“FROM Tijuana, you can see downtown San Diego,” says Juan, with his easy smile and sparkling eyes. “I mean, there’s no way you can get lost or anything.” We are sitting in the refuge for homeless men where he works, here in East Los Angeles near where the 101 freeway crosses over and then runs parallel with the river. As you cross the East 1st Street bridge between downtown and the east of the city you can see the ugly concreted banks of the river, paved to prevent erosion – the same banks that Danny (John Travolta) and his mates raced their cars on in Grease.
Juan’s description of the frontier between Mexico and the United States at Tijuana is accurate in one sense but misleading in another. At the furthest northwestern point of Mexico, close to where the Pacific Ocean meets landfall, San Diego rises above the horizon barely thirty kilometres away. It is a dream, an aspiration, for the people sitting on the other side of the security fence. I met a man on the southern side of the fence who was looking towards San Diego longingly, as though it were a lost lover. He had worked without documentation as a chef in a fancy hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. He didn’t say how or why he was back in Mexico, but he did say that it was harder to get into the United States these days.
This is what Juan’s comments don’t portray: no matter how close Tijuana is to San Diego, crossing from Mexico is a difficult, indeed deadly, game. On the fence near the Faro de Playas de Tijuana are thousands of white crosses put there by activists to commemorate those who have died trying to cross the border. According to my guide, Uriel Gonzalez, 5600 people died trying to cross the frontier between 1994 and early 2010. In Juan’s case, it took some twenty attempts. In the end, he made it, but only after being caught repeatedly by US officials and returned to Mexico. He was seventeen by the time he succeeded.
Juan is originally from Honduras. He was born into a poor family in a poor village. He was twelve when he started working, and over the following years his resumé, if he’d had one, would have included positions in industries as diverse as agriculture, hospitality, construction and mechanics. Such was the necessity of life for the young man.
In 1998, when Juan was barely a teenager, Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in more than 200 years, devastated Honduras, killing at least 7000 people and costing the country US$3.8 billion. Wind, rain, flooding and landslides – worsened by the country’s slash-and-burn forestry practices – “virtually destroyed the entire infrastructure of Honduras,” according to the US Department of Commerce’s National Climate Data Centre. As much as 20 per cent of the population was made homeless; agriculture was devastated. Sections of the population were threatened with starvation, and there were outbreaks of malaria, dengue fever and cholera. In the longer term, the country’s development was thrown backwards. According to Honduras’s president at the time, Carlos Roberto Flores, Hurricane Mitch set the country back by fifty years.
Within a couple of years, Juan had become disillusioned about his prospects. Mitch had destroyed most of his town and work was hard to find. “It was really difficult times for my family and myself,” he explains. The struggle of life in Honduras, and an emotional link to the United States, where his mother was buried (she died there when Juan was seven years old), led Juan to decide to attempt to cross the border. He was sixteen.
Juan travelled through Honduras, to Guatemala and then into Mexico without a “coyote” – a smuggler – because he couldn’t afford one. He stopped in different places here and there to work and save money for the next leg of his journey. He was captured, detained and returned from Mexico to Guatemala – telling the Mexican authorities that he was Guatemalan so that in this real-life version of snakes-and-ladders he would not have to ride the snake all the way back to the bottom again. And then, eventually, a year after leaving his home, he made it.
OSCAR’s recollection of the Mexico–US frontier is less light-hearted than Juan’s. He is from El Salvador, a country that until 1992 was embroiled in a bitter civil war that claimed the lives of some 75,000 people. He was seventeen when he joined the mass exodus of Salvadoran young people travelling to the United States. According to Edwin Recinos, the chief protector of minors at the El Salvadoran child protection agency, about 500 people leave El Salvador every day and up to a quarter of them are minors.
Like many migrants, Oscar had a number of reasons for leaving his homeland. But one stood out. “My problem was the gang. Some of them wanted to use me,” he said. “The gang members are really bad. They don’t think twice before killing you. They’re controlling the country.”
El Salvador’s youth gang violence is remarkable. Partly exported from the United States and spread throughout Central America, and partly home-grown, the gangs “demand that you help them to do crimes, to move drugs, light buses on fire, collect fees, many things,” according to Oscar. And because he failed to comply, he said, “my life runs risk, my family’s life is in danger… it is their decision what they can do.” Oscar’s parents arranged for him to travel to the United States.
By the time he got to the border he was exhausted and became separated from the group with which he was travelling. “When I felt that my body couldn’t take it any more I left the travelling group,” Oscar explained. “I was lost for two days, or maybe more, I think.” He was completely disoriented. “I was in a place where there was just dirt. And I walked and I walked.”
Finally, he was caught by immigration officials. “I wasn’t going to turn myself in but my body couldn’t take it anymore. That’s how I was detained. I couldn’t take it. I was exhausted. I couldn’t feel my feet anymore from walking. All I wanted to do was sleep.” He was kept briefly in The Freezer – a room that migrants and their supporters say is deliberately cold so as to make migrants uncomfortable. Then he was sent to detention for six months before being released. He now has been given protection in the United States.
LIKE Australia, the United States has a complex relationship with migrants. Both countries are built on migration and both have built up national mythologies as places of refuge. In 1783, George Washington proclaimed that America was a land whose “bosom… is open to receive… the oppressed and persecuted of all nations.” A century later, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty proclaimed that the United States would receive without discrimination the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The reality is somewhat more mixed than this noble rhetoric suggests. The United States has certainly offered a lifeline to many millions of people, but it has also been inconsistent and even politically motivated in responding to people seeking safety or new opportunities. The conflict is evident in how the United States responds to undocumented migrants, who are estimated to number eleven million, equivalent to half the population of Australia. The majority of these migrants – 62 per cent – are Mexicans. A further 1.33 million, or 12 per cent of the total, are from the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
Undocumented migrants play an important role in the US economy, providing an underclass of cheap, flexible labour. But they also represent a threat to many Americans, who fear they are taking away jobs, pushing wages down, changing the demographics of the country and engaging in crime. In March this year, for example, rancher Robert Krentz was murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant, boosting the belief that illegal immigrant crime was increasing, and indeed that Mexican crime cartels were crossing the border into the United States. In fact, there has been no increase in crimes committed by undocumented migrants, yet the perception helped push through Arizona’s “broadest and strictest” immigration law in years. The widely criticised law made failure to carry immigration documents a crime and gave police powers to detain anyone suspected of being illegally present in the country. It is presently being appealed by the Obama administration.
The Arizona law – a sign of the failure of consecutive federal administrations to deal adequately with the problem of illegal immigration – is broadly consistent both with longer established and more recent efforts to reinforce control over the southern border. In 1994, President Clinton emphasised a “prevention through deterrence” strategy that focused on increasing border control. Over the years, this strategy was expanded and enhanced. Laws, funds and other resources have been thrown at the border. In the wake of the anti-immigrant sentiment that led to the Arizona law, President Obama sent as many as 1200 National Guards to the southern border. He recently claimed that there are more “boots on the ground” and that the southern border “is more secure today than at any time in the past twenty years.”
As part of a series of enforcement operations over the past decades, a fence – or at least several disconnected metal barriers – has been built along sections of the border. Slightly less than 20 per cent of the 3141 kilometre border is fenced, but where it is, the structure is impressive and its intention clear. As you travel east from Tijuana heading toward Mexicali, the barrier snakes its way along the hillside, reminiscent of the Great Wall of China, built to protect the Chinese empire from nomadic incursions. Beside the fence is a track that patrols use to monitor the area; overhead flies the occasional helicopter. In 2006, the Bush administration planned to add a “virtual fence” that would have included radar towers to detect unauthorised border crossers, at an estimated cost of US$7.6 billion. The virtual fence turned out to be a real-world failure and was abandoned at the test stage.
The intent of the broad strategy coming out of the Clinton era, according to political scientist Peter Andreas, was “to disrupt the human traffic, forcing migrants to attempt the crossing in more difficult, remote areas or at official ports of entry.” If he is right, then the strategy has been successful: migrants are taking routes that are more difficult and dangerous. It is difficult to say whether the increased enforcement of the border has curbed illegal immigration. Recent figures indicate a decline in illegal immigration, partly due to enforcement activities, but also as a result of the economic downturn in the United States. What is clear is that pushing unauthorised border crossings into more difficult areas has led to an increase in migrant deaths. The number of deaths at the border, and their cause by such things as environmental conditions, increased from 1994 as enforcement initiatives were stepped up.
Nor is increased threat to life the only negative consequence of this border-strengthening strategy. The dangers and difficulties associated with crossing the border have also pushed more and more migrants into the hands of organised crime. This has made the journey through Mexico as well as the border area more dangerous for migrants.
GLORIA sits amid the city skyline in downtown Los Angeles at the offices of a lawyer who has supported her. Twenty-two floors below, an inscription outside the city library celebrate the enlightenment ideals of US history with a quote from the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist and women’s suffragist, Frederick Douglass:
Power concedes nothing without demand
It never did
It never will
Another inscription quotes the fourteenth amendment to the US constitution: “No State shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law nor deny equal protection.”
Gloria has the dark eyes and hair of a Latina. She left her home in a small village in early 2008 and travelled north with a friend in search of a better life. She was only sixteen. Like Juan, she comes from Honduras. Although she says that her journey through Guatemala and then numerous train trips through Mexico were relatively uneventful, she does mention how she witnessed a train “disintegrate” a man as they were running to catch it. Then, near the northern border of Mexico, “everything went wrong.”
Because they didn’t know anyone in Mexico the group she was travelling with had run out of food. “But we had to cross the desert and, in the end, we were kidnapped.” She was taken to a farmhouse where she was kept in a dark room with a host of other victims – children, women, young men, the elderly. She was escorted to the toilet and watched while she was there. “They were really bad people. They beat us. They didn’t give us food.” Her kidnappers contacted Gloria’s mother and threatened to kill Gloria or sell her into prostitution unless they were paid a ransom. Her mother borrowed the money and paid the ransom. After two months, Gloria was set free.
The incident was by no means unusual in Mexico. Non-government organisations have reported that there were as many as 18,000 kidnappings of migrants in 2009. In April 2010, Amnesty International published a report on the situation of migrants in Mexico. According to Amnesty:
Every year, thousands of migrants are kidnapped, threatened or assaulted by members of criminal gangs. Extortion and sexual violence are widespread and many migrants go missing or are killed. Few of these abuses are reported and in most cases those responsible are never held to account… [F]ederal and state authorities are frequently implicated at some level in abuses against migrants.
To be sure, there is a serious problem of organised crime throughout Mexico. Mexico’s drug cartels are brutal and powerful, and are said to control parts of the country. Four years ago, the government launched a campaign against them. Since then, more than 28,000 people, including over 2000 police officers, have been killed. Senior public officials have been assassinated. And there are fears that the drug-related crime has spilt over the border into the United States.
According to Danielle Alvarez, an activist with No More Deaths, a humanitarian organisation operating at the Arizona border, border enforcement has moved migration into the remit of organised crime. In the past, when crossing the border was more simple, profit margins for guides were not large enough to interest organised crime. Instead, migrants used local guides who were accountable to their communities should the migrants be victimised. But in the past few years, because of the increasing profits associated with assisting migrants to cross the border, drug-smuggling cartels have become involved in people smuggling.
Migrants are not only at greater risk from the elements because they are pushed to more remote, more dangerous border crossings, they are also at greater risk of victimisation from criminal gangs. Amnesty International reports that as many as six in ten women and girls experience sexual abuse during their journey. Stories abound of women routinely taking contraceptives before embarking on the journey, and of others carrying with them condoms in order to request that would-be rapists use them. According to Alvarez, “All the conversations I’ve had with women, asking them about what they were told before they came, asking them what their experiences were like, what they heard from other people, the general expectation is that [sexual assault] is probably something that is going to happen.” Sexual assault is so common as to be normalised.
Indeed, there is a sort of celebration of these sexual assaults by the perpetrators. “All over the desert you’ll see these trees, where women’s underwear and bras are strung up,” says Alvarez. They signify where women have been sexually assaulted, “like the way dogs pee on a certain tree,” sending a message to other people who are making the crossing.
IT IS difficult to imagine what might deter people who are prepared to take such risks to get to the United States. Deterrence only works if the threat of negative consequences outweighs either the potential benefits of an action or the possible harms of inaction. How can you deter people who are prepared to risk their lives and their physical and emotional integrity to leave one country for another?
Part of the problem with attempts at deterrence is that they don’t grapple adequately with the reasons behind people’s movements. When Oscar sought protection, the immigration authorities determined that the United Sates had obligations towards him. But he was already north of the border when he came into contact with the authorities. A border-control approach that sets out to deter people in need of protection before they get the chance to make a claim is morally dubious. It seeks to obfuscate the obligation of governments to protect those who cannot find relief from human rights violations in their homelands.
For Juan and Gloria, the prospect of a better life was motivation enough to take the risks involved in getting to the United States. The impetus for them was more aspirational than it was about the need for protection. And while it is easy to sympathise with the waste of human potential if Juan and Gloria had remained in Honduras, it is not obvious that the United States, on the face of it, has an obligation to them. But an approach to border control that deliberately pushes people to places where crossing is more remote and more dangerous is deeply questionable. Whether foreseen or not, one of the consequences has been the cost in human lives. The deterrence approach is also bad policy in another sense, pushing migrants into the arms of organised crime. This is clearly inconsistent with the claims of a nation that portrays itself – and draws migrants because of this self-promotion – as a global beacon of freedom and prosperity. •
