the border, it allows them to raise their prices by $100 to bring people across. We’re fighting an enemy that we empower every time we fire a shot. We haven’t figured this out yet. We keep saying we have 20,000 Border Control agents. We need 40,000 and we need more fences, and then they build more tunnels. I just have a much different perspective living in San Diego than I did when I was in Dallas.

MRT: What do you think the solution is, as far as border security?

Navarrette: I’ll tell you what the Border Patrol agents tell me. People ask when we’re going to solve the border protection issue. I’ll tell you when: We’re going to solve it when you get 100 members of Congress from both parties, 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, and we send them down to the border, and when they get to the border, they shut the hell up. They don’t say anything. They don’t do what congressmen typically do at the border, which is open their mouth and start talking about what the border needs. What I want them to do, those 100 congressmen from two parties, is to ask the border patrolmen who are there, and the bosses and the supervisors, two questions: What do you need? And how can I help?

So I did that. I took my own advice. I went to the head of Border Patrol, and I asked those people at the top levels, What do you need? And they did not say, ‘Build me more fences.’ They said, ‘Those don’t work and they have tunnels.’ They said, ‘Don’t build me fences but build me roads. Come down here with the Army Corps of Engineers and build me roads because there are parts of the border that my vehicles can’t even get to because there’s no roads. So No. 1, build me roads.’ Not sexy. Doesn’t look good on a bumper sticker, but the experts who know what they’re talking about say they want it.

Two, if you look at the border from San Diego to Brownsville, it’s true that Texas has half of it. But in San Diego we have a phenomena that’s unique to San Diego, and that’s the border tunnels. You build a barrier, they go under it. There are an estimated, they say dozens, could be hundreds, of these tunnels. But they’re not in the Rio Grande Valley or Laredo or Brownsville, they’re here. So consequently the border patrolmen who are here say they want tunnel detection equipment. The military has it but they haven’t shared it with Border Control.

The third thing he said, well it must be more agents? He said, ‘No. Do not send me any more agents, because I’ve got 20,000 already and I don’t have infrastructure to train the ones I have. The last thing you need to send me is more computer surveillance equipment for the War Room so we can see these people coming across the border and we have a better sense of what’s going on.’ This is a very high-tech war, and they need high-tech equipment. Those three things are what the experts want and we’ve got some really stupid politicians who think they know a lot and they really don’t know anything. They’re getting in the way, because instead of meeting the experts and asking the questions I asked, they would rather go down there and tell them what they think they need.

(To read the entire interview, click on the link below)
http://www.mrt.com/news/article_ba731b52-3c7e-11e4-9587-43e16d4d6751.html