Source: The Huffington Post
By Federico F. Peña and Federico C. Baradello
Arizona isn’t the only place confronting a broken immigration system. In recent years, Spain’s Canary Islands received tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants while thousands more died trying to make the ocean journey from West Africa. It’s no surprise that Spanish politicians now call the waterways between Africa and Spain “Europe’s Rio Grande.”
Similar to the U.S., Spain’s immigration policies have failed and teach an important lesson: Piecemeal policies that “secure the border first” have been tried in the past and will not work in the future. Only comprehensive immigration reform can stop unauthorized immigration.
Since the mid-1990s, as unauthorized immigration from Africa to Spain grew, the Spanish government poured money into expensive border patrols along the Strait of Gibraltar (the narrow waterway separating North Africa from Spain). At first, these patrols seemed to slow unauthorized immigration into Spain, but after several years unauthorized immigrants began heading to the nearby Canary Islands in droves. Spanish border controls were only successful until human smugglers found new routes for desperate immigrants.
A decade earlier, along our Southwest border with Mexico, the Clinton administration enacted the Southwest Border Strategy, which built and reinforced border fences and multiplied investment in border patrols along the most populated segments of the border. The strategy called for raising the risk of unauthorized immigrant apprehension by closing off the most commonly used human smuggling routes. Administration officials believed this would either deter immigrant traffic or force the traffic over terrain less suited for crossing, where immigrants would be easier to detect. Yet as this strategy was implemented, immigrant traffic shifted to dangerous desert and mountain passages along the border. Immigrant traffic shifted to Arizona.
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Federico Peña is a Senior Advisor to Vestar Capital Partners and a former public official who served as Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, and previously as Mayor of the City of Denver. Federico Baradello is completing a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and a J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall).
