GEYER: Napolitano will help enforce the border

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By Georgie Anne Geyer

COMMENTARY:

With the president-elect's most recent and most effective appointment - that of no-nonsense Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to be head of the Department of Homeland Security - we can finally hope that something intelligent will be done on immigration.

Oh, I'm not going to say it's America's "burgeoning immigration problem." I'm not going to write that we are at "point zero" for taking back our out-of- control borders to the south. I'm not going to insist it's way past time for us to act like a grown-up family who obeys the laws and rules in its own household and decides which folks to invite to dinner.

I'm not going to write all that because I've written it hundreds and hundreds of times since I first started this column in 1975. And still, the borders remain open for anyone in the world - work in hand or gun in hand - to walk, run, crawl, push or force his way across! (Now I've gone and written it again.)

But I want to believe in Janet Napolitano. Here you have a governor and, before that, Arizona's attorney general, who has broken all kinds of barriers - not only for women, but also despite the politically correct parlance that has so perverted our nation.

Look back at her record. The 50-year-old Miss Napolitano has tested unique immigration policies and programs in her 15 years of public service to a state being overwhelmed by illegal aliens.

She was the first governor to call for National Guard troops on the border, and she has persistently and repeatedly called for Congress to deal with comprehensive immigration reform, not just enforcement.

In 2006, she went so far as to demand that the federal government pay for deploying those National Guard troops along the border to help the overwhelmed U.S. Border Patrol. (The troops originally sent have since been withdrawn, but she has recently called for their redeployment.)

In short, she seems to be the professional and psychological profile of a person we need in charge of that incredible mixture (dare we say mess?) that President Bush made by bringing together under one roof everything from the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration and others.

There's only one problem: What have been considered until now as "the" issues circling around illegal immigration - the sheer number of illegal or "undocumented" aliens, the costs of social services that they incur, the breakdown of our national sense of community - have already been bypassed by new concerns, whose dangers have yet to be analyzed.

First, in sharp contrast to earlier years, illegal immigration is at least temporarily declining, apparently in tune with the great American financial collapse that our Wall Street geniuses have put upon us. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), using monthly data collected by the Census Bureau through May 2008, shows the illegal immigration population, mostly Hispanic, has declined by more than 1 million in the last year. "The implied decline in the illegal population is 1.3 million since the summer of 2007, from 12.5 million to 11.2 million today," the center reports. But everyone adds that this may be temporary.

Second, Mexico has changed dramatically - and, in many ways, horrendously. It may well be that the United States faces, in that once culturally rich country, a drug state ruled by mafias who have been killing and wiping out the police and federal authorities who challenge them, particularly along the U.S. border.

There were recently 43 murders in four days in Tijuana; in Juarez, there were 40 "hits," which includes murders, attacks and beheadings; and murders and kidnappings are up across the country. Monica Campbell of Newsweek recently reported on CNN: "The feeling along the border, and I would say throughout Mexico, is that the government has lost control of major parts of the country. ... [T]he law enforcement authorities are so corrupt. They're in collusion with the criminals themselves."

She added: "We're seeing a range of violent acts that have never been seen before in Mexico."

And George W. Grayson, professor of government at the College of William and Mary and arguably America's pre-eminent specialist on Mexico, writes in a recent paper for CIS that we face, in the disintegration of the Mexican state, the ominous possibility that the drug mafias along the border are moving "from honing in on specific victims to indiscriminate terrorism as occurred in Colombia two decades ago." In one nightclub attack in 2006, for instance, the attackers lobbed five human heads onto the dance floor.

Third, until now, it has seemed clear to me that the American people wanted two things from their immigration authorities: They wanted a border closed to illegality and open to legal immigrants and visitors. And for the 12 million to 20 million illegals already in the country, they were willing to have a tough-minded "amnesty" of some sort - as long as it is the last amnesty! (Key here is the fact we already had a huge "last amnesty" in 1986 for 3 million illegals and, because nobody really meant it, we now have 4 or 5 or 6 times that many illegals in the country.)

But it will now be harder for Miss Napolitano to fix this with old solutions. Now we have not just poor village Mexicans climbing the fences in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo, but we have a formidable lineup of vicious and ruthless drug mafiosos who threaten their state but ours.

It's lucky that Janet Napolitano has been a tough attorney and governor. She's going to need all that toughness in the days to come.

Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.