Let's Pay Some Attention to Mexico's Southern Border and the OTMs David North - The Center for Immigration Studies
go to original July 23, 2013

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the laxness of enforcement at Mexico's lower border is the freight train called "The Beast", as the accompanying photograph shows. (Associated Press/Eduardo Verdugo)

Here's an idea. Instead of adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents at our southern border, let's make that 18,000, and use the money saved for 2,000 of them to fund, say, 4,000 Mexican Border Patrolmen (or better, Mexican Marines) at their southern border.

Clearly, it costs less to hire people in Mexico than in the United States, and clearly there are oodles of Central Americans pouring over that border on their way to the United States. The Border Patrol uses the term "Other Than Mexicans" (OTMs) for the non-Mexicans it apprehends after they have wended their way through Mexico.

Border Patrol statistics show that the agency is seeing a lot more OTMs recently. Apprehensions of them by the Border Patrol were 46,997 in FY 2011 and 94,532 in FY 2012.

My sense is that adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents, as is proposed in the version of S.744 passed by the Senate, is mostly overkill. More agents are needed, of course, but there will be the factor of diminishing returns. If the 20,000 could be added to the interior enforcement efforts, that would be meaningful, but Congress does not propose that.

Adding 4,000 agents at the borders between Mexico and Guatemala (and to a lesser extent) Belize, however, will make a terrific difference, even if the force is not as alert as our Border Patrol, and is corrupt to some extent. Mexico does little currently to guard those borders and 4,000 agents there would be very useful.

Read the rest at The Center for Immigration Studies

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