Congress approves 700 mile border fence, hiring of 1,500 more border agents

September 29, 2006

Just a week before beginning its campaign break, members of Congress stopped tearing each other apart long enough to agree on one improvement to immigration enforcement – construction of a fence along one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border. They even approved a $1.2 billion down payment to pay for it.

The Senate at its last September meeting passed with a 80-19 vote and sent to President Bush a bill authorizing 700 new miles of fencing on the Mexican border. No one knows how much it will cost, but a separate bill also on the way to the White House makes a $1.2 billion down payment on it. As an example, a 14-mile segment of fence under construction in San Diego is costing $126.5 million.

In addition to money for starting work on the fence, the homeland security bill passed by the House and later by the Senate includes $380 million to hire 1,500 more Border Patrol agents and money to build detention facilities to hold 6,700 more illegal immigrants until they can be deported.

"The perception that has been painted mistakenly is that the United States government, our Congress is not delivering to the American people on a huge problem that's out there," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "We're active."

After a debate that stretched over three months, the Senate in May passed a sweeping immigration bill that combined tougher border enforcement measures with new guest worker programs and a plan to give millions of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. a shot at citizenship.

Despite Bush's ringing endorsement of the measure, the House would have no part of it, sticking to the bill it passed five months earlier that would treat illegal immigrants and people who offer them aid as felons.

Rather than negotiate a compromise with the Senate, Republican leaders plucked out many provisions of the House bill for new votes in both the House and Senate over the past two weeks.

Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., made a 11th-hour appeal to colleagues to include in the fence bill a measure to help the agriculture industry, which relies heavily on undocumented workers.

Those workers have become harder to find because of increased border enforcement and availability of jobs for the workers in construction and other industries, they said. Consumers ultimately will pay the price for that at the grocery store, they added.

"Pickers are few and the growers blame Congress," Craig said, reading a news headline. "The growers ought to blame Congress. They ought to blame a government that has been dysfunctional in an area of immigration that has been problem for decades."