Border crossings, drivers' licenses, and voter registration

Adaptability has been the key to survival since the dawn of man.   And Jimmy Patterson tells a heartwarming story about one man's ability to adapt.  The resourceful subject of his story made a successful career change from oarsman to entertainer as his neighborhood border crossing was closed.  He's a survivor.

And others will survive stricter border enforcement and that dreaded fence.  The Houston Chronicle has an article online about how a border fence has affected the towns of Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Mexico, titled Fence's presence felt.  Excerpt:

Families tend to have members on both sides of the border. U.S. farms like the Johnsons' relied on Mexican workers hopping the border to work by day and heading back south at night.

Migrants heading farther north would often stop by the border farms to ask for water or food for the journey. They were never turned away, Johnson said, and they would often do chores to repay the kindness.

That changed in the 1990s when tighter border enforcement — first to the east in El Paso, then to the west in Arizona — funneled the growing waves of migrants from the Mexican interior and Central America though Columbus and other parts of New Mexico.

Vehicles carrying illegal narcotics or illegal migrants would plow through the border fence across the Johnsons' land. Scores of migrants led by smugglers, called coyotes, would trek through the fields, scaring livestock and leaving trash. The smugglers would sometimes be armed.

"I understand the plight of the people," said Johnson, who speaks Spanish and whose family has been farming here since 1918. "I live with these people. If I were in their shoes, I'd be doing the same thing.

"What I don't like is the business that transporting them across the border has become," he said. "Things became dangerous."

Complaints from the Johnsons and others on the border prompted New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to demand federal action.

A waist-high reinforced barrier designed to stop vehicles was built on the border — a stretch of it on the Johnson farm stood a few feet inside Mexico. National Guard troops camped near Columbus.

Richardson called on Mexico to bulldoze houses in Las Chepas, a largely abandoned hamlet just across the border from the Johnson's farm that has served as a staging area for smugglers.

"From a law enforcement perspective, it's curtailed a lot of our problems," said Sharon Mitamura, a deputy sheriff who patrols the border on either side of Columbus.

"You have legitimate people who are coming here," she said of the border jumpers.

"But you also have the coyotes who are bringing people across," she said, "and you have the bandidos who are stealing."

The same human crush that alarmed the Johnsons created an industry in Palomas.

Restaurants and stores sprouted. Small hotels and boarding houses went up. Buses and other vehicles transported people.

So an industry comes and goes.  And people adapt.

In the meantime, farther North, Hillary Clinton is still unable to say whether she supports or opposes giving drivers' licenses to illegal aliens.  The issue is too complicated for sound bites according to an unimpeachable source, who by the way, signed the "Motor Voter" into law in 1993, which according to John Fund, will make it very easy for illegal aliens with drivers' licenses to register to vote in U.S. elections.

Perhaps a compromise of sorts could be reached if said drivers' licenses stated in bilingual all caps that the bearer is a non-citizen and is ineligible to vote and by making it a serious crime for election registrars to register illegal aliens for voting in the U.S.

So can people adapt?  Sure they can.  But the solution has always been with the Mexican government whose políticos need to figure out how to build Mexico's own economy and export something besides people and drugs.