 |
|
|
 Editorials | At Issue | June 2005 
How Many More Migrants Must Die?
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
| People prepare to cross illegally into the United States through a tunnel along the Rio Grande in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
(Photo: Dario Lopez-Mills/AP) |
U.S. citizens are going to be massing along the Arizona/Sonora border this week, and the issue once again is Mexican migrants. But unlike the media-baiting Minutemen of last April, these volunteers probably won't be praised by the governor of neighboring California. Nor will they get the wink-wink, nudge-nudge support of the Bush administration.
The activists aren't out to hunt migrants in the desert. They're trying to put an end to migrant deaths there. That would be a tall order under the best of circumstances, but impossibly tall in a political atmosphere mostly unconcerned about the unconscionable carnage taking place on a daily basis.
It's not easy to find accurate numbers of migrants who die hiking across the Arizona desert after crossing the border. A decent guess based on figures from the Border Patrol, medical examiners and rights groups is 200 a year over the last few years. Record temperatures so far this year point to higher numbers. The Arizona press is reporting an average of three deaths a day during the current heat wave that started a week ago.
There won't be huge numbers of volunteers taking the Migrant Trail from the crossing point at Sasabe to Tucson this week. Would you walk 75 miles in 100degree heat if you didn't have to? But the mere existence of the solidarity event and of Arizona pro-migrant organizations like No More Deaths, Samaritans, Healing Our Borders, and Derechos Humanos reminds us that U.S. attitudes about migrant jobseekers aren't as monolithically hostile as the Mexican press sometimes paints them.
For example, Elaine Higginbotham-Schramm is an American. She lives near Tucson, along the Brawley Wash, a main corridor of migrating job-seekers from Mexico. Hundreds cross through or near her property every day. "I have four water stations set up for the crossers and I refill them every day," she says. "I will not deny a human being food or water for any political reason."
Chris Simcox is also a U.S. citizen. He lives in Tombstone, a few hours away from Elaine. Through his vigilante group, he offers the migrants something else. "If we see any crossings we let the Border Patrol know right away," he told Peter Laufer, author of "Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the MexicanAmerican Border." "We just do nothing but report the crossings and the illegal activity, at the encouragement of President Bush. That's what he's encouraged Americans to do for a year now, to report suspicious illegal activity. And you can't find anything more suspicious and illegal than coming across our border."
No two U.S. citizens could be less alike. But both are frustrated they can't do more. Chris wants the border militarized. Elaine would like to be able to give a lift to an exhausted job-seeker. But she can't. In the Arizona desert humanitarian aide for illegal migrants can be a crime. "If I see somebody walking along the road, I cannot pick them up unless I am prepared to tell the Border Patrol that my passenger must go to the hospital," she says. "It isn't enough that they're starving and thirsty. They have to be dying and I have to be able to show that, or I'm guilty of aiding and abetting."
We'll be hearing more in coming weeks about the Elaines of this world. That's the good news. The bad news is we'll also be hearing more about tragic deaths in the desert. There's no argument that the recent wave of wall-building and beefed-up enforcement at the traditional crossing sites have pushed the migrant flow to the more dangerous open desert lands. As a result, more people don't make it.
It is impossible to believe that this wasn't an anticipated consequence of the harsher policies. The migration, after all, is a classic illustration of a basic law of economics labor goes where the jobs are. A line in the sand, even with walls and agents, isn't going to stop that.
As Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, recently put it, "The U.S. job market provides an irresistible magnet." By that Cornelius means that it is the attraction of employment opportunities on the U.S. side rather than conditions on the Mexican side that fuels the migration.
Add to that the equally irresistible magnet of family reunification (an underrated but perfectly understandable motive for migration) and it's clear that nothing's going to stop the wave of border-crossers until the very idea of what that border means is overhauled. The only choice in the meantime is whether the migrants' journey will be lifethreatening or not. Every day the desert yields up the toll of the choice that's been made.
How has it come to this? Chris Symcox and those he speaks for blame the Bush administration for not sealing the border. Others accuse Mexico of encouraging migration, which nets some US20 billion a year in money the migrants send home. Cornelius pooh-poohs that notion as Mexico-bashing.
"Even if the Mexican government were 100 percent committed to restricting the movement of its nationals and putting Mexican peoplesmugglers out of business, it would not make a discernible difference in illegal crossings," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
The accepted explanation is that the Bush administration put border and immigration reform on the back-burner after 9/11 and kept it there. But there's always been something unsatisfying about that interpretation.
Wouldn't border issues with Mexico assume more, not less, importance after a terrorist attack? Even if not, why would 9/11 put migration reform on a fouryear hold? Can't an administration concentrate on more than one thing at a time?
An alternative theory is that the present deplorable migration mess is not a default situation resulting from a lack of U.S. policy. Rather, it is the policy. Here's why that's plausible: The Bush administration owes its success to a deft balancing of two constituencies business conservatives and cultural conservatives. The two don't always agree, least of all about immigration. To Wall Street, undocumented workers are a godsend a limitless source of cheap labor with no rights to demand. To the cultural conservatives, they're the barbarians at the gates.
The current policy of semitoleration of illegal entries keeps Wall Street happy while giving cultural conservatives something to get roiled up about (which is when they're the most useful). Putting up some fences and condoning vigilantes throws them enough bones to keep their loyalty without actually impeding the flow of cheap labor.
If that two-faced policy means channeling migrants through the killing fields, so be it. As we've seen before, hellish death in the desert isn't the kind of thing that stops this U.S. administration from going ahead with its plans.
kellyg@prodigy.netmx |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us