Authors: Caroline Moorehead
The border between Mexico and the United States is just over two thousand miles long. Ten million people today live in the twelve major border cities, which among them have forty-four ports of entry. Around 300,000 Mexicans cross
legally
every day to work in the United States. Cross-border trade has doubled in ten years. Tijuana in Mexico and San Diego in California, a single urban sprawl straddling the frontier at San Ysidro, currently have a population of around 4 million, and it is rising sharply all the time. Some 60 million people and 20 million cars cross from Tijuana into San Diego every year, making it one of the busiest frontiers in the modern world.
Migration across this long border, both legal and illegal, goes back a very long way. All through the nineteenth century, people moved back and forth more or less freely; the first American attempt to restrict entry was aimed not at the Mexicans but at the Chinese, who were landing by boat at the ports of Ensenada, Guaymas, and Mazatlán and paying traffickers $40 to take them into California. The first officers appointed to catch illegal crossers were known as Chinese inspectors. In the 1920s, when the United States imposed restrictions on European migration, the Mexico-U.S. border became a back door for Europeans and when, in 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was created, the primary targets for its 450 officers were European and Asian migrants. Mexicans, meanwhile, continued to cross as they had always done, informally, in response to the demand for cheap labor in the expanding agricultural businesses. Deported when the Depression hit the United States, they were welcomed back to make up for the labor shortages of World War II.
Between 1942 and 1964, the “bracero” guest worker arrangement provided continuing cheap labor for the new agrobusinesses. By now, the presence of Mexicans in the United States was enshrined in a vast and complicated web of needs and agreements and
when, in the 1960s, the bracero program ended, the system simply moved underground; the Mexicans’ freedom of exit was guaranteed by the Mexican constitution, and they were undeterred by the largely symbolic presence of a small number of border agents. The migrants joined large Mexican communities all over America, for the most part leaving their families at home in Mexico. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which legalized some 2 million Mexicans already working in the United States (while at the same time tightening border controls), stimulated a desire among more Mexicans to enter the United States in the hopes of receiving a similar amnesty. By 1996, more than 7 million Mexicans were living in the United States, most of them illegally. On the wall of the briefing room in San Diego’s Border Patrol headquarters hangs an extraordinary photograph. Taken around the end of the 1980s, it shows a hillside on the Mexican side of the border, somewhere on the edge of Tijuana. The entire hill is covered with men, perhaps five or six hundred of them, all facing forward, toward the camera, as if watching a football match. Caught on film by a photographer on the California side, they are migrants, waiting for night to fall and the great race toward the border to begin. Facing them, not seen, are a few Border Patrol vehicles, poised to arrest as many as they can.
On a busy night, back then, Agent Angel Santa Ana of the Border Patrol told me when he showed me this photograph and explained its significance, there would be as many as three thousand arrests. It was unnerving to be an agent back in the 1980s, he said, waiting lonely and apprehensive for dark to fall, bracing yourself to hold back the surge of people as they came racing down the hillside toward you; but you soon learned that if you took a very tough line with one member of a group, the rest would fall into line and go quietly. “Even now when it is all tougher,” he said, “Mexicans are not hard to catch: they are easily cowed by authority and they are fearful of men with guns.” They are, as he puts it, “docile.” In those days, he went on, the men crossing sometimes dug holes under parts of the fence for women and children to crawl through, while they, being men, insisted on climbing over. Agent Santa Ana is a good-looking
and agreeable man in his thirties, attuned to the nuances of border affairs, and he wears cowboy boots under his green uniform. A second-generation Mexican Californian, he grew up in Texas and plans to return there.
In 1993, the newly inaugurated President Clinton, facing a recession in California and the rise of anti-immigration groups claiming that by mid-2050 only half the population of the United States would be white, launched a program to “regain control” of the country’s southwestern border.
*
The border—particularly the most popular crossing area, around San Diego, with its few stretches of weak fencing—had long been perceived as loose but adequate: it was now seen as dangerously porous. While California became a center of anti-immigration rhetoric, Washington hardened its approach to illegal immigrants. Generous new funds were poured into the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the INS, and with the money came more guns, more agents, more equipment. Some helicopters arrived. An electronic identification system known as IDENT, which stores the fingerprints and photographs of those caught trying to cross, was introduced at border points, and the military, bringing with it sheets of corrugated-steel landing mats, sent army reservists to build a ten-foot-high fence along fourteen miles of the most vulnerable crossing points. The idea behind the Clinton administration’s new commitment to curb illegal migrants was simple: “prevention through deterrence.” The Border Patrol concentrated large resources of staff and technology on the relatively short stretches of border traditionally most used by illegal crossers, rather than taking the other possible course, which would have been to appoint large numbers of inspectors to mop up migrants once they were in.
It was under Clinton’s presidency that the first coordinated assault to frustrate Mexican immigrants was launched along the Rio Grande in Texas, where a police chief called Silvestre Reyes deployed
closely spaced border control vehicles along a number of popular crossing points. Operation Blockade—renamed Operation Hold the Line after the Mexican government protested—was declared successful and was soon followed by Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego. Then came an extension of Operation Hold the Line, ten more miles of enforcement west into New Mexico. In 1999 came Operation Safeguard, to improve control along 300 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border. Everywhere, underground sensors, infrared scopes, huge portable floodlights, and many new agents arrived to carry out the program. It has become, say its critics, like a futuristic film, full of gadgets; only the proposal to electrify the fence has actually been defeated, after human rights groups protested. Even devices designed to save lives, like watering stations, are wired with infrared sensors that betray that they have been used.
At first, Clinton’s aggressive border policies looked highly successful. The crackdown was reported widely and with approval. Silvestre Reyes announced that arrests along his stretch of the border had dropped by a dramatic 76 percent, which suggested to him— though not to many others—that those migrants were now staying at home. Reyes left to pursue a successful career in Washington.
It was true that the arrests were dropping wherever the border was now effectively enforced by patrols and equipment. But it rapidly became obvious that the numbers of those crossing had not dropped; they had simply shifted elsewhere. Squeezed away from the regular routes, migrants were resorting to
coyotes
, whose activities became more efficient and more professional, and who began to charge ever higher fees. Heretofore, the
coyotes
had operated informally; now they began to group themselves into highly effective syndicates, with agents all around Mexico, sophisticated processes for forging and selling documents, arranging safe houses and journeys by train, plane, and truck, and with carefully worked out ways of collecting fees for successful crossings. What was once a relatively simple and straightforward illegal practice has now become a complex underground web, connected to, though not the same as, the drug trade, whose members use the same routes.
And, of course, the routes the migrants were now driven to use were more dangerous. They passed through the desert, with its immense surges and drops in temperature. Or they swam: across the treacherous twenty-one-foot-deep All American Canal, in some places as wide as a football field, with undercurrents too powerful for all but the strongest swimmer, or the New River, said to be the most polluted stretch of water in the world, carrying typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis. It is down this river that many of the crossers now float, holding their breaths under submerged bridges and along a twenty-foot culvert. As Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego, sees it, there is something deeply immoral in a policy that deliberately puts people in harm’s way. Like Father Luis in Tijuana, he is angry about the casualties. When he talks at seminars and conferences about the border, he tells his audiences about the 1,700 migrants who died trying to cross between 1994 and 2001, and the many others who have lost their lives unreported in the mountains and the desert. He shows his students slides of the Berlin Wall, and tells them that only 239 people in all lost their lives during the forty-three years of the wall’s existence, stating that this is a tenth of the number who have died on the Mexico-California border. Cornelius makes another point. Increased enforcement has altered the composition of those who cross: fewer women, children, and older people now attempt the journey.
While half of Mexico lives in poverty, and Americans depend on cheap Mexican labor, economic agreements between the two countries continue to favor the migration of goods and not people—the crucial 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, at U.S. insistence, omitted all mention of labor migration. The border remains patchily and symbolically controlled, with great shows of strength in some places and an absence of all legal authority in others, so the migrants will keep on coming, drawn by the promise of dollars that lie just within reach, confused but not deterred by the ambivalence with which Americans view their arrival. Not deterred either, it seems, by the vigilantes spawned by this particular mixture of official
encouragement and restriction: in Arizona and Texas, ranchers turned cowboys, carrying machine guns and two-way radios, now regularly patrol the border. The Web site of Ranch Rescue offers the slogan “Private property first, foremost, and always,” advertises weapons and combat gear, and recruits volunteers for Operations Foxbat, Jaguar, and Thunderbird. It quotes Cicero on the moral Tightness of self-protection. Ranch Rescue is for people who “believe that when government fails or refuses to act, individual Citizens are obligated to act on their own” and for whom “socialism in all its forms” as well as “Environmentalist measures” are just for “liars and fools of the very worst kind.” It was the vigilantes who first used a new weapon being investigated by the Border Patrol, a drone that flies along border areas and beams back photographs of people attempting to cross. The vigilantes are acting in total violation of federal and state laws, but they appear to escape prosecution.
The migrants are not put off by the penalties they face if caught. Despite the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which increased penalties for illegal entry and people-smuggling, in practice very little happens to the migrant who is arrested. So overloaded is the system all along the border that only recidivists whose fingerprints have been recorded are actually prosecuted. All others are simply returned across the border, in a “humane and orderly” fashion, as demanded by the human rights organizations active in the region and as subscribed to by the Border Patrol. Agent Angel is proud of his district and his work. Along the border as a whole, half a million crossers are said to be apprehended each year, but no U.S. border state has the resources to prosecute more than a tiny fraction of them. A migrant today is said to have just one chance in eight of being prosecuted.
It would be wrong to say that the fence dominates the border, or even that it is particularly noticeable. On the contrary, it is almost invisible. In the minds of most San Diegans, says Wayne Cornelius, the fence is an abstraction, a place where from time to time politi-, cians make speeches, seeking votes by taking a stand against the dangers of illegal immigration, and where members of various churches
gather to honor those who die in their attempts to reach America. Ordinary San Diegans, he says, do not know about the fence, and they do not care.
It is, of course, possible that a semiclosed border is precisely what suits most people. The United States needs Mexican labor. Mexicans need U.S. jobs, which enable them to send $7 billion home each year to their families in remittances. An open and free border—as advocated by some Wall Street liberal economists—would result in an unregulated surge of new arrivals, which the United States cannot handle and which would rapidly lead to an even larger anti-immigrant backlash. In any case, the events of September 11 have introduced the specter of terrorists using the migrant route, and there is something comforting about the idea of a fence, a barricade against the nightmare of a world out of control. The United States must therefore be seen to be attempting to prevent illegal immigration, with showy displays of border controls, while at the same time allowing enough people through to feed the market for cheap labor.
Seen like this, the fence and the activities that surround it become like an elaborate childhood game, in which, as darkness falls each night, the two opposing sides line up, the migrants waiting to cross, the border patrols waiting to catch enough of them to appear efficient and in control. The light grows dim, the whistle goes, the migrants begin their race toward the new world. Only, of course, it is a game with a very dark side, one in which only the fittest survive; and among the casualties are many of the women and children for whom the new rules are, quite simply, too tough.