Our View: Danged fences alone don’t do the job

• Border security alone hasn’t worked
• The unintended consequences of a myopic approach to illegal immigration are deadly and counterproductive
• A new study shows the militarization of the border resulted in higher numbers of undocumented immigrants settling in Arizona

Tell Congress to stop pandering to nativism and enact comprehensive immigration reform.

What we are doing hasn’t worked.

Here’s yet another unintended consequence of a multibillion-dollar strategy that focuses only on the politically easy part of the problem:

A new study shows the militarization of the border resulted in higher numbers of undocumented immigrants settling in Arizona than otherwise would have been the case, according to a team of economists who looked at border policies from 1994 through 2011.

Shifting migrants around was not the intent of more than $130 billion in federal spending on border surveillance and security in the past two decades.

Illegal immigration is down. But that was more about the recession than those danged fences. Fewer jobs meant fewer illegal border crossers, according to a 2011 study by the National Research Council.

In a good economy, we don’t need more fences. We need more robust employment verification and worksite enforcement. That’s part of comprehensive reform.

In a good economy, we don’t need more boots on the ground. We need an efficient and adequate guest worker program to address the needs of growers across the country for agricultural workers.

We don’t need hyperbole, either.

The orchestrated outrage about the July murder of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco misses a larger point. Yes. The guy benefited from a misguided sanctuary policy. He should have been turned over to authorities. But he’d been deported five times before the killing. The border buildup didn’t stop him from coming back.

We need comprehensive immigration reform to move workers off the desert and into the legal ports of entry. That makes it easier to catch the bad guys.

A legalization process for law-abiding migrants living here now would also make it hard for criminals to hide. That’s another benefit of treating a complex problem with something besides simplistic rhetoric.

Consider a few other unintended consequences of focusing almost exclusively on border security:

-- Heavy security in urban areas forced migrants into deadly desert treks. In its 2014 annual report, the Pima County Medical Examiner reported receiving the remains of 2,330 people who died crossing the border since 2001.

-- Making it hard to cross empowered criminal smugglers, who charge migrants and leave them to die if they can’t keep up. People smuggling became so lucrative the drug cartels jumped in. Then came the rip crews who steal drug loads or kidnap migrants for ransom.

-- Border policies virtually ended circular migration by making the trip expensive and dangerous. No more can a breadwinner come here, work a few months and return to the family south of the border. They stay now. They send for spouses and children or start families here.

-- People in border communities such as Arivaca feel singled out and hassled by border checkpoints, while ranchers in remote border areas feel unsafe. That’s despite the number of Border Patrol agents in the Tucson Sector increasing from 282 agents in 1994 to 4,200 in 2011.

Border security alone hasn’t worked.

The new study about the impact of border policies on where migrants settle looks at early policies that hardened the line in California and Texas. Researchers Todd Pugatch, economist at Oregon State University, and Sarah Bohn, economist and research fellow at California’s Public Policy Institute, say the result was an extra 33,000 Mexican immigrants settling in Arizona.

It’s one more example of the unintended consequences of treating the border as a problem you can simply wall off.