Mexico migrants brave death for American Dream
REUTERS
December 11, 2000
MEXICALI, Mexico - "Take your hands out of your pockets. Put your hands up over your head," barked the U.S. Border Patrol agent on California's frontier with Mexico.
Nine bedraggled Mexican migrants, squinting at the strong flashlight shining in their faces, stumbled out of the reeds bordering a foul-smelling sewage canal. They had floated on the scum-flecked black water in the hope of crossing into the United States, their sights set on The American Dream.
Two of the women were pregnant and the devastation on their faces at being caught was clear.
"It's not worth risking your life like this," one of five U.S. agents at the scene told the motley, shivering group in Spanish once they had all been rounded up. "If you kiss your children when you get home you could give them tuberculosis. You have to think about this."
Mexico's new President Vicente Fox has vowed to fight for the rights of 1.5 million Mexicans who are arrested every year trying to cross the 2,100-mile U.S. border and to push for a gradual opening of the frontier.
For the first time in Mexican history he has appointed a border czar, Ernesto Ruffo, to focus on migrant issues. Fox has also pledged to increase economic growth at home to create more jobs so fewer people feel forced to emigrate.
Between Oct. 1, 1999, and Sept. 30, 2000, 369 migrants died in the crossing, up sharply from 231 the previous year, according to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service data.
Migration is one of the big stumbling blocks in U.S.-Mexican relations that Fox will have to face during his six-year term. Washington feels Mexico should do more to control the migrant flow; Mexico argues there is strong enough demand in the U.S. labor market for Mexican workers and it resents what it calls a patronizing attitude from its northern neighbor.
UP TO 100 MIGRANTS CAUGHT A DAY
Across the border from Mexicali, U.S. border agents in Calexico, California, do not question the ethics of keeping Mexicans out. They are just doing their job.
"We've been catching between 75-100 a day on this shift," agent Tim Henry, who has patrolled the border for 16 years, told Reuters. "On a slow night we'll do 50 to 60," added Henry, in his green uniform and a leather jacket on a recent duty shift.
If arrested, Mexican migrants get 14 chances to return voluntarily once personal details and fingerprints are taken. Thereafter, they go before a judge and are deported. At the 30th apprehension, they face prosecution for reentry and jail.
In Calexico, some 230 agents patrol 25 miles of border, much of it desert. The town, with some 20,000 inhabitants, is separated from Mexicali in Baja California by a 15-foot boundary fence. "Most of the injuries we see are from falling off our fence," Henry said.
One of the easiest points to cross, despite seven patrol cars stationed there around the clock, is a street of bungalows facing the fence near the official entry port. "Here, if they can lose us for an instant, they can disappear forever. There's people in the houses who let them in," Henry said.
"I've got one in the palm trees here," he added, beaming his huge flashlight into nearby shrubs.
Of the migrant deaths overall in 1999/2000, 37 percent were from heat exposure, while 25 percent were from drowning.
After the multimillion-dollar 1994 launch of Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, 120 miles away, with numerous infrared cameras and sensors, the flow of migrants surged in neighboring areas. Calexico border agents were arresting 400-500 a night at that point, Henry said.
MIGRANTS AWAIT RAIN, FOG TO JUMP FENCE
On the Mexican side of the floodlighted Tijuana/San Diego fence, which rights groups compare to the Berlin Wall, clusters of migrants sit watch around small fires through the night, waiting for fog or rain to obscure the U.S. patrol cameras.
Despite the enormous difficulty of dodging detection, migrants continue to flock here, dreaming of being able one day to support their families or have a career.
Joel Montana Ramirez, 15, has tried and failed to cross eight times in the three weeks since he ran away from his home in Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico.
The slim youngster sleeps behind a truck opposite a crack den a stone's throw from the border, in a violent Tijuana neighborhood ironically called Libertad, or Freedom. "My stepfather used to beat me and my two younger brothers with a leather belt," he said when asked why he left home.
Joel, in baseball cap and torn dirty jeans, hopes to go to school and become a mechanic in the United States. All he owns – another pair of shoes and two blankets – is in his backpack.
Most migrants here cannot afford to hire a smuggler, known as a coyote, to take them across. Prices can be as high as $2,500 and frequently coyotes take the money and disappear en route, leaving clients to die or be caught in the desert.
Agents from Grupo Beta, a Mexican government force charged with protecting migrants from assault and telling them their rights, visit groups camped along the fence by day and night.
"How's it been here tonight? All quiet? No one attacked you?" Beta agent Carlos Roque asked a group of men huddled together on a mattress for warmth against the freezing night.
That night there were no attacks by junkies desperate for pesos, but some migrants complained of being beaten up by the city police and having their money stolen.
"We've stopped a lot of the police violence against migrants but we want to reduce it more and we need your help," Roque, who generally wears a bulletproof vest on patrol, told the men.
COMBATING POVERTY KEY TO MIGRATION PROBLEM
More than 40 percent of Mexico's 100 million population live in poverty, of whom 25 percent live in extreme poverty. The minimum wage is around $3.50 a day ($0.35 cents per hour US denomination based on a typical 10 hour Mexican workday).
"If they were paid better salaries here no one would leave their homes, their families, and the U.S. wouldn't have to pay out billions of dollars to keep Mexicans out, which doesn't help anyway because there will always be a flow of migrants," said a Grupo Beta agent who asked not to be named.
Fox argues the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States and Canada should be expanded to include the free flow of labor as well as goods, a view that got a dim response from Washington during Fox's August visit.
"We will have to convince the United States and its government on the border ... I hope it to be soon, it should be open for crossing," Fox told a group of Mexican Americans during his inauguration festivities.
He has pledged to create a million jobs a year and achieve 7 percent annual economic growth by the end of his six-year term, but Victor Clark, head of the Tijuana-based Binational Center for Human Rights, was skeptical about Fox's chances of drastically changing the migration picture.
"One of the points of NAFTA was to generate jobs, but I doubt with Fox's government, given the conditions of the country, that migration will be reduced.
Copyright ©2000 Reuters News Service.
*Bold type added.