» Wilson: Vigilance Needed On Border Threats

WASHINGTON — Former Rep. Heather Wilson, now a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in New Mexico, said the immigration and border security debate in America has taken on a new dimension in the four years since she left Congress.

Violent Mexican narco-traffickers are creating additional challenges for law enforcement on both sides of the border, she said.

The former U.S. House member said that if elected to the Senate, she would encourage federal government vigilance to ensure drug violence doesn’t spill across the border into the U.S.

“In the last five years, there have been at least 50 investigations of corruption of border agents,” Wilson said. “These are very well-funded organizations of narco-traffickers, and corruption of local officials or border control agents needs to be a concern. We need to make sure we’re paying attention to that.”

Wilson said a combination of “people, technology and policies” can be employed to ensure that illegal immigrants —and especially violent narco-traffickers — are more likely to be detected and stopped.

“The good news is that the number of people crossing the border has gone down substantially since we increased (border enforcement) resources starting in 2005,” Wilson said. “The bad news is those people tend to be highly organized and well-armed and very dangerous.”

Heather Wilson

Wilson does not support construction of a border-long wall or fence from California to Texas. Fences, vehicle barriers and other obstructions have been erected along about 600 miles of the Mexican border over the past five years, but a contiguous border-long fence does not exist.

“There are some places where barriers make sense,” Wilson said. “There are other places on the border, including in New Mexico, where the geography is so formidable that the geography would build a better barrier than a fence would.”

Wilson said she does not favor allowing the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. to remain here, even if they pass background checks, pay fines and meet other requirements. This approach is commonly referred to as a “path to citizenship” by its advocates and “amnesty” by detractors.

In a 2007 Journal interview, Wilson said she opposed granting citizenship to undocumented workers already in the U.S. because it was not fair to those who had been seeking citizenship legally.

“I think we need some changes to our immigration laws in a variety of ways,” Wilson said in the recent interview. “Our laws now heavily favor family relationships, and I think we should have a policy that benefits America by favoring highly skilled, well-educated hardworking people who want to build the next American century.”

Wilson said a 2010 Arizona law that allows law enforcement officers to demand proof of citizenship from people they simply suspect of being in that state illegally is not the right approach.

“I don’t think that works in New Mexico,” Wilson said. “I think New Mexico’s approach is a lot more pragmatic. In Albuquerque, anyone who is arrested and processed through the jail has their nationality checked.”

Wilson would not take a definitive position on the Dream Act, which would allow children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents to become citizens when they graduate from high school or enroll in the military. But she sounded sympathetic to their plight and suggested that some accommodation should be made for them.

“We’ve got to find some kind of solution for children who are brought here by young parents through no choice of their own,” Wilson said. “We need to bring them into America. What the actual mechanism is and how we write the law I’m not sure. These are not choices these children make.”
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal