(New York Times) SAN DIEGO — They move north in rickety fishing boats, often overloaded and barely seaworthy, slipping through the darkness and hidden from the watchful radar of American patrols.
Along beaches north of here, the migrants from Mexico and beyond scramble ashore, in groups of a dozen or two, and dash past stunned beachgoers, sometimes even leaving behind their boats, known as pangas. Drug smugglers, too, take this sea route, including one last month found paddling a surfboard north with a duffel bag full of marijuana on it.
As the land border with Mexico tightens with new fencing and technology, the authorities are seeing a sharp spike in the number of people and drugs being moved into the United States by sea off the San Diego coast.
The authorities arrested 136 illegal immigrants sneaking in by sea in the fiscal year that ended Oct. 30, double the 66 marine arrests in 2007. Since October, more than 100 illegal immigrants have been arrested, bringing the marine arrests of illegal immigrants in the past couple of years to unprecedented levels, said Michael Carney, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in San Diego who oversees a task force on marine smuggling.
The seizure of drugs, principally marijuana, has similarly skyrocketed. In the fiscal year that ended in October, the authorities seized 6,300 pounds of marijuana in the coastal waters north of the border, a sevenfold increase from the 906 pounds confiscated in 2007. This fiscal year, 6,100 pounds have been found.
Supply, meet demand. Americans want marijuana, Mexicans have it. Build a border fence and they’ll use boats and surfboards. Send out more Coast Guard cutters and they’ll use submarines. Send out sub patrols and they’ll build rockets and air-drop parachuted loads of weed. Shoot down the rockets and the Mexican equivalent of Scotty from Star Trek will build a transporter and beam it into America. You cannot stop supply if there is demand, especially if the supply is a weed that will grow damn near anywhere.
But you know what you’ll never see transported in a dufflebag by a Mexican on a surfboard? A case of Bud Light and a carton of Marlboros.
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