Over the past couple of years, lawmakers have repeatedly pointed to the alarming levels of drug-related violence that is unraveling on the Mexican side of the southern border in a way that suggests that the horrific crimes are spilling over into the U.S. This deceptive line of reasoning has most often been used either to argue against comprehensive immigration reform or support harsh immigration measures such as SB-1070, the law that was recently passed by Arizona. Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano called on politicians to stop exaggerating the levels of violence occurring on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico:

The verdict is that our approach is working. We have strengthened the southwest border in ways that many people did not think possible. And our partnership with Mexico along the border is very strong.

It is inaccurate to state — as too many have — that the United States’ side of the border is overrun with violence or out of control. This statement often made to score cheap political points is just plain wrong.

Shortly thereafter, a coalition of border city mayors chimed in to denounce a recent op-ed written by former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) which claimed that Al Qaeda openly boasts of using drug tunnels to smuggle weapons of mass destruction through our porous defenses.” Although Huckabee conceded that “[f]ortunately, those boasts have proven empty — at least so far” he still concluded that DHS has “failed miserably” to secure the border. The U.S. Mexico Border Mayors Association echoed Napolitano’s remarks in their response. Politico reports:

In a letter obtained by POLITICO, the mayors from cities in Arizona, Texas and California — saying they represent 7 million people — responded sharply to a recent op-ed Huckabee wrote in the New York Post. [...]

“(C)laims that our border cities are out of control are just not true,” reads the letter from eight mayors addressed to Huckabee and the Post. “Not only do these claims fly in the face of statistical evidence, but they also disparage the tremendous efforts that our law enforcement agencies have made to protect this border and the people who live in border communities.”

They added, “We can tell you first hand that the Southwest Border Initiative is certainly working. We have seen unprecedented investment in terms of manpower, resources, and technology that has resulted in a more secure border. We have implemented a successful strategy which includes greater collaboration with federal, state, local and tribal, and Mexican partners while facilitating legal trade and travel.”

The mayors also added that they “constantly have to correct the false perceptions that our cities are not a safe place to live, work and play.” In fact, according to FBI statistics, they are amongst the safest. The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin — all of which happen to be pretty close to the U.S. – Mexico border. Counties along the southwest border have some of the lowest rates of violent crime per capita in the nation and those rates have dropped by more than 30 percent since the 1990s while immigration has soared.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t appear the public officials Napolitano and the border city mayors were referring to are paying much attention to the data. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu — an ardent SB-1070 supporter — accused Napolitano of downplaying border-related violence and of being “divorced from reality.” He also announced that he expects armed conflict with the Mexican drug cartels soon. Meanwhile, a recent report by the Government Accountability Office suggests that it’s the northern border that actually poses a much larger terror risk.

One story that has been largely gone unnoticed in recent days is the death of Ramses Barron Torres — a 17-year-old Mexican national who was shot by a U.S. border patrol agent. At first, there were conflicting reports regarding the curious circumstances surrounding his death. Originally, a Mexican official reportedly said the teen died Wednesday after he fell from a border fence and hit his head on a rock. However, witnesses to the event claimed that Torres was shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, said on Thursday that it now appears “to be clear that the death was the result of a gunshot wound.”

KGUN has shared the testimony of a friend and witness to Torres’ death:

“The moment I came from running from up here (USA) to down there (Mexico), that’s when you can hear the gunshot. I thought that they were shooting at me, but they weren’t. This is when Ramses yelled, ‘They hit me! They hit me! Help me!” explained Torres’s friend, Sergio, who did not want his full name revealed.

Sergio added that aside from climbing the fence to visit Ramses’s American girlfriend, the two did nothing else to provoke Border Patrol. His statements conflict with reports saying the boys threw rocks at the federal agents.

“We didn’t do any harm to them. We didn’t have any guns or nothing. We just had ourselves. I think they were just mad because they (Border Patrol) couldn’t catch us,” said Sergio.

Watch the report:

The FBI, which is leading the investigation, has maintained that Border Patrol agents were attempting to arrest suspected drug smugglers near the fence when bystanders began throwing rocks at them, prompting an agent to fire at them. Nonetheless, the agent who fired the shot was placed on administrative leave.

Regardless of which side is right, the incident presents yet another disturbing case of what appears to be excessive force. This past summer, Anastacio Hernández, a father of five U.S. born children, was shot with a stun gun by a Customs and Border Protection Officer at the San Ysidro border crossing as he resisted being deported. While Customs and Border protection maintained their actions were necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety,” the San Diego County coroner ruled that his death was a homicide.

A few days later, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed Sergio Adrián Hernández Huereca, a 14-year-old boy on the U.S. side of the Paso Del Norte bridge in El Paso, Texas who allegedly threw rocks at him. At the time, T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, claimed “deadly force” was a justified response. However, I still have a hard time understanding how young, unarmed kids throwing rocks merits a deadly firing of bullets in response.

Either way, it’s still unclear whether rock-throwing was even involved in last week’s incident. According to the Arizona Republic, newspapers on both sides of the border reported that the incident occurred in an area that is under video surveillance, which will hopefully clear up what is about to come yet another international controversy.

(H/T Colorlines)

Yesterday, I predicted that it was only a “matter of time” before an opportunistic lawmaker points to the tragic massacre of 72 Central and South American migrants on their way to the U.S. as yet another reason to “seal the border” and delay immigration reform. Unsurprisingly, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) stepped up to the plate on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. However, McCain didn’t just use it as an opportunity to start fear-mongering about violence in Mexico hypothetically “spilling over,” he also called immigration and human rights activists “oblivious” for suggesting that “our border is more secure than ever”:

When they — this is the most cruel and brutal things that have happened in our hemisphere. And what I don’t get, Greta, is where are the immigration activists and the human rights activists and others that wouldn’t conclude that the way you stop this terrible situation — one of the ways is to secure our borders? Then this human trafficking dries up and people come to this country legally. But they don’t seem to get that. Where are the human rights activists with these terrible abuse taking place as we speak? [...]

And then [they] turn around and say, “Don’t worry, our border is more secure than ever,” is completely oblivious to what’s happening on the other side of the border and continues to happen in our own state. And the majority of the American people have it figured out. But frankly, apparently, some of these immigration groups, pro-immigration groups haven’t figured it out yet. Secure the border. Then we can address some of the other issues.

Watch it:

However, immigration activists aren’t just speculating when they suggest that the U.S. side of the border is safer than it’s been in years. The claim is actually based on hard data from the FBI and interviews with law enforcement officials. The FBI crime statistics show that as undocumented immigration has increased, crime in Arizona and other border states has gone down. Data from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) additionally shows that the violent crime rate in Arizona has been declining since 2006 and in 2008 and is at the lowest level since 1973. Even property crime has plummeted in Arizona since 2002 and in 2008 and is at its lowest point since 1966. Clarence Dupnik, the border sheriff of Arizona’s Pima County, has stated, “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”

Finally, immigration and human rights activists are very aware that human smuggling is a “human rights crisis.” Long before the bodies of 72 murdered migrants were found, Amnesty International decried “the alarming levels of abuse faced by the tens of thousands of Central American irregular migrants that every year attempt to reach the US by crossing Mexico.” On the ground, non-profit groups such as Border Angels and the Border Action Network work to provide relief to migrants and the border towns they pass through.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, immigration groups continue to fight for immigration reform that would have the effect of shuttering the human smuggling business by providing economic migrants with more opportunities to legally enter the U.S. when there are jobs available for them. Meanwhile, as Wonk Room noted yesterday, the enforcement-only approach that McCain pushes exacerbates the problems and hardships migrants face. The harder it is to cross the border, the more profitable the human smuggling business becomes. And as profits rise, so does violence in Latin America. McCain, however, insisted last night that he believes the border can be made airtight, citing Israel’s impeccable border security record — underestimating the persistent ingenuity of human smugglers and ignoring both the focus of Israeli border security efforts and the human rights violations associated with them.

Surely, McCain has access to all the information cited in this post — which means either he is the one who is oblivious or he is willfully deceiving the American public.

Over the past year, amidst the heated immigration debate, immigration hawks have pointed to the violence taking place on the Mexican side of the border to argue that the U.S. isn’t ready for comprehensive immigration reform and should instead pursue a single-minded focus on border security. It’s probably only a matter of time before anti-immigrant lawmakers start pointing at the recent “massacre” of 72 Central and South American suspected migrants who were brutally tortured and killed by human smugglers in Mexico on their way to the U.S. as yet another reason to pour billions of dollars into immigration enforcement.

However, it’s actually the absence of immigration reform that contributed to their deaths and has helped propel the violence on the other side of the border. Just as the “insatiable demand” for illicit drugs in the U.S. fuels the bloody drug war in Latin America, heavy demand for and a steady supply of immigrant workers together with an outdated visa system that shuts most migrants out of the U.S. has fueled the profitable and violent human smuggling business.

Despite the poor state of the economy, the Global Consortium on Security Transformation wrote in May 2010 that “[t]he U.S. labor market has seen chronic shortages in some sectors for decades. As a result, “[i]t is no secret that much of the U.S. food processing and agricultural industries depend heavily on foreign-born (often illegal) workers for harvesting fruits and vegetables.” An aging population, low fertility rates, and rising education attainments and employment aspirations are amongst the factors that the study cites as contributing to the labor shortage in those sectors.

Meanwhile, few economic opportunities across Latin America creates an ample supply of workers who are more than willing to fill many of those jobs. However, irrespective of “good” or “bad” economic conditions, they can’t. The decades-old U.S. visa system that allows immigrants to enter and work in the country legally consists of static quotas that don’t respond to economic fluctuations.

Meanwhile, a focus on border security has made it increasingly difficult for migrants to enter the U.S. illegally. Yet it hasn’t stopped them from coming. Instead, it has increased the profitability of the human smuggling business and strengthened its ties with organized crime. In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “[a]s U.S. border security has tightened, Mexican drug cartels have moved in on coyotes…the traffickers now use their expertise in gathering intelligence on border patrols, logistics and communication devices to get around ever tighter controls.”

Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, chair of the department of transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at Arizona State University, explains, “[n]ow, because of the so-called security needs of the border, what’s been created is this structure of smuggling in the hands of really nasty people who only treat the migrant as a commodity.” Along the way, migrants face rape, theft, physical and emotional abuse, and even kidnapping, torture, and death. Their own smugglers view them as exploitable cargo. If they make it to the U.S., they are cheap labor or trespassing “criminals,” depending on who you ask. Migrants like the 72 who were brutally killed in Mexico risk everything to attain the American Dream, but, somewhere along the line the humanity of their journey is lost.

Watch Amnesty International’s video on the risks migrants to the U.S. face:

Some well-meaning, free market thinkers would argue that an open border that allows for the free flow of labor is the answer. However, besides running the risk of being an economic and national security nightmare, it’s also politically impossible. Fixing the broken immigration system by creating a flexible number of opportunities for economic migrants to work in the U.S. without sacrificing border security is a much more practical and realistic solution. Replacing old visa quotas with a system that responds to economic supply and demand would devastate the lucrative human smuggling business by allowing more economic migrants to enter the U.S. legally, rather than paying someone to smuggle them through. It might even significantly dent the illegal drug trade by freeing up resources that are currently being indiscriminately used to pursue non-violent economic migrants and dangerous drug cartel operatives alike. In the meantime, more border security means more human smuggling profits, more violence, more exploitation, and more migrant deaths on both sides of the border.

Last week, Democrats introduced a $600 million border security bill that was passed under unanimous consent — reportedly, much to their surprise. The legislation includes $176 million for 1,000 new Border Patrol agents, $89 million for 500 additional customs and immigration personnel, $32 million to deploy drones, and $196 million for the Justice Department’s work along the border. Given that the House of Representatives may take up the proposal when it reconvenes from recess tomorrow, it begs the question of whether throwing another $600 million at the border will make a difference, practically or politically.

In practical terms, many experts have argued that focusing on the border may have some grave unintended consequences. Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues, Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone, have carefully studied the effects of border security measures over the past ten years. What they found is that “border enforcement may have increased the size of the permanent Mexican population in the United States by a factor of nearly four.” That’s because a tighter border also constricts the movement of labor. In other words, undocumented workers who may have previously entered the U.S. on a seasonal basis chose to stay put as it became harder and more dangerous to leave and come back. Another effect that the experts don’t mention is the increasing profitability of human smuggling. The harder it is to cross the border, the more dependent migrants become on paying criminal smugglers to get them across the border and the more lucrative the human smuggling business becomes. And, as Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) points out, “[a]s we have done more to secure our borders, alien smuggling organizations have increasingly become more bold, violent and dangerous.”

Apparently, the Democrats’ introduction of the border bill was also guided by political motivations. In the past, Republicans have rejected similar bills, arguing for much larger bills paid for with unused economic stimulus funds. Roll Call reports that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) initially proposed last week’s legislation and asked for unanimous consent, anticipating the Republicans would oppose it. Schumer intended “[to] expose whether people want to secure the borders or just want an issue” for this fall’s elections. According to Roll Call, most Democrats didn’t think Republicans would approve the bill and expected to prove a political point. However, not only did Republicans vote for the bill, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) added themselves as co-sponsors. At that point, Schumer pivoted, stating, “This bipartisan effort shows we are serious about making the border more secure than ever…Now our attention must turn to comprehensive reform, which is the only way to fully address the problem of illegal immigration.” However, as immigration advocates note, those opposed to comprehensive immigration reform will endlessly continue to demand more border security as a way to permanently stall actual solutions. They claim that “passing a stand-alone border bill eliminated a bargaining chip for Democrats.”

Ultimately, more enforcement without reform is a waste of limited resources and money. The border is already supposedly “safer than its ever been” and the best way to make it even safer is to provide economic migrants with the legal channels to enter the U.S. so border patrol can focus more on actual threats to public safety. While it’s true that it will be harder for Republicans to argue that Democrats are turning a blind eye on border security, they’ll continue to raise the benchmarks and generate more unintended consequences. If lawmakers really want to chip away at the problem in absence of immigration reform, experts suggest their best bet is to promote workers’ rights and the vigorous enforcement labor laws — an action which may actually succeed in catching the Republicans off-message and off-guard.

Today, Time magazine reports that the border is “one of America’s safest places,” pointing out that the Arizona’s overall crime rate dropped 12 percent last year and 23 percent between 2004 and 2008. However, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) seem fixated on the right-wing myth that the bloody Mexican drug war has spilled over the border and that violence is, as McCain puts it, “the worst I have ever seen.”

In that vain, Kyl and McCain proposed legislation last night that would direct $701 million towards 1,200 additional Border Patrol agents, 500 more Customs and Border Protection officers, three new border-enforcement bases, grants to support local law enforcement, two drones, and additional resources for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Kyl and McCain’s proposal is almost identical to the legislation recently pushed and passed by Democrats in the House, however, the troubling difference is that they’re proposing to use unspent stimulus money to pay for it:

The legislation we introduced today will provide additional resources to help gain control of our border, without impacting our nation’s deficit. It is our hope that Democratic majority will swiftly work with us to ensure passage of this bill. We also look forward to working with the Administration toward the adoption of our 10-Point border plan, which will provide the additional resources that are so desperately needed by so many living along the border in Arizona.

Repealing what is left of the stimulus translates into taking away money that’s dedicated to middle class tax cuts. The stimulus cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, and there are still $55 billion in tax benefits that have yet to be expended. Pat Garafolo explains that “repealing the stimulus to pay down the deficit amounts to raising taxes on all of those people.”

It would be one thing if Arizona’s economic woes were over and the stimulus funds dispensable. However, the state is still on the road to economic recovery. Though University of Arizona economist Marshall Vest recently declared the recession officially over in Arizona, he also noted that “it will be months before a recovery is evident and years to repair all the damage that’s been done.” Indeed, Arizona is now $10 billion in debt. The unemployment rate is slightly below the national average, hovering at 9.7 percent. Arizona is one of the four states responsible for the top 20 metro foreclosure rates. Meanwhile, CNN reports that the state’s new immigration law, SB-1070 — which McCain and Kyl support — is furthering economic woes. “[A]necdotal evidence from business owners, real estate agents and community leaders indicates the mere specter of the bill [SB-1070] has created a culture of fear among Hispanics in Arizona that’s slowly paralyzing sectors of the economy,” wrote CNN correspondent Emanuella Grinberg.

McCain initially dubbed the stimulus bill “generational theft” in 2009 and criticized it for being “full of unnecessary spending.” Kyl has been on a crusade since 2009 to scrap unused stimulus money, arguing that it’s not working. He’s also fought tooth and nail against extending unemployment benefits because it would supposedly be a “disincentive” to those who can’t find jobs. Both senators criticized the stimulus for containing too much pork. “It doesn’t stimulate, it just spends,” said McCain.

However, while Kyl and McCain appear to think that the stimulus is a failure and a lost cause, economists Alan Blinder and Marc Zandi believe it “probably avert[ed] what would have been called Great Depression 2.0.” The Congressional Budget Office further estimates that the stimulus’ effects on “output and employment are expected to increase further during calendar year 2010″ and predicts that it’ll start fading away in 2012.

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) admitted to Meet the Press anchor, David Gregory, that Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) was wrong when she stated that most undocumented immigrants “are coming here and they’re bringing drugs” during a primary election debate. CNN is now reporting that T.J. Bonner of the National Border Patrol Council has also affirmed that Brewer’s statements are simply not true:

T.J. Bonner of the National Border Patrol Council told CNN that Brewer’s claims were “clearly not the case.” Bonner said that some undocumented immigrants caught by border patrol agents have drugs on them, and that they sometimes blame pressure from the drug cartels. But, he said, those claims have little credibility because drug smugglers are typically transporting much larger quantities of drugs. And besides, he said, if what Brewer said were true, there would be many more prosecutions for drug smuggling. Brewer’s comments, Bonner said, don’t “comport with reality — that’s the nicest way to put it.”

Bonner isn’t exactly a pro-immigrant activist either. Most recently, he defended the shooting of a teenager who was accused of throwing rocks at a border patrol agent saying that the use of “deadly force” was a justified response. Bonner has spoken at “Mothers Against Illegal Aliens” events and praised the border vigilante Minutemen Project.

Despite criticism, Brewer is sticking to her guns. When pressed, Brewer told CNN that undocumented immigrants might be motivated to come to the U.S. just to work, however, they get “snared” into the drug cartels, She later issued a press release defending her remarks. “The simple truth is that the majority of human smuggling in our state is under the direction of the drug cartels, which are by definition smuggling drugs,” stated Brewer.

As Wonk Room has repeatedly pointed out, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and their presence is more likely to be correlated with safer cities and neighborhoods. Despite the flow of illegal immigration, violent crime along the U.S. side of the border has been declining.

Watch Brewer’s interview with CNN:

Earlier this week, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) appeared on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. During the interview McCain and Kyl argued that the Congress is not at a place where it can enact comprehensive immigration reform and spoke at length about the need to secure the border. However, not long ago, McCain and Kyl stood on the other side of the argument. In 2006, McCain worked with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) on a comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate, but never made it to committee. In 2007, Kyl followed-up the legislation by sponsoring a more conservative immigration reform bill that failed to make it through cloture. At the time, Kyl and McCain faced many of the same arguments against immigration reform that they are now bringing up themselves today. The thoughtful responses they provided to criticisms just a few years ago not only evidence the hypocrisy that the two have displayed on the issue, they also serve as a rebuttal to the rhetoric and excuses that the two Senators have been using in 2010.

Watch a video of McCain and Kyl’s contradicting statements:

Here is some more documentation of where they stand now versus where they stood then:

NOW: “The border is not secure. It can be made secure without comprehensive immigration reform.”

THEN: McCain once insisted that a border crackdown would do nothing to solve the nation’s immigration problem. In the past, Kyl has pointed out that the immigration system itself has to be fixed in order to enforce the law: “The answer is of course if you don’t have a good law to enforce, you can’t work that strategy. The law has got to be changed.” The country’s visa system is outdated by more than 20 years and no matter how much money is poured into “border security,” it doesn’t change the fact that the lack of green cards and work permits will continue to propel illegal immigration. Beefing up the border also won’t address the fact that almost half of undocumented immigrants legally enter the U.S. with tourist visas that they overstay.

NOW: “Until it [the border] is secure, I don’t think the political conditions are there [to tackle immigration reform].”

THEN: Kyl and McCain once shunned the idea of using border security as a pre-requisite for immigration reform. McCain called an “enforcement-first” strategy an “ineffective and ill-advised approach.” “Congress cannot take a piecemeal approach to a national security crisis. I believe the only way to truly secure our border and protect our Nation is through the enactment of comprehensive immigration reform. As long as there is a need for workers in the United States and people are willing to cross the desert to make a better life for their families, our border will never be secure,” said McCain. In response to critics of the immigration bill Kyl sponsored who complained that the border was not secure, Kyl replied, “If you are unhappy with the status quo, if you don’t like the way that things are today, then why would you oppose a change that at least offers the prospect that the new law will be enforced when we know that the old law is not being adequately enforced?” Both senators slammed lawmakers for taking the easy way out by “sitting on the sidelines” and saying “no” to everything that came their way.

NOW: “We have a ten point plan…surveillance people, and the fencing completed or replaced where it needs to be.”

THEN: For a long time, McCain was a staunch critic of building a border fence. In a 2007 Vanity Fair article, McCain is quoted as saying, “I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.” During the GOP presidential primary debate, McCain proclaimed, “America is still the land of opportunity, and it is a beacon of hope and liberty and, as Ronald Reagan said, a shining city on the hill…And we’re not going to erect barriers and fences.” McCain has also cited the futility of building a fence:”No wall, no barrier, no sensor, no barbed wire will ever stop people from trying to do what is a basic yearning of human beings all over the world, and that is to have better lives for themselves and their families.”

NOW: “Murderous, barbaric behavior…this violence…has really increased, raised the stakes rather dramatically in our requirement to get the border secure.”

THEN: Rather than engaging in fear-mongering, McCain once referred to undocumented immigrants as “God’s children.” McCain used to remind people that “the overwhelming majority of people who come to this country are honest, god-fearing, hard-working people.” In 2008, McCain even conceded that the “the tenor of the [immigration] debate has harmed our image among Hispanics” — a point that was affirmed by the 2008 election results.

At a recent town hall meeting in Tempe, Arizona, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) announced that President Obama is “holding border security hostage” to immigration reform. Kyl claims that Obama suggested in private that Democrats won’t secure the border because, if they do, Republicans will have no reason to support immigration reform:

I met with the President in the Oval Office, just the two of us. I kicked the rest of the people out. [...] Here’s what the President said: “The problem is, …if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.” In other words, they’re holding it hostage. They don’t want to secure the border unless and until it’s combined with comprehensive immigration reform. I explained, you and I, Mr. President, have an obligation to secure the border.

And it also has potentially positive benefits. You don’t have to have comprehensive reform to secure the border.

Watch it:

Perhaps Obama failed to mention it to Kyl, or maybe Kyl conveniently omitted any remarks that explained to him that there’s a much better reason to hold off on throwing billions of dollars at the border other than the crude political calculations that Kyl accuses Democrats of: the border is reportedly safer than it’s ever been. The mistaken premise behind the Republicans’ call for border security before immigration reform is based on the premise that there has been a rabid increase in violence at the border since Kyl’s immigration reform bill failed in 2007. In other words, it gives Republicans reason to oppose legislation that they went as far as sponsoring just a couple years ago. It would be a good excuse if it were true. However, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, violent crime at the border has been steadily declining.

While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made great strides over the past year, one type of crime is up at the border: property crime. That’s because no matter how much money is poured into “border security,” it doesn’t change the fact that the lack of green cards and work permits means that immigrants enter the U.S. via the backyards of border residents. The country’s visa system is outdated by more than 20 years and, regardless of economic conditions in the U.S., immigrants who are desperate to work here are offered almost no legal avenues to make that possible. Kyl’s own ten point border security plan would do almost nothing to solve that or address the 12 million undocumented immigrants who are already in the U.S. By creating a flexible visa lottery that responds to U.S economic needs and putting undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization, immigration reform would do that and more.

The problem with the approach taken by Kyl and Republicans is that it conflates illegal immigration with dangerous criminality. There’s even a psychological term that was recently used to describe the chronic misperception experienced by Republicans: self-serving perception bias. Overall, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and immigration reform could go a long way in freeing up more resources that DHS can direct away from chasing undocumented workers through the desert and towards pursuing threats to our national security. In the end, Republicans are holding immigration reform hostage to border security and blocking a comprehensive solution to our nation’s immigration problem to score cheap political points.

Yesterday, local Arizona news stations began reporting that a group of undocumented immigrants were shot at in an area of Parker Canyon located near Rio Rico Arizona on Friday. According to reports, a group of undocumented border crossers were shot at by two men wearing camouflage using high-powered rifles. One of the five immigrants was hit by a bullet in the forearm and treated at an area hospital for his wounds. The migrants also told authorities that they came across two dead bodies. Nogales International reports:

Sheriff Antonio Estrada said that according to his department’s incident report, five undocumented migrants had crossed into the United States and were walking through a canyon around 5 a.m. on Friday when two unidentified males wearing camouflage clothing shot at them with a high-powered rifle.

“The victims claimed no demands were made. They were just walking and fired upon,” said Estrada, who added that the group had not been robbed. Estrada said that when the group ran, one of the men, Manuel Esquer Gomez, 45, from Nogales, Sonora sustained a gunshot wound to the left forearm.

As the group continued, the men stumbled upon skeletal remains of what they thought were two people.

While little is known about the attackers, Sheriff Antonio Estrada has stated that “[i]t’s perturbing to hear of people with high-powered rifles and camouflage. It raises some real red flags.” He also told KVOA that the shooters might have been U.S. citizens. “I hate to think that is what we’re looking at but we’re not going to dismiss any possibilities,” Estrada stated. “They may be individuals who may be hunting illegal border crossers. That’s really a big concern for us.”

Last summer, Shawna Forde, a member of the Minutemen American Defense, was charged with dressing up as a law enforcement officer and breaking into a house near the border in Arivica, Arizona and shooting a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter. While it’s too early to say who is responsible for Friday’s shooting, it is known that James Gilchrist of the Minutemen Project has boasted about having 240 volunteers ready for a 30-day aerial and ground surveillance campaign on the Arizona-Mexico border. At the very least, last week’s incident further justifies the warnings of law enforcement officials who have pointed out that their presence “could be a very [volatile] situation, one that reasonable people ought to avoid.”