Just get over to the 57 washers, there's another group that's coming up through there.
South theme, stop, stop, turn around, come south.
Just swing north right there in the washer, right there on the east side, but get right across.
Did you get him?
Tonight on Frontline...
We're averaging about 1,000 to 1,200 aliens a day.
A woman.
Enough is enough.
It's just out of control.
Her treacherous journey...
And it's affecting my lifestyle.
To a better life than America.
I frankly don't care why they come.
If they're here, they're breaking a law of the United States and they need to leave.
Correspondent William Longavicia examines Americans' growing fears about the rush of illegal immigrants.
In the past, we worried that immigrants would never become like us.
Today, we worry about something new.
That they will cheat on welfare, corrupt our politics, and watch too much TV.
We worry that they will become like us.
Shut your hole, Liz! Go back!
Tonight on Frontline...
It's our country, it's America!
Go back to Mexico.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
Along the border at San Diego, it starts the same way every day.
They've come from all over Mexico and Central America.
They peer into the United States and wait for darkness.
Every night, thousands of people penetrate the border defenses here, and many of those will stay.
Since 1980, the United States has absorbed the greatest rush of newcomers in its history,
an average of over a million immigrants each year.
Half of them cross this southern border.
Fully one-fourth come illegally.
San Diego is the new Ellis Island, but no one is erecting statues to liberty.
They're costing millions of dollars every year. They account for about 30%.
Are you the immigrant?
They account for about 30% of our criminals.
We have to pay for your babies that they come here and have, and they become legal citizens.
30, they say 30 million.
Shut your hole, Liz! Go back!
Illegal immigration in particular frightens and angers Americans, and nowhere more than in California.
They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California.
The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.
Pete Wilson, California's incumbent governor, has sensed a winning issue and is campaigning vigorously against illegal immigration.
They're coming by boat. They're coming by plane. They're coming on foot.
A flurry of proposed bills would deny public benefits to illegal immigrants, including schools, welfare, and health care.
We just don't have the money to support this type of giveaway program to illegal aliens.
Attorney General Reno and Senators Feinstein and Boxer spent about an hour touring the border.
Washington has felt the need to respond, and liberals on this issue sound increasingly like conservatives.
The day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it.
Today we send a strong and clear message. We will make it tougher for illegal aliens to get into our country.
We can't afford to lose control of our own borders or to take on new financial burdens at a time when we are not adequately providing
for the jobs, the health care, and the education of our own people.
Therefore, immigration must be a priority for this administration.
I have lived along this border and written about it for years.
It is not the only place to look at immigration, but it has become the most important.
Economically, socially, and politically, what happens here affects every corner of our country.
Along this border, the choices affecting our very identity as a nation lie starkly exposed.
San Diego is the American dream city. For many immigrants, it is the first awe-inspiring sight of a new world.
But like much of Southern California, San Diego is a troubled place.
Defense cutbacks have undermined its economy, causing widespread unemployment and frustration.
It's not surprising that the city has become a hotbed of anti-immigrant activism.
AM 1130 News Talk Radio
A daily talk show hosted by Roger Hedgecock, a former mayor and reformed liberal, is the best-owned forum for these feelings.
I feel like, as a recovering politician, I can tell you my senses are that this is a firestorm of a political issue.
Well, when you see Dianne Feinstein, who was the mother of sanctuary in San Francisco for illegals,
now stands on the border and shakes her head and wrings her hands and says,
something has to be done, then you know that it's a real issue.
60% of Americans feel illegal immigration damages the country. That sentiment is even stronger in California.
If they're here, they're breaking a law in the United States and they need to leave.
We have got to address the reality that there are 500,000 people getting caught coming across our border every year.
That's got to stop. We don't have enough of that social service net for citizens, for people who deserve it, for people who are sick here in our country.
We have a lot of open phones and lots of people who want to talk.
Let's get Lauren in San Diego. Hi.
All of them know that if they get here, that we'll look after them.
I decided to follow the telephone trail back to the people who called in.
If you're an illegal alien and you go into our county welfare offices, you can get welfare.
They say to you, where do you live? You live here.
Where's your papers? I don't have them. I lost them. What's your name?
And you make up a name and they give you money.
Lauren Fleming repairs boats and has the familiar worries of a small businessman,
but beyond his anger at welfare lies a deeper cultural anxiety about being overwhelmed.
There are whole portions of Los Angeles City. If you don't know where you're at, you'd swear you were in Tijuana.
You cannot tell the difference. You cannot tell the difference.
The barrio that exists in Tijuana looks exactly the same as the one in Los Angeles.
As an American, I'm offended by that.
Deanne in Poway is next. We're going to squeeze as many callers in here as possible. Hi, Deanne.
Hi, Roger. Well, all three of you are my heroes on this subject.
Immigration is a real problem in trying to get some laws passed.
Northern San Diego County is affluent and no longer quite rural.
Deanne Erickson welcomed me to her property there.
Like many of her neighbors, she resents and fears the changes she sees all around.
I know of situations where women have actually been pulled off of their horse,
where they've been taken at gunpoint in their cars.
We moved here for the peace and quiet, and we thought, what a lovely setting.
So we've been here 18 years, and it was and it is.
A casual visitor might not understand her fears, but there is a hidden world here, and it is close by.
Deep in the ravines, a tenacious and foreign visitor has moved in.
We do have problems with illegal laborers who work up here, live up here.
Some of them drive their cars on the roads erratically.
There's a number of problems associated with living here and sharing my home
and my area with people who I feel don't really belong here.
I've decided to take a stand. My husband and I talked about it,
and we decided that what we were doing, hiring them, was contributing to the problem.
That was why they were coming here, and so we stopped hiring them.
And even though now there are those with green cards, I refuse to hire them,
because I don't want to contribute to the problem that we have in this state.
Gary in San Diego. Sorry, go ahead.
How are you doing, Rog?
Okay.
I want to make a response to that fellow that called.
Well, if those Hispanics weren't here, those jobs would be filled by Americans.
Some of the loudest complaints come from poor and blue collar neighborhoods
where residents live shoulder to shoulder with new immigrants.
I went to work for a scaffolding company, and I was making $7 an hour,
which I thought was pretty decent, you know.
And they let me go.
And the reason they let me go is because they could hire two Hispanics to do my work
for $10 an hour, meaning for both.
Gary Gahn is unemployed.
Like many Americans today, he has been beaten down
and has grown bitter at his own country for allowing this to happen.
The competition from immigrants seems to him like the most personal of attacks.
They're stealing.
And they're not stealing from the government, they're stealing from me,
because I'm the clown that gets unemployed when they're taking my job.
They're stealing.
They're coming over here to get my job.
You know, you might as well just come over here and get my house.
You might as well just come over here and starve my family.
Gahn sees the world in simple terms,
but poses questions that have no easy answers.
It's not my problem that their country has a problem.
I'm not involved in the politics of their country.
You know, I have nothing to do with their country.
Their country's problems are their problems, not mine.
Why do I have to suffer the problems of the politics played in their country?
There is an old and circular argument about what drives immigration,
suction from the north or pressure from the south.
The answer is probably both.
Mexico, like Central America, remains deeply troubled.
Agua Verde, a coastal community about a thousand miles south of the border,
is a typical Mexican town.
From the outside it appears whole, but on the inside it is damaged and poor.
When shrimp are abundant in the nearby lagoon, Agua Verde can support itself.
But most years the shrimping is bad.
Then the town falls back on farming.
But there is not enough land and there is not enough irrigation water.
Farmers can only grow one crop a year.
For a visitor, life seems wonderfully relaxed here, but the relaxation is enforced.
For the people of Agua Verde, it becomes a way of enduring the slow passage of time.
Men leave if they can. Women and children follow.
In recent years, much of the town has escaped to Los Angeles.
Some people who left Agua Verde have established themselves as legal residents of the United States.
They may dream of their former lives, but when they return it is only to visit.
I left because my family really didn't have enough to eat.
And if I were in the same situation right now, I don't know how, but I'd find a way to jump the fence.
Because to live here in this situation, you just can't.
There is no work here, so what do you do? I'll go to Los Angeles.
And what kind of work will you do there? I don't know.
Let's see what happens. You may be poor when you get there, but you'll be better off than here.
And now it is time for Maria Salas to leave. She is 24.
Her husband has made it to Los Angeles already, where he is staying with his sister and has found a job in a shirt factory.
Now Maria and her one-year-old baby, Jesus, must join him.
They, too, will have to cross the border illegally.
We would go days without money to buy milk for the baby.
We do have my grandmother. She has a store, and we've borrowed from her.
That's why we're able to get by, and we still owe her money today.
That's one reason we're going north, so that we can pay her what we owe her.
If they go, they want to improve their lives.
Lorena Quintanilla is a retired teacher and local welfare official.
She asked her if Mexico's problems should be the responsibility of the United States.
We don't hold the United States responsible for these problems, but it isn't Mexico's fault either for being poor.
They go in search of a better financial situation for their families.
We love Mexico. Only something of great magnitude would make us abandon our country.
There is great poverty here, and this affects our lives.
We don't want to be so poor that we can't provide stability for our children, for our families.
That's why we go to the United States. We go to find opportunities.
This is Maria's last night in Agua Verde.
Her neighbors have thrown a traditional going-away party for her.
But beneath the festivities, the mood is somber and regretful.
I want things to go very well for you there. Don't be sad when you think about going away.
My husband and I wish the best for you and your baby.
I hope that up there you find the future that you couldn't achieve here.
I wish you and your husband the best of luck. Thank you.
Los Angeles waits for Maria. It is the city of immigrants, the new New York.
They come from all over the world and in big numbers.
Of the nine million people who live in the county, nearly a quarter are foreign-born,
and almost a million of them are illegal immigrants.
Americans are beginning to conceive of the illegal immigrant, and to some degree the legal immigrant,
as having a little different character than he has in the past.
Some of that's our own fault. When you advertise to the world that you can come to the United States
and make more money staying in bed all day on a social service and welfare
and putting in eight hours in your own country, you're a little bit at fault for putting out that type of a message.
This is the giant Los Angeles county hospital where medical care is free.
It is the embodiment of a welfare system that the critics say draws immigrants to California.
I think today you have a number of people who come over knowing that you can get to the United States,
the steps you go through to apply for various social payments,
and pretty soon you're extracting dollars from Uncle Sam.
Health care costs are very, very high.
You have, when an emergency occurs and you have to take care of somebody, we do that. We're Americans.
Those costs, as you know, when a person goes to the hospital after an accident, are massive.
People are coming here not to get benefits, those kind of benefits, not to get the welfare benefits,
but to get a free handout. People come across here to work, to earn money.
I don't think they're stealing services. What service?
Service means to offer improvement. No one leaves here better.
They leave here tired of waiting. They leave even sicker than when they came.
It's time they stop blaming us. They keep saying that the state is broke because of us.
No, the state is rich because of us.
Because I pay taxes and I don't see those taxes. I don't benefit from them.
Nonetheless, over half the patients at the Los Angeles County Hospital are foreign-born,
and two-thirds of the women giving birth are illegal immigrants.
For taxpayers who do not use this system, all this is expensive.
But the question remains, even if we could stop immigration,
what do we do with the people who are already here?
You can't avoid the problem of undocumented aliens. You either have to accept it or get rid of it.
And the way that people are looking at getting rid of undocumented aliens is,
okay, we won't give them anything. We won't give them a driver's license.
We won't give them a Social Security number. We won't give them a job.
Maybe they'll leave. Maybe they'll just go away and this won't be a problem anymore.
Well, it's not going to happen.
Outside the city, in the migrant camps, there is plenty of evidence
that the immigrants will keep coming even if they are denied social benefits.
Claudia Smith, an attorney who works with the migrants, took me to a camp in northern San Diego.
It's one of the biggest encampments of its sort.
And this is how they put their housing together and ward off or try to ward off the rain and the cold.
They come here, especially in the San Diego area, for about seven, eight, nine months out of the year and then go home.
They come to piece together a living wage, which amounts to an average of $5,000 to $7,500 a year
and working under conditions that are as appalling as anything I have seen over the last 20 years.
We are very poor people, but we're not thieves. We're honorable people.
We like to work and earn what little we can.
I don't think people come here in search of free benefits.
Everything is earned here through our work. Nothing is free.
Migrant laborers in North County subsidize a fairly affluent and carefree lifestyle here.
They're the ones who will do your gardening work.
They're the ones who will babysit your children, all of these kinds of things.
People want them out on the street corners at six o'clock in the morning, and a lot of them,
so that they can bid each other's wages down.
However, at six o'clock at night, they want them out of sight, and it just doesn't work that way.
But it's obvious that the United States cannot assume responsibility for the entire world or even for Mexico.
A debate is now raging over whether total immigration, legal and illegal,
is causing large-scale economic damage to the nation.
There are illegal aliens taking large numbers of American jobs that are fairly high-paying jobs
and are valuable to our citizens, and that's now being substantiated by people like Dr. Huddle of Rice University.
That's trouble.
Dr. Donald Huddle is an economist whose report on immigration concludes it has cost the country
massive unemployment, lowered salaries, and huge government expenditures.
Immigration, indeed, is a pretty costly event for the public sector in the United States.
The net cost after taking into account taxes that are paid by them at local, state, and federal levels,
that the cost is about $42.5 billion, $19.92.
Huddle's report was commissioned by the Carrying Capacity Network,
an environmental group with strong reservations about immigration,
but it has never been published in an academic journal and is disputed by most immigration specialists.
In Washington, I talked to Huddle's chief critic, Dr. Jeffrey Pacell of the Urban Institute.
He tends to understate the amount of taxes that immigrants pay,
tends to overestimate the costs of services provided to them.
In a very general sense, he tends to ignore positive and indirect benefits of immigration.
And in this report in particular, he greatly overstates the number of immigrants.
Illegal immigrants in particular are hard to count.
Pacell, like the federal government, believes they now number perhaps 3.5 million.
Huddle adds about a million to that figure.
It's true that, for instance, on the illegal immigrants, that I am on the upper part of the range,
and Dr. Pacell is on the very bottom of the range.
And I happen to believe from the studies that have been done,
including presidential commissions and the original immigration commission,
that my numbers are very consistent.
We've taken it apart and looked at the assumptions
and redone a lot of the calculations with more accurate assumptions.
We come up with a figure on the range of $25 to $30 billion in surplus rather than cost.
Between Huddle and Pacell lies a gap of $70 billion.
Both men make assumptions because there is so little hard evidence.
It appears that immigrants do suppress wages,
but they also create new jobs with their productivity and spending.
New immigrants burden local governments,
but probably pay more into the federal treasury than they take out.
The consensus among experts is that Huddle is wrong.
Beyond that, there is only politics.
It is morning in Agua Verde and time to leave.
Maria says goodbye to her grandfather.
One always feels sad because they leave.
She's nervous and happy because she's going to be with her husband.
We'll see if their lives will change.
Right now, things are sad here.
There hasn't been any business.
Maria is leaving behind the comfort of her known world.
The future is treacherous.
The way is uncertain.
Her parents will drive her an hour and a half to the bus station in Mazatlan
for the long journey north.
Tijuana and the border lie 24 hours away.
There are plenty of buses going there.
They compete for business.
Maria has only her baby and her worries to keep her company.
In Tijuana, she will have to make choices.
She has a plan to send the baby through the official border crossing,
but she herself may have to jump the fence.
She knows enough to fear it.
I know it's going to be hard, just thinking that when I cross,
they might catch me and send me back.
All that scares me.
For years, as an air taxi pilot, I flew the border.
Seen from the air, it disappears into the sameness of the continent.
It is an arbitrary line, a legalism laid across the land.
By its very nature, the border remains open.
It can be crossed anywhere.
The San Diego area is the busiest crossing point
of illegal aliens in the United States.
I know that tonight our agents will arrest over a thousand people.
That's a given.
How many got away, I figure that anywhere from five to six hundred
based on our measures.
The heaviest concentration of our activity occurs within a 14-mile zone.
You have mountains, canyons, hills.
The terrain is extremely difficult.
The whole idea is to make it across the border area,
get into town, get to where the conveyances are,
the buses, the taxis, the trolley.
As long as there's an agent here, they're not going to come across.
As soon as I see one of the units pull off,
they'll try to run a group through.
There have been efforts to control illegal immigration before.
The most recent was the Massive Immigration Reform and Control Act,
which outlawed the hiring of undocumented workers nationwide.
It was signed into law in 1986.
Future generations of Americans will be thankful
for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders
and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions
of our people, American citizenship.
The bill failed.
It required employers to verify the identities of their workers.
But a huge black market and phony documents sprang up in response.
Employers could no longer tell who was a legal resident
and who had crossed the border illegally.
What she did is she got a smuggler to take this,
put her picture on there, put the counterfeit stamp on there,
and then she tried to make applications for entry with it.
This document right here, this gentleman presented.
It's got his fingerprint on it.
We've already checked the fingerprint.
It's not him.
We get maybe 100 of these a day, people presenting other ones.
This document right here, come here.
You can obviously see that that's not her.
It's a border crossing card to cross the border into the United States
for a temporary visit, not to work.
She presented to make application for entry, and it's not her.
Immigrants feel neither reformed nor controlled,
and we are left trying to hold the line.
Because of false documents, that has become even harder.
It's early afternoon in Tijuana.
Maria and her baby arrive after the overnight bus trip from the south.
Los Angeles is now only a few hours away,
but Maria has no idea how she'll cross the line.
In Tijuana, Maria will stay at her sister's tenement apartment
while she waits for word from her husband in Los Angeles.
What did the bear tell you?
He told me that the bear could pass me by.
But not the bear?
Yes, but not the bear.
What's your name?
I told you.
I'm not saying anything.
Let me see.
No.
If they give me back, I'm not going to pass.
What?
I'm not going to take a shower again.
What do you mean?
No.
Why not?
Because you'll be fine.
Maria simply has to wait.
She keeps her courage up with the thought that Agua Verde is only a bus ride away.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government keeps trying to strengthen the divide
between Tijuana and San Diego.
The first move was the construction of 15 miles of new, reinforced fencing.
We found every available landing mat stacked up in surplus from Guam to Guantanamo.
I mean, every military base we had, we searched for landing mat.
We found a ton of it, 179,000 pieces.
So what you have right here is a little runway that's just been turned on its side.
But there is little evidence that the fence has slowed illegal immigration.
Another idea, pushed by San Diego residents, was to light up the most heavily traveled stretch of the border.
Part of the problem has been the fact that the federal government has had a benign interest in this.
They have not paid attention to it.
And so we just need to get the word out that, hey, somebody has got to pay attention.
Our agents are out there waiting.
You have a lot of people that are already congregating on the Mexican side.
And now it's time, ladies and gentlemen, to light up the border.
In theory, the lights will help the Border Patrol and deter illegal immigrants.
In fact, they illuminate a narrow swath of fence and cast the larger border deeper into darkness.
Border Patrol Chief de la Viña himself must know that the lights are largely a political show.
Again, these lights are not the ultimate solution to this problem.
In fact, we had about 20 people just make a run across the border.
The Border Patrol did see them.
Ten-four is going to be a few.
Yeah, if you guys can just get over to the 57 watch, there's another group that's coming up through there.
The final defense is technology borrowed from the military.
The Border Patrol now parks thermal imaging cameras on hillsides.
Kelly, just swing north right there in the wash.
They're right there on the east side, but getting right across.
What do you need me to do?
Come on, come on.
Yeah.
South, stop, stop.
Turn around.
Come south.
Did you get it?
The government carefully tallies its arrests each night.
No one knows how many people get away.
But it's clear that immigration has not been stopped at the border.
Not by fences, lights, or high technology.
Finally, the time has come to go.
Maria's husband has found a smuggler who will take her right through the official border crossing with false documents.
The price is $500 to be paid upon delivery in Los Angeles.
How do you feel right now? Are you nervous?
Yes.
What are you most afraid of?
Everything.
I'm thinking about how to get there.
Maria will assume an entirely new identity for the crossing.
She will become a long-standing Tijuana resident with a job and an income.
The smuggler will provide her with the new documents.
In the meantime, she has to shed all official traces of her former self.
By late morning, after hours of anxious waiting, it appears the deal has fallen through.
There is no word from the smuggler.
The women in the house work the telephone to find an alternative.
The extensive smuggling network reveals itself.
The baby is still scheduled to leave.
He will cross with relatives using the birth certificate of an infant cousin.
Maria makes the wrenching decision to send him ahead.
By the next morning, Maria's wait is over.
For the right price, there are plenty of people eager to take her across.
A new smuggler has been found.
His plan is also to go through the official border crossing.
Maria provides him with photographs for the altered documents.
She has changed her hair and clothes to look more Californian.
She carries no luggage.
The smuggler is nervous and in a hurry.
Six hundred miles to the east of San Diego lie the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez,
divided by the border along the narrow Rio Grande.
Less than a year ago, the border patrol here decided to hold the line against illegal crossings.
When the program called Operation Blockade was instituted,
thousands of Mexican commuters accustomed to crossing daily to their black market jobs in El Paso were outraged.
Silvestre Reyes, the chief border patrol agent in El Paso, is responsible for this program that has received so much national attention.
When I first got here, the perception was that it was very easy to cross here.
We had anywhere between 30 and 40 lancheros or ferrymen that made a very lucrative business in bringing people across,
charging them anywhere from two to five dollars a person to enter illegally.
The strategy is simple. Agents are positioned every few hundred yards along the river levees between the cities.
Their new job is to deter people rather than to arrest them.
The agents are visible and stationary.
It's boring work, but it has succeeded.
The quiet of the border patrol's holding cells attests to an impressive lack of business.
Before the operation started, this place would be full and you'd have agents just about at every seat processing.
All these cells were full. All these pre-processing cells were full.
It was more of a revolving door.
Now the aliens are so few that the one or two agents that we have assigned to the processing center can handle all the processing.
But can El Paso be a model for the larger border?
Most of the people dissuaded by the blockade are only illegal commuters, not determined immigrants.
Skeptics believe this circumstance makes El Paso a special case.
That just isn't going to work. That just is not going to work.
Ruben Garcia, a Catholic lay worker with long experience on the El Paso border, is convinced that local blockades will not stop illegal immigration.
The word gets out. I'm willing to bet that everybody in Central and South America knows right now what the situation in El Paso is.
And what's the place to cross and what's not the place to cross.
This isn't going to keep people out.
The blockade stands like a boulder in a stream. The current divides and accelerates around it.
Illegal immigration is up from Arizona to the lower Rio Grande.
It is also up on the bridges of El Paso where many people are crossing with phony documents.
I have seen people who have left and they have walked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles.
No one is going to believe that that person is going to be deterred.
It's because we have no sense of why it is that they're moving.
But Reyes is confident his solution can control illegal immigration along the entire 2,000-mile border.
There are only approximately 200 miles that we really basically need to control in this way here.
And this type of operation makes it very practical in terms of addressing those 200 miles.
El Paso fools people. They tour the levees and naturally suspect that a painless solution has been found.
But I left with serious doubts looking down once again on the larger border
where Reyes' own agents admit that the blockade fails just outside the city.
In San Diego, there is mounting pressure on the Border Patrol to institute an El Paso-style blockade here
at the border's busiest crossing point. But the question is, will it work?
It's not that we don't want to do that type of an operation. Physically, it's not going to work.
El Paso has level terrain, a Rio Grande River. Here we have mountains, we have canyons, we have the ocean.
The other aspect is you have 95% of those that are entering are not local. They're from the interior of Mexico.
Their motivation is that if they don't make it tonight, we apprehend them and send them back.
Well, they're on the border tomorrow night. They're not going back to their home.
So when you put all that together, then you put the volume.
The El Paso might be dealing with 600, 700 on a daily basis. We're dealing with 2,000.
These 2,000, should there be, say, some type of a barrier or what have you where they could come across,
the following night you'd have another 2,000, followed by another 2,000.
By the end of the week you'd be looking at close to 10,000, 15,000 people.
We're going to lose. We don't have the resources. We would anticipate that they would be making big rushes at us.
We would anticipate there'd be violence. We would anticipate a riot-type situation.
Frankly, there are ways to seal a border. The Soviets showed us how.
It requires barbed wire, watchtowers, and guards, and some sort of more powerful deterrent.
No one seriously suggests that the United States use deadly force on its perimeter.
But those most concerned about illegal immigration worry that arrest and deportation is no punishment at all,
that the southern border is just a revolving door.
One practical punishment now being discussed is immigration prison.
On a small scale, we already have such places called INS detention centers.
El Centro, California is one.
500 men are locked up here awaiting their hearings.
Most are criminals just released from prisons.
But some are not. During my visit, the center held several hundred Chinese who had been intercepted off the coast of San Diego.
El Centro is interesting because it gives some idea of the type of facility
that would have to be built on a much larger scale if we decided to punish masses of foreigners
and hold the line against the revolving door.
The question, as always, is at what cost?
Already, this center was expanding to avoid overcrowding and to meet national prison standards.
We have a total of five different menus that are changed on a weekly basis.
And, you know, your morning breakfast is, you know, you've got orange grits,
scrambled eggs, grilled turkey, ham, sliced bread, jelly, margarine, coffee.
And variety for lunch, it could be shrimp, egg rolls, fried rice, steamed broccoli,
braised beef cubes, buttered noodles, beef taquitos, which we had yesterday,
oven-baked fish, which is on right now, soup of the day, chicken salad, potato salad.
What, roughly, is the cost per prisoner, for detainee, per day, per week, per month?
God, presently, I don't have that figure.
There was maybe about 40-some dollars per day, maybe about a year ago,
so that's probably gotten up since then.
Our concerns about punishing illegal immigrants should be deeper than the merely fiscal.
What would be the societal costs of establishing a massive immigration prison system
on our southern border?
It is a question worth considering when people say we must hold the line.
Hernandez?
Yeah, that's him.
You're under arrest.
We have a warrant for your arrest.
You're an alien in the United States.
The alternative to holding the line is to try, once again,
to eliminate the lure of jobs.
This should be relatively simple to achieve.
Regulations are already in place forbidding the employment of undocumented workers.
Now, if only documents were not so easy to falsify.
We do not have consensus in this society about how we should be identifying ourselves.
Now, our ability to work with employers and with enforcing the laws
that are requiring employers to hire only people that are legally here,
our ability to do that is very much limited by the fact that we do not have consensus
in this society about what cards we should be carrying and whether there ought to be data banks.
It seems the federal government's ultimate plan for stopping illegal immigration
could be a national data bank and ID card for everyone.
And I think it's quite clear in the health care debate already
that there is going to be some kind of a system for verifying people's eligibility for health care.
My own sense is that that will, over time, become a general verification system
that is used for all kinds of societal purposes and immigration regulation and verification of legal status
will become one of those uses.
Supporters of this idea say we already have credit cards, social security numbers,
and various licenses already backed up by computers.
But the very need for a single card points to the limitation of the current system.
It is still awkward for authorities to figure out who we are.
A single card would eliminate illegal immigration,
but it's hard to be an American and not be concerned about the larger implications.
Given what we don't know about immigration, you have to wonder if we have much to gain.
We had lost track of Maria as she headed for the San Diego border.
Her plan was to get into the United States through the official crossing point using false documents.
Up in Los Angeles, the baby Jesus has made it safely.
Maria's husband has not seen his son since his own long trip north.
By early afternoon, there is no sign of Maria.
Her family is worried and is beginning to imagine trouble.
I don't know how they're doing or how it will go with their crossing the border.
For me, it was an extremely difficult crossing.
Maybe she got caught. I don't know. I really don't know what could have happened.
It's been many, many hours.
I'm just thinking about what could have happened, whether they got caught on the line and sent back.
It's hard thinking about how they're going to cross.
It has been eight hours since Maria disappeared in Tijuana.
Her husband can no longer wait and has to go to work.
Finally, the call from Maria.
She made it. She's in Los Angeles. The smuggler needs directions.
Thirty minutes later, he makes the delivery.
Until now, no money has changed hands.
But with Maria safely in Los Angeles, the time has come for payment.
The smuggler tries to raise the price by $50, but when the family resists,
he quickly accepts the $500 as agreed on in Tijuana.
I ask him to describe the trip.
They had documents. The documents that are made over there are perfect.
Just perfect. They're transported in a car and will be asked, where are you going?
All you say is, I'm going to San Ysidro to go shopping.
There's a lot of people that don't know about us, so those are the ones that risk it walking through the mountains.
And of course, there's assaults. Women get raped.
It costs $300 to bring you through there, but you're also risking it.
We aren't known to a lot of people since we don't publicize.
It's only $200 more and your safety is assured.
We don't stuff you in the trunk of a car. Instead, you're riding like an average citizen.
The next morning, the family is together again, the latest illegal immigrants to the United States.
Despite all the political rhetoric and all the efforts of the border patrol, they manage to get here.
The family is poor and may need California's help, but Maria's husband is working already and paying taxes.
In the long run, they are unlikely to take more from the nation than they give.
Should we fear them anyway? Neither Maria nor her husband speaks English, and in Los Angeles, they may never need to.
In other ways, too, they may never adapt.
Magnified by millions, this causes concerns deeper than economic.
The newcomers seem to threaten the unraveling of society.
But history casts light on our times.
The myth of an immigrant nation misleads us.
The United States has rarely absorbed immigrants happily.
Much of the rhetoric that is being used in the debate over immigration and multiculturalism today
is a direct throwback to the rhetoric of the 1920s,
in which we were objecting to immigrants mainly on cultural and racial grounds.
Many of the arguments are identical.
They imply that the U.S. has reached or exceeded its cultural absorptive capacity.
Whether or not the economy can continue to use these people productively,
the concern is that the culture, the core culture of the United States, whatever that is, has been stretched to the breaking point.
In the past, we worried that immigrants would never become like us.
We were wrong.
Today, we worry about something new, that they will cheat on welfare, corrupt our politics, and watch too much TV.
We worry that they will become like us.
Immigrants provide a mirror, and we don't like what we see.
We do need a border to define the nation and to keep from being overrun.
But our border is a strange sort of fiction that functions to the extent it is believed.
It's possible that the fiction needs strengthening, but little else.
Beyond that, we should not pretend that we can actually seal ourselves off without altering the essence of America.
To live with the current level of immigration would not be an easy choice.
It would require wisdom and steady nerves.
It takes courage not to indulge our fears.
Dear Frontline, I am so grateful for your time.
And now it's time for some viewer comments.
Behind the badge was a Frontline report on the breakdown of trust between cops and the communities they serve.
The program used local and national TV news coverage of a New York drug dealer's shooting to examine media bias against the police.
This man was screaming for his mother.
There's not a man that has a gun that's going to kill you.
His name is Ulysses Oniko.
He says he was there and saw what happened to his friend.
CBS News senior producer Robert Lang wrote a letter saying that Frontline had unfairly misrepresented a CBS News magazine story.
He wrote, What Frontline did goes way beyond using quotes out of context.
You have demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth, treating one side of a balanced story as if it didn't exist, and in so doing damaged the credibility of CBS News.
Frontline regrets not conveying that CBS did attempt to tell the police version of what happened.
One viewer sent us a video letter defending police use of force in life-threatening situations like the one discussed in the program.
The officer does not choose to get assaulted, but must control that type of behavior.
It's time to allow law enforcement realistic options of control and resistive behavior so that they may protect and serve the citizen population better.
This is Sam Faulkner, law enforcement training specialist from the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy.
Another viewer had a different reaction.
I believe that police abuse of the public is much more widespread than generally known and is covered up by the politicians and politically controlled courts, and the public is at the mercy of the lawless cop.
Increasingly, the criminal law has become a revenue measure, resulting in more regulations and controls and more and more police supervision of the public and violation of their civil rights.
It is called law and order.
Very truly yours, Donald J. Cassidy.
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FRONTLINE is produced for the Documentary Consortium by WGBH Boston, which is solely responsible for its content.
This is PBS.