The San Francisco Chronicle May 16, 2006
BUSH SEEKS 'MIDDLE GROUND' IN DEBATE ON IMMIGRATION
NATIONAL GUARD: Some say overextended military units don't belong on border
By John Koopman
A proposal by President Bush to send several thousand National Guard troops to help the Border Patrol is raising questions about whether it would affect the Guard's missions at home and abroad -- and whether it's even an appropriate use of the troops.
The president announced Monday night that he intends to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, where they will be used primarily for logistics, support, training and, perhaps, surveillance duties. They will not be asked to perform law enforcement tasks.
"The mission is consistent with skills the members of the National Guard have, but I'm not sure it's something we should be doing," said Paul Monroe, former commanding general of the California National Guard. "These men and women have been doing a lot recently. Some are on their third deployments."
Monroe, who was removed as guard commander by the newly elected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004, said troops should be used on the border only as a last resort.
"It seems to me the National Guard has become a handy resource, and they've been used more than it was ever envisioned that they would be used," he said.
The California National Guard has borne a heavy burden with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, although the number of troops deployed overseas has dropped significantly. Maj. Jon Siepman, spokesman for the California National Guard, said the state has 2,200 troops on overseas missions, down from 6,500 a year ago.
Of the four border states affected, California and Texas have about 20,000 Guard members each; Arizona has about 7,400, and New Mexico has about 4,000.
The Guard has patrolled the Mexican border in the past, and a handful of guard soldiers are there now to help with logistics. Broadening the involvement to several thousand troops would greatly increase the military presence on the border even if the troops are not patrolling the border and detaining suspects.
Leaders oppose move
Schwarzenegger opposes the idea.
"Going the direction of the National Guard, I think, is maybe not the right way to go, because I think that the Bush administration and the federal government should put up the money to create the kind of protection that the federal government is responsible to provide, not to use our National Guard," he said.
Noting that many California guard soldiers are just coming back from Iraq, or other overseas deployments, some of them having spent a year or more abroad, he said, "I think that we should let them go to work, back to work again," Schwarzenegger said.
Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez said he also opposes Bush's plan, though he agrees there needs to be tighter border security.
Sending the National Guard means the United States is tantamount to militarizing the border, and "that sends a wrong message to our neighbors to the south," Núñez said. "I don't believe we're in a state of siege with our neighbors to the south."
The president said the troops would be used at the border for a year while the Border Patrol is beefed up and further develops its own high-tech surveillance project, which will rely on infrared technology, motion sensors in the desert and aerial surveillance.
Bush's proposal received mixed reaction from state lawmakers.
State Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Oceanside (San Diego County), chairman of the Senate's Veteran Affairs Committee, supported the president's proposal.
"The National Guard is supposed to guard the nation,'' he said. "Where better to do that than on our border?''
But Assemblyman Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, who chairs the Assembly's veterans committee, called the move "an unnecessary militarization of the border.''
Nation, who is running for Congress, said a better solution would be to increase funding to add Border Patrol officers.
Guard may have little effect
Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the UC San Diego, described the deployment as folly, both because of its short time span and the small number of troops involved. The patterns that the immigrants follow can change instantly in response to tougher controls in different sectors, and that is likely to happen this time, he said.
"Anything short of 100 percent militarization -- the word the Bush administration doesn't want to use -- will be ineffective and a waste of taxpayers' money," Cornelius said. "It would also push more illegal entrants through the legal ports of entry, with migrants using false or borrowed documents."
As it is, he said, tougher border controls in areas like Arizona have forced the immigrants to enter in the San Diego sector of the border, where apprehensions have soared in recent months. The new troops would be spread far too thin to prevent that from happening again, he said.
Claudia Smith, an official with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, said the worst potential problem was a rise in immigrant deaths, already at record levels.
"Any time that you redouble border control efforts, it inevitably leads to more migrant deaths, because the traffic doesn't stop," Smith said. "It just shifts to places more remote than the past ones, which are more dangerous."
She, like other border experts, said that anyone in the White House knowledgeable about these issues was well aware that the National Guard troops represented a token force that would have no lasting impact.
John Pike, a defense and intelligence expert with the Web site globalsecurity.org, said the small number of troops is unlikely to have a major impact on Border Patrol operations, but he said the announcement should help Bush politically.
"He'll be seen as taking strong, decisive action on an issue of considerable importance to the American people," Pike said. "But I don't think it's going to do much beyond that."
Chronicle staff writers Mark Martin, James Sterngold, Tom Chorneau and Matthew Yi contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2006, San Francisco Chronicle
