Light Show at the Border? : Plan to string lights over border is no substitute for effective policy

A few years ago, hundreds of activists, rallied by a San Diego radio talk-show host, regularly drove to the city’s border with Mexico and angrily turned their vehicles’ lights southward to pierce the night in a symbolic protest against illegal immigration.

Fortunately, those confrontational outings have ended. But if the protesters’ lights have dimmed, the memory of their bitter hostility toward migrants hasn’t. So it’s difficult to understand why the federal government would want to steal a page from the protesters’ playbook.

Last week, the Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to erect 150 poles--up to five stories high--so banks of lights can be strung across 13 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border in the San Diego sector.

The lighting would cover residential neighborhoods, farms and brushland. The net effect: a brightness similar to that in a well-lit parking lot.

The agency, like the protesters, said the intent was to deter drug smugglers and illegal migrants. But at what cost to international relations? And would there really be any significant gain for law enforcement?

The same troubled area--stretching roughly from the Pacific Ocean to the western foot of the San Ysidro Mountains--has already been fortified by an imposing new 10-foot-high steel fence. The result was that many smugglers and migrants simply moved a few miles eastward to less secure areas. Once sleepy communities in eastern San Diego County are now besieged by drug runners and desperate migrants.

Are lights going to have any stronger effect than steel?

The only sure consequence of the Corps of Engineers proposal would be to resurrect the ghosts of protests past and increase animosity between two countries struggling to bury decades of mistrust and adopt historic new accords--ranging from the North American Free Trade Agreement to a possible bi-national airport shared with San Diego.

In other words, law enforcement gains could be minimal and the loss of goodwill substantial. That is not a formula for effective border policy.