The headline from the June 3, 2010 news story read like something you’d expect from The Onion, not the Associated Press: US-Mexico Border Isn’t So Dangerous. Excuse me, Ms. Reporter, tell that to rancher Rob Krentz’s widow.

Martha Mendoza, an award-winning AP writer, actually started her report with this sentence: “It’s one of the safest parts of America, and it’s getting safer.”

Tell that to the women and children whose underwear is regularly found by law enforcement officers nearby the so-called Rape Tree in Yuma County, Arizona. The attackers escape easily across the Colorado river and avoid capture.

While it’s just one news story (which was picked up by equally clueless editors and printed across the country), it’s a great example of why it seems to be do difficult for America to even discuss the problem, much less come to some consensus on what to do about it.

It comes down to numbers. And perspective.

For the vast majority of Americans who don’t live on either coast, we understand the main idea – there are simply way too many people who trespass into our country and stay here. It doesn’t matter what color they are or what planet they come from. The fact is they don’t have permission to do that – whether they are poor and needing work to support their families or they are drug dealers armed with assault rifles.

It’s also fact, based on extensive research from the U.S. Mexico Border Counties Coalition, that the illegal entry of millions of people through our southwestern border has caused tremendous economic hardship on the 24 counties that share a border with Mexico. Researchers found these border counties spent $1.23 billion from 1999 to 2006 – just to provide law enforcement and criminal justice services to undocumented immigrants.

The federal government reimbursed those same counties a grand total of $54.8 million for said services during that time frame.

Keep in mind, while Ms. Mendoza cited big cities like San Diego, Phoenix and Austin in her report on border violence, in actuality the towns and counties that are on the border are rural, poor and sparsely populated. In other words, they don’t have big budgets to provide all the needed services to their own citizens, much less provide law enforcement and healthcare to thousands of undocumented people every year. But they do it anyway, with little to no assistance from the federal government that is supposed to have jurisdiction.

Healthcare on the border in crisis
Other researchers have attempted document the burden of healthcare provided to these folks by border county hospitals. Keep in mind, while immigrant activists cheer on illegal immigration, asserting various “rights” to those who cross, they are essentially encouraging these mostly poor, young and uneducated people to risk their very lives to cross extremely dangerous desert lands trusting their safety to “coyotes.” These are the same coyotes who charge exorbitant fees to “guide” them and many times cruelly mislead them about the length, endpoint and difficulty of the journey and will leave them behind if they are too slow.

What kind of shape to you think many of these folks are in when they get here? Ask the border ranchers who have a very long history of providing compassionate care, like water and bandages, to those who may have just cut their fences to get here. Some illegals have been known to set fires in the vast, arid pastures just to get the attention of the border patrol so they can be rescued.

The best estimate of the healthcare burden on border counties is from 2000 and is, admittedly, a best guess. Why? It comes to those pesky numbers. There isn’t exactly a tracking system for who is legal and who isn’t at our hospitals. And those who aren’t legal aren’t particularly interested in offering up their status.

Nevertheless, based on extensive review and fancy math, researchers commissioned by the USMBCC estimated that 10 years ago, county hospitals on the southwest border incurred about $190 million in uncompensated costs from emergency care for undocumented immigrants. We all know how the cost of healthcare has risen in the last 10 years, so the number today could easily be doubled.

Also, emergency medical services (EMS) incurred another $13 million in 2000 that wasn’t compensated. However, that combined $200 million only accounts for the hospital and ambulance; it doesn’t even begin to figure in the doctor bills, rehabilitative care, etc. So?

So the problem is if you live in one of these rural, isolated, border counties your community really depends on its hospital. If the hospital (your property taxes pay for) goes under, or can no longer provide charity care to residents because it has been overrun by undocumented, nonpaying immigrants, the entire community is imperiled. Again, talk to Sue Krentz, who told me several years ago in an interview, before her husband was murdered, that women in her community could no longer deliver their babies at their local hospital – they had to drive three hours away to get care!

Women crossing the border to have their babies on U.S. soil in nothing new, but there are stories that make your jaw drop at the magnitude of the problem anyway. Researchers in the healthcare study came across one anecdote from California where a bus pulled into a hospital parking lot full of undocumented women ready to go into labor!

It’s not that there aren’t some taxpayer-funded programs to help pay for undocumented people’s healthcare in certain situations. There are limited Medicaid programs and Children’s Health Insurance programs, but it’s often reported that undocumented people refuse to fill out the paperwork for fear of being reported to immigration officials. So even when hospitals could seek reimbursement, they often can’t.

What about education and other local/state services for which there is ever more demand and less resources to cover it? Researchers involved with the 2007 report, The Burden Falls on Border Counties, interviewed hundreds of county officials in the 24 border counties about the impact on their county budgets. These officials told researchers about their wish lists – what they would do for the people of their community with the money they end up allocating to services required by illegal aliens instead.

Things like better libraries, after-school programs, road improvements, all these sorts of things that counties are responsible for wind up getting cut while the county pays for services mentioned previously, plus things like murder investigations and autopsies from immigrant-on-immigrant crime that aren’t exactly accounted for in county budgets and overlooked or neglected by federal budgets.

The report includes a quote from a letter one sheriff wrote to then Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano: “We cannot now participate in GITEM, the Auto Theft Task Force, DARE, the school resource officers program, or generate additional revenue by housing federal prisoners. The quality of life has diminished in Santa Cruz County; we are shortcutting merit increases and benefits (in our department), making it more difficult to recruit officers and we are decreasing expenditures on parks and recreation and basic infrastructure.”

Apprehensions down, anxiety up
Of course, fear has something to do with one’s quality of life, too. While the number of apprehensions was down last year – only 556,041 according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol – a number of factors are contributing to rising levels of fear among southwest border county residents.

It is true that FBI figures show a national decrease in violent crime for 2009, compared with 2008. Violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. FBI statistics also show a nationwide decrease in property crime. Ms. Mendoza asserts that FBI crime reports for 2009 also show a decline in violent crimes in Arizona. “And violent crimes in the southwest border counties are among the lowest in the nation per capita – they’ve dropped by 30 percent in the last two decades.”

I’ll have to take her for her word at that, because I couldn’t find the same reports. However, I did check out those FBI statistics, called the Uniform Crime Report. On the FBI’s web site, it explains that these crime figures are voluntarily reported by law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Furthermore, users are cautioned to use the data to draw conclusions or make direct comparisons between cities. “Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.”

I suppose that’s how you square the UCR numbers with statements like this from FBI Director Robert Mueller in a statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March of 2009:

“Data from the Uniform Crime Report indicates that violent crime continued to decline across the country in 2008. But this may not reflect what is actually happening on the streets, particularly in small to mid-size cities. Street-level crime is a key concern, with gang violence and gun crime largely to blame.”

He goes on to say, “We are deeply concerned about the high levels of violence along the Southwest border. All too often, this violence can be traced back to three things: drugs, human smuggling and gang activity…. Of course, drug-related violence is not new to the border area. But there have been shifts in alliances among Mexican drug-trafficking organizations. These Mexican cartels are vying for control over the Southwest border territory, leading to an increase in violence.

“Mexican authorities are struggling to cut off drug smuggling routes from Mexico to the United States. One of the consequences of their efforts has been a huge surge in violent crime, particularly homicides. As law enforcement organizations crack down on these drug-trafficking organizations, they turn to other means to make money, including kidnapping an extortion.”

A 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment from the Justice Department reports there are more than 5,200 gangs with nearly 111,000 members criminally active in the Southwest Region – Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Utah. In the report, interviews with local law enforcement officers indicate that gangs are responsible for as much as 60 percent of the crime in some communities in these areas.

Of special concern to ranchers is the fact that these gangs are not only smuggling drugs and innocent women and children across their land, they are also smuggling firearms back into Mexico as payment and to make a profit. The gift that keeps on giving!

According to CBP, in 2009 the amount of illegal narcotics seized was 2.4 million pounds, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. Not all of those seizures would have come from the 24 border counties, but you can bet a majority of it did one way or another. Tucson is now called methamphetamine distribution “capital.”

Even without the drugs and gangs, most border ranchers you talk to say there is a different kind of people coming across the border than what they have always known. Consider Luna County, New Mexico, one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states. According to The Burden Falls on Border Counties,

“As noted by officials in other border counties, the character of the criminal undocumented immigrants has changed. They are present in greater numbers and have become bolder, stealing money, food, and staples from isolated homes near the border as well as equipment from farmers and ranchers. Often, innocent entrants are part of a larger group that commits these crimes. Moreover, the number of deaths is up. Thirty-five bodies have been recovered in the last two years, mostly due to weather.”

What to do about it?
With the high-profile violence on Mexico’s side of the border, and the underreported violence on the U.S. side of the border, there are all kinds of government strategies being thrown at it – Operation This and Operation That multiplied a hundred times over. Customs and Border Patrol has even begun an unmanned aircraft operation along the borders. Some programs have shown more effectiveness than others, but as with most short-term solutions a push-back in one area only results in a surge in another location.

President Obama has shown interest in comprehensive immigration reform – hardly anyone understands what that means nor do they agree on it (see Nothing New page 48). But his stomach for border security has been decidedly symbolic just like his predecessors. Recently he threw a bone to the border with a request for up to 1,200 additional National Guard troops to provide “support” until CBP can recruit and train additional officers. Not necessarily boots on the ground, you see.

As usual in the political realm, the power players are intentionally vague about their promises – except when they occasionally let the cat out of the bag. Just as this article was going to press, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl spoke at a town hall meeting about his one-on-one with the President about illegal immigration. Senator Kyl claims that Mr. Obama told him if he secured the border then republicans would have no interest in comprehensive immigration reform.

Obama’s rep denied it, but that tit-for-tat perspective combined with the administration’s plan to sue Arizona over their new immigration law set to go into effect this summer AND planned cuts in Obama’s FY2011 budget for CBP, fencing, E-Verify and other matters related to border security won’t exactly win the hearts and minds of people hoping for change at the border.

As Sen. Kyl put in his press release, “I think all Americans would be better served if the Obama Administration focused on implementing proven border security solutions, like Operation Streamline, rather than ‘working around the clock’ to devise ways to sue states for passing legislation it disagrees with.”