USA TODAY International Edition
Border walls won’t stop Mexican drugs
Build robust alliances with our neighbors
In recent weeks, our national politics have been consumed with President Donald Trump's proposed wall along our border with Mexico.
Much of the support for it is rooted in the opiate epidemic and the feeling among many, including the president, that a wall will staunch the flow of drugs coming into the USA from Mexico. Many regions that voted for Trump have not only been hammered by jobs going to Mexico, but they also now watch as Mexican drugs are part of why neighbors and loved ones are dying. I share their outrage.
Drug trafficking north from Mexico is a pestilence, and it's an essential factor in our national epidemic of addiction and death. (And it is no less serious than the savage violence in Mexico fueled by equally pestilential guns trafficked from the United States, by which the gravest security threat in our hemisphere is arming itself.)
Mexican drug supply — cheap, prevalent and horribly potent — hinders users attempting to recover from addiction and makes relapse a deadly gambit. Because it is so serious, because people are dying in record numbers from drugs smuggled up from Mexico, it must be met with serious proposals.
A wall — or better put, another wall — along our southern border would do little to stop the flow of drugs coming up from Mexico. If walls worked in that way, no drugs would enter our prisons.
We already have hundreds of miles of border walls. They are where they need to be. They aren't immoral. The rule of law is precious; I learned that living for a decade in Mexico, where it is too often absent. Part of the rule of law is an orderly border.
Walls have done what they can do
Plus, we've already seen what happens without physical barriers. I've interviewed several ex-coyotes in Tijuana, who smuggled people across from the 1970s until President Bill Clinton built the first wall there in 1993. They describe a border out of control, with hundreds of people running across every evening, for years, deluging an outmanned Border Patrol.
There were rapes, beatings. Money from illegal immigration fed the city's underworld, police corruption. It persuaded young “campesinos” from the south to learn to smuggle, and a good number of them went on to smuggling drugs. Throngs of street vendors set up every afternoon at the borderline catering to prospective illegal crossers. Walls and other measures restored order, ended the marketplace, protected the wetlands, allowed for peaceful use of the nearest San Diego beaches.
Some areas of our border with Mexico might still need walls, and existing walls will need repair. But for the most part, our border walls have done what they can do.
This is not to say the border is sealed in a literal sense. In an era of free trade and international supply chains, to truly seal a 2,000-mile border would require draconian measures — massive inspections of vehicles, for example — that would savage our economy.
But illegal border crossing is now in good measure a boutique industry, designing crossing solutions for individuals. In the Tijuana region, the cost of crossing illegally runs from $6,000 to $14,000 per person, up from a fixed rate of $300 in the early 1990s. I take this price range — beyond what most working-class immigrants can afford — to be the market's expression of a border that is effectively closed, at least where crossers are concerned.
Heroin is cheaper than ever
Yet walls have notably not stopped the flow of drugs. The market reflects that, too. Heroin is cheaper and more potent than ever. Ninety percent of it comes from Mexico. Mexican methamphetamine is flooding neighborhoods; traffickers give it away as a come-on to prime demand among our country's new population of opiate users.
These drugs come through areas with walls.
Former associates testifying against Mexican drug capo Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was found guilty on all counts Tuesday at his trial in New York, described sending drugs through border crossings, areas with walls, and not through isolated unwalled areas.
Or the traffickers use airports. Or the U.S. mail, through which a lot of fentanyl arrives from China.
In an era of heroin and fentanyl, the only true bulwark against these horribly potent drugs is built through robust alliances with neighbors. Working together in small, incremental ways. That takes time. Takes willingness. Takes learning about the neighbor. It takes honestly facing our role in this — our drug demand and our guns smuggled south — and Mexico facing its historic complacency regarding its traffickers and the deadly dope they supply.
Another border wall embodies the delusion that we can go it alone against an international scourge, with the added promise that it will magically transform the country. Instead, it is, I believe, a distraction, allowing us to avoid the hard daily work of building alliances, and confronting our own accountability for the knotty problem of international drug trafficking.
The opioid addiction crisis began because we believed in an easy answer to a complicated problem: one pill for everyone's pain. Doctors could prescribe narcotic painkillers, derived from the opium poppy, indiscriminately to all pain patients without risk of addiction. The drug catastrophe we're now living with is rooted in that myth.
The drug scourge that resulted is too deadly to waste time on another.
Sam Quinones is a freelance journalist and the author, most recently, of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”