ABC News
October 11, 2012
By RANDY KREIDER
Local police have confirmed that one person is dead after a Border Patrol agent fired his gun at a crowd throwing rocks across the border fence in Nogales, Arizona late last night, and Mexican media reports say the deceased is a 14-year-old male.
According to the Border Patrol, agents in Nogales were responding to a report of two suspected smugglers on a road that parallels the border fence at 11:30 p.m. when they saw the alleged smugglers drop a narcotics load on the U.S. side of the boundary and flee back into Mexico.
The Border Patrol told ABC Tucson affiliate KGUN that while the smugglers were trying to climb back over the fence, a crowd on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales, Sonora began pelting the agents with rocks.
"Subjects at the scene then began assaulting the agents with rocks," said the Border Patrol in a statement. "After verbal commands from agents to cease were ignored, one agent then discharged his service firearm. One of the subjects appeared to have been hit."
The Border Patrol says it then notified the Mexican government of the shooting, and is "fully cooperating with the FBI-led investigation" now underway.
Nogales Police confirmed to KGUN that one person died at the scene.
A reporter for the Mexican radio station XENY took a photo of emergency personnel removing the body from the street, and reported that the victim was male. Other Mexican media have reported that the person who died at the scene was a 14-year-old male. The Border Patrol declined to confirm the age and gender of the deceased when asked by ABC News.
In June 2011, a Border Patrol agent in San Diego, California fatally shot a suspected border crosser who was allegedly perched on top of the border fence, throwing rocks and wood with exposed nails at agents while they attempted to arrest other suspected border crossers, authorities told ABC affiliate KGTV in San Diego.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/border-patrol-kills-rock-thrower-border-fence/story?id=17456759
Showing posts with label Mexico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mexico. Show all posts
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
HR 1505: The Latest Tribal Border War
Indian Country Today
June 19, 2012
by Heather Steinberger
Today, a broad parks and recreation bill called H.R. 2578 — “To amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act related to a segment of the Lower Merced River in California, and for other purposes,” also known as the Conservation and Economic Growth Act — is scheduled for a floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. And it will affect Indian country, as included in the bill is H.R. 1505, or the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act.
Authored by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) and featuring 59 cosponsors from across the country, H.R. 1505 would give the Secretary of Homeland Security, through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the authority to take control of “all land under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture within 100 miles of the international land borders of the United States.”
“Securing our nation’s borders must be among our highest priorities,” said Rep. Bishop, who also serves as House National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands Subcommittee chairman. “Right now, public lands inaccessible to the United States Border Patrol offer nearly unfettered safe harbor for criminal drug and human smugglers entering our country illegally. The Border Patrol must have improved access in order to deter and apprehend those using our federal lands as trafficking routes.”
The bill was amended in committee last fall to remove language that included maritime borders, add language to protect existing legal uses for recreational and economic activities, add a five-year sunset date to evaluate if the legislation should be renewed, and strictly limit the activities (six) for which the bill could be used. In fact, the committee changed all references to “The Secretary of Homeland Security” to “U.S. Customs and Border Protection” to emphasize that authority would be limited to border security operations and personnel. It would not be a broad new authority across the federal government.
However, according to Oliver “OJ” Semans, executive director of Four Directions, a nonpartisan get-out-the-native-vote organization based on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, the problem for Indian country is that the tribes whose lands lie within 100 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders were never part of the legislative process — and would have no say in how their lands could be used within the scope of those six authorized activities.
“The (author and) sponsors of H.R. 1505 want to give the U.S. Department of Homeland Security unprecedented power to build roads, fences, buildings or even watchtowers on public land administered by the departments of Interior and Agriculture,” Semans said. “This bill directly affects tribes, and they were never even consulted and/or asked to attend hearings on the bills.”
The text of the amended legislation reads, “The Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture shall not impede, prohibit or restrict activities of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection on land under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture to achieve operational control over the international land borders of the United States.” The authorized activities include construction and maintenance of roads and fences; vehicle patrols; installation, maintenance and operation of surveillance equipment and sensors; use of aircraft; and deployment of temporary tactical infrastructure, including forward operating bases.
While the legislation states that it will not restrict legal land uses such as grazing, hunting or mining, it does list more than 30 acts that H.R. 1505 would waive. These include the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, the Act of June 8, 1906 (also known as “the Antiquities Act of 1906”), the National Historic Preservation Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Wilderness Act. The National Historic Preservation Act and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act protect sites considered sacred to Native people.
Affected tribes include the Bay Mills Indian Community (Michigan), Blackfeet Tribe (Montana), Grand Portage Band of Chippewa (Minnesota), Red Lake Band of Chippewa (Minnesota), Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe (Michigan), St. Regis Mohawk Tribe (New York), Aroostook Band of Micmac (Maine), Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Wisconsin), Boise Forte Band of Chippewa (Minnesota), Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (Washington), Fort Belknap Indian Community (Montana), Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribes (Montana), Houlton Band of Maliseet (Maine), Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe (Washington), Kalispel Tribe (Washington), Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (Michigan), Kootenai Tribe (Idaho), Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (Washington), Lummi Nation (Washington), Makah Tribe (Washington), Nooksack Tribe (Washington), Passamaquoddy Tribe (Maine), Penobscot Nation (Maine), Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Wisconsin), Seneca Nation (New York), Swinomish Tribe (Washington), Tonawanda Seneca Tribe (New York), Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (North Dakota), Tuscarora Nation (New York) and the Upper Skagit Tribe (Washington).
One of H.R. 1505’s most vocal opponents is Senator Jon Tester (D-MT). His state is home to several affected tribes, and he has expressed deep concern for the lack of consultation with tribes — and lack of public input altogether.
“H.R. 1505 contains specific language that allows one federal department ‘immediate’ and total control over public lands in Montana,” said Aaron Murphy, communications director of Montanans for Tester. “Jon is concerned by this irresponsible proposal because it undermines… tribal sovereignty with a one-size-fits-all big government strategy, allowing a handful of federal agents to do whatever they want with no public input and no public accountability. Those who support this bill failed to consult with tribes — or any Montanans for that matter. Any decisions that deal with public land should be made with public input.
“Jon also is concerned that the legislation waives at least 36 laws,” he added.
Murphy noted that, as written, the Department of Homeland Security — again, through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection — would not have to seek permission to do whatever is necessary to achieve “operational control” on any land administered by the Department of Agriculture or the Department of the Interior.
“There is no language that exempts lands administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” he observed. “The House (committee) even rejected an amendment to specifically exempt tribal land from H.R. 1505.”
Sen. Tester, he said, “believes we can protect our nation without trampling tribal rights.”
Sen. Tester isn’t the only one to express concern. According to testimony from the House hearing on H.R. 1505, the lead lawyer for the Department of the Interior under President Clinton also expressed serious concerns about the bill’s effects on tribal sovereignty.
A fellow Montana legislator, Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), is a co-sponsor of the bill and co-chair of the Congressional Northern Border Caucus. He proposed many of the changes that were incorporated into the current, amended version of H.R. 1505, and he said the bill is a good one for Montana and the United States.
“Border security is national security, and in Montana that means safety for our families and communities,” Rep. Rehberg commented. “It’s time to put an end to the dangerous turf war where federal land managers hide behind environmental laws in order to prevent border patrol agents from doing their jobs on federal land.”
He also noted that the legislation is much more targeted than what he called “the sweeping measure” that unanimously passed the U.S. Senate in 2009.
“We built in protections for grazing rights and more narrowly focused the intent of the law on efforts to secure the border,” he explained. “We also added a sunset provision so the law can be reviewed by Congress to make sure it’s working as intended. This was a good bill, and now it’s even better.”
Is there a dangerous “turf war” between federal agencies? The Department of Homeland Security already has a memorandum of understanding with the departments of Interior and Agriculture that allows the departments to work together in a situation that might require DHS to pursue suspects or investigations on public land. And, according to a prominent Washington D.C. lobbyist who represents tribes across the country, there has been “no hue and cry” from the Border Patrol to take additional measures to guarantee access.
Tom Rodgers is president of Alexandria-based Carlyle Consulting, and he is perhaps best known as the whistle-blower in the Jack Abramoff scandal. He also is a member of Montana’s Blackfeet Nation, and he said he questions the need for H.R. 1505 in the first place.
“I’ve seen the GAO report, and I’ve yet to see substantive arguments,” he commented. “I’m not convinced. There’s been silence from the Border Patrol, and I’ve never heard of any tribe denying access to its land. I call this a weapon of mass distraction.”
Rodgers said he also finds it ironic that so many advocates of smaller government are behind this particular bill.
“There are so few resources, and there are so many other needs,” he said. “Without a demonstrable need, why give the Department of Homeland Security more authority? Why are we spending time and resources on this? It doesn’t make sense.”
Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) is leading opposition to H.R. 1505 on the House Floor today. Members of affected tribes are encouraged to contact their representatives to share their views.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/06/19/hr-1505-the-latest-tribal-border-war-119255
June 19, 2012
by Heather Steinberger
Today, a broad parks and recreation bill called H.R. 2578 — “To amend the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act related to a segment of the Lower Merced River in California, and for other purposes,” also known as the Conservation and Economic Growth Act — is scheduled for a floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. And it will affect Indian country, as included in the bill is H.R. 1505, or the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act.
Authored by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) and featuring 59 cosponsors from across the country, H.R. 1505 would give the Secretary of Homeland Security, through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the authority to take control of “all land under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture within 100 miles of the international land borders of the United States.”
“Securing our nation’s borders must be among our highest priorities,” said Rep. Bishop, who also serves as House National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands Subcommittee chairman. “Right now, public lands inaccessible to the United States Border Patrol offer nearly unfettered safe harbor for criminal drug and human smugglers entering our country illegally. The Border Patrol must have improved access in order to deter and apprehend those using our federal lands as trafficking routes.”
The bill was amended in committee last fall to remove language that included maritime borders, add language to protect existing legal uses for recreational and economic activities, add a five-year sunset date to evaluate if the legislation should be renewed, and strictly limit the activities (six) for which the bill could be used. In fact, the committee changed all references to “The Secretary of Homeland Security” to “U.S. Customs and Border Protection” to emphasize that authority would be limited to border security operations and personnel. It would not be a broad new authority across the federal government.
However, according to Oliver “OJ” Semans, executive director of Four Directions, a nonpartisan get-out-the-native-vote organization based on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, the problem for Indian country is that the tribes whose lands lie within 100 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders were never part of the legislative process — and would have no say in how their lands could be used within the scope of those six authorized activities.
“The (author and) sponsors of H.R. 1505 want to give the U.S. Department of Homeland Security unprecedented power to build roads, fences, buildings or even watchtowers on public land administered by the departments of Interior and Agriculture,” Semans said. “This bill directly affects tribes, and they were never even consulted and/or asked to attend hearings on the bills.”
The text of the amended legislation reads, “The Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture shall not impede, prohibit or restrict activities of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection on land under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture to achieve operational control over the international land borders of the United States.” The authorized activities include construction and maintenance of roads and fences; vehicle patrols; installation, maintenance and operation of surveillance equipment and sensors; use of aircraft; and deployment of temporary tactical infrastructure, including forward operating bases.
While the legislation states that it will not restrict legal land uses such as grazing, hunting or mining, it does list more than 30 acts that H.R. 1505 would waive. These include the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, the Act of June 8, 1906 (also known as “the Antiquities Act of 1906”), the National Historic Preservation Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Wilderness Act. The National Historic Preservation Act and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act protect sites considered sacred to Native people.
Affected tribes include the Bay Mills Indian Community (Michigan), Blackfeet Tribe (Montana), Grand Portage Band of Chippewa (Minnesota), Red Lake Band of Chippewa (Minnesota), Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Tribe (Michigan), St. Regis Mohawk Tribe (New York), Aroostook Band of Micmac (Maine), Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Wisconsin), Boise Forte Band of Chippewa (Minnesota), Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (Washington), Fort Belknap Indian Community (Montana), Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribes (Montana), Houlton Band of Maliseet (Maine), Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe (Washington), Kalispel Tribe (Washington), Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (Michigan), Kootenai Tribe (Idaho), Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (Washington), Lummi Nation (Washington), Makah Tribe (Washington), Nooksack Tribe (Washington), Passamaquoddy Tribe (Maine), Penobscot Nation (Maine), Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Wisconsin), Seneca Nation (New York), Swinomish Tribe (Washington), Tonawanda Seneca Tribe (New York), Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (North Dakota), Tuscarora Nation (New York) and the Upper Skagit Tribe (Washington).
One of H.R. 1505’s most vocal opponents is Senator Jon Tester (D-MT). His state is home to several affected tribes, and he has expressed deep concern for the lack of consultation with tribes — and lack of public input altogether.
“H.R. 1505 contains specific language that allows one federal department ‘immediate’ and total control over public lands in Montana,” said Aaron Murphy, communications director of Montanans for Tester. “Jon is concerned by this irresponsible proposal because it undermines… tribal sovereignty with a one-size-fits-all big government strategy, allowing a handful of federal agents to do whatever they want with no public input and no public accountability. Those who support this bill failed to consult with tribes — or any Montanans for that matter. Any decisions that deal with public land should be made with public input.
“Jon also is concerned that the legislation waives at least 36 laws,” he added.
Murphy noted that, as written, the Department of Homeland Security — again, through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection — would not have to seek permission to do whatever is necessary to achieve “operational control” on any land administered by the Department of Agriculture or the Department of the Interior.
“There is no language that exempts lands administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” he observed. “The House (committee) even rejected an amendment to specifically exempt tribal land from H.R. 1505.”
Sen. Tester, he said, “believes we can protect our nation without trampling tribal rights.”
Sen. Tester isn’t the only one to express concern. According to testimony from the House hearing on H.R. 1505, the lead lawyer for the Department of the Interior under President Clinton also expressed serious concerns about the bill’s effects on tribal sovereignty.
A fellow Montana legislator, Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), is a co-sponsor of the bill and co-chair of the Congressional Northern Border Caucus. He proposed many of the changes that were incorporated into the current, amended version of H.R. 1505, and he said the bill is a good one for Montana and the United States.
“Border security is national security, and in Montana that means safety for our families and communities,” Rep. Rehberg commented. “It’s time to put an end to the dangerous turf war where federal land managers hide behind environmental laws in order to prevent border patrol agents from doing their jobs on federal land.”
He also noted that the legislation is much more targeted than what he called “the sweeping measure” that unanimously passed the U.S. Senate in 2009.
“We built in protections for grazing rights and more narrowly focused the intent of the law on efforts to secure the border,” he explained. “We also added a sunset provision so the law can be reviewed by Congress to make sure it’s working as intended. This was a good bill, and now it’s even better.”
Is there a dangerous “turf war” between federal agencies? The Department of Homeland Security already has a memorandum of understanding with the departments of Interior and Agriculture that allows the departments to work together in a situation that might require DHS to pursue suspects or investigations on public land. And, according to a prominent Washington D.C. lobbyist who represents tribes across the country, there has been “no hue and cry” from the Border Patrol to take additional measures to guarantee access.
Tom Rodgers is president of Alexandria-based Carlyle Consulting, and he is perhaps best known as the whistle-blower in the Jack Abramoff scandal. He also is a member of Montana’s Blackfeet Nation, and he said he questions the need for H.R. 1505 in the first place.
“I’ve seen the GAO report, and I’ve yet to see substantive arguments,” he commented. “I’m not convinced. There’s been silence from the Border Patrol, and I’ve never heard of any tribe denying access to its land. I call this a weapon of mass distraction.”
Rodgers said he also finds it ironic that so many advocates of smaller government are behind this particular bill.
“There are so few resources, and there are so many other needs,” he said. “Without a demonstrable need, why give the Department of Homeland Security more authority? Why are we spending time and resources on this? It doesn’t make sense.”
Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) is leading opposition to H.R. 1505 on the House Floor today. Members of affected tribes are encouraged to contact their representatives to share their views.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/06/19/hr-1505-the-latest-tribal-border-war-119255
Friday, December 30, 2011
New fencing doesn’t stop illegal crossings
Washington Post
December 30, 2011
by Nick Miroff
CALEXICO, Calif. — A decade ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico was at an all-time high, this stretch of border was as good a place as any to sneak into the United States.
Migrants and smugglers could slip through the alfalfa fields outside town or plow their pickup trucks through the desert, where the biggest worries were stuck tires and getting safely across the irrigation canals.
But in the past five years, the international border here has become a harder, tougher, taller barrier — an American Great Wall. Miles of steel fencing now ride the desolate sand dunes west of Calexico, and to the east, giant jack-shaped “Normandy” barriers block off old smuggling routes, named for their resemblance to the defenses that once lined the beaches of northern France in World War II.
Overall, the United States has added 413 miles of new fencing to its southern boundary since 2006, raising to 649 miles the total length of border that has some form of man-made barrier to people or vehicles. The Rio Grande creates a natural partition along another 1,252 miles, and the government has been putting new fencing there, too.
Now the question is: How much more should be built?
Border Patrol officials say their current plans are to construct just one more mile of fence, in Texas. But as illegal immigration takes an increasingly central role in Republican campaign debates, several GOP candidates have renewed calls to fence the entire 1,969-mile boundary.
President Obama has made light of such proposals, saying fence advocates won’t be satisfied until the U.S. builds “a moat” stocked with “alligators.” But leading Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have vowed to barricade the entire U.S.-Mexico divide, with Gingrich signing a pledge to install a “double fence” while campaigning in Iowa earlier this month.
With such an endeavor projected to cost tens of billions of dollars, this stretch of California desert might be as good a place as any to assess how the existing border fence actually works.
The new barriers have been particularly effective at stopping vehicles from coming across, Border Patrol agents say. Along one stretch of desert here, the number of drive-through incursions plunged from 350 in 2007 to four so far this year.
But agents also say it is not the case that smugglers and illegal migrants on foot simply go to the place in the desert where the fence ends, and walk around it.
“Anywhere is a good place to sneak across if we’re not watching,” said Special Agent Jonathan Creiglow, a Border Patrol officer assigned to the agency’s El Centro sector here.
But there are also sections of 18-foot fencing right in the middle of downtown Calexico, opposite its sprawling sister city of Mexicali, where border jumpers can be up and over the wall in a matter of seconds, melting into shops and residential streets once they land on the other side.
At night, smugglers toss Hail Marys of pot-stuffed footballs and fling golf-ball-sized heroin nuggets over to waiting receivers. Stealthy ultra-light aircraft bomb the lettuce fields outside town with bundles of dope, then swoop back into Mexico, well below radar but high above the fence.
Then there are rugged sections in the desert where fencing is porous or nonexistent, but crossings rare. And those who do try to slip through are tracked by the Border Patrol’s growing array of sensors, high-powered night-vision cameras and surveillance drones.
In short, agents say, fencing is a tool and a first line of defense, but it does not bestow border security by its mere existence. “Without the fencing we wouldn’t have as much time, but nothing is going to stop them from going over or cutting through it,” explained Creiglow, who, at 26, is one of the many recent hires at the Border Patrol, which has doubled in size since 2002, with 18,500 of its 21,500 agents now deployed along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.
A costly barrier
Most of the barrier does not sit on the actual international boundary, but slightly north of it, allowing maintenance workers to access both sides without technically crossing into Mexico. Upkeep for the existing 649 miles of fencing is projected to cost $6.5 billion over the next 20 years, according to a 2009 report by the Government Accounting Office, and U.S. Homeland Security officials say the fence was breached 4,037 times in the government’s 2010 fiscal year, at an average cost of $1,800 per repair.
With most of the remaining unfenced stretch of border in Texas, the debate has shifted to the question of walling off the Rio Grande. Even in areas where the river can be shallow enough to wade across, putting a fence along the river’s sinuous levees is both costly and unpopular with local ranchers who want to preserve riparian access for thirsty cattle.
In Arizona, where Border Patrol agents catch more illegal migrants than anywhere else, lawmakers are soliciting public donations to put barriers along the remaining unfenced 82 miles of the state’s 370-mile boundary with Mexico. Such a structure would need to climb up and over steep mountain areas where construction costs are exorbitant and the deterrent value is questionable, enforcement experts say.
“I think the question is: What are you trying to achieve? Just to be able to say that you built a fence on top of a mountain?” said Thad Bingle, who was the Border Patrol’s chief of staff from 2007 to 2009. “If someone climbs 10,000 feet to the top of a mountain they aren’t going to be deterred by a 10-foot fence.”
Construction in rugged areas is made even more pricey because every stretch of new fence needs an accompanying road for maintenance and patrols, he added.
Fewer arrests
While the agency tallies the number of migrants it catches, it does not plot the locations of those apprehensions. But after hitting an all-time high of 1.6 million apprehensions in the government’s 2000 fiscal year, the number of arrests dropped to 327,577 in the 2011 period which ended Sept. 30, the lowest level since 1972.
Migration experts attribute the decline primarily to the weak U.S. job market — especially the lack of construction jobs — as well as growing fears of kidnapping gangs in northern Mexico. At the same time, average family sizes have fallen dramatically in Mexico, employment opportunities have improved, and the United States is letting more Mexicans in through the front door.
Mexican workers received 516,000 temporary work visas in 2010, “the highest number since the Bracero Program of the late 1950s,” said Douglas Massey, an expert on Mexican migration at Princeton University.
Tougher enforcement on the U.S. side has also been a factor, driving up the costs of getting across as well as the difficultly. But migrant smugglers on the Mexico side say the fence is hardly their biggest concern.
“There’s too much surveillance now,” said Luis, a husky guide-for-hire known as a pollero, standing in the Niños Heroes park in downtown Mexicali, where recent deportees and would-be border crossers gather. “The Migra [Border Patrol] has cameras everywhere,” he said.
Luis wouldn’t give his last name, but he said for $500 smugglers will get customers over the fence by creating elaborate diversions for the Border Patrol and deploying teams of helpers with roll-up ladders and ropes, even forming cheerleader-style human pyramids Better yet, Luis said, for $3,000 a guide will take you over the fence and through the desert at night, and $6,000 buys a legitimate U.S. visa rented from a look-alike with legal status.
“There’s always a way in,” he said with a wily grin.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/new-fencing-doesnt-stop-illegal-crossings/2011/11/28/gIQAbLdBQP_story.html
December 30, 2011
by Nick Miroff
CALEXICO, Calif. — A decade ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico was at an all-time high, this stretch of border was as good a place as any to sneak into the United States.
Migrants and smugglers could slip through the alfalfa fields outside town or plow their pickup trucks through the desert, where the biggest worries were stuck tires and getting safely across the irrigation canals.
But in the past five years, the international border here has become a harder, tougher, taller barrier — an American Great Wall. Miles of steel fencing now ride the desolate sand dunes west of Calexico, and to the east, giant jack-shaped “Normandy” barriers block off old smuggling routes, named for their resemblance to the defenses that once lined the beaches of northern France in World War II.
Overall, the United States has added 413 miles of new fencing to its southern boundary since 2006, raising to 649 miles the total length of border that has some form of man-made barrier to people or vehicles. The Rio Grande creates a natural partition along another 1,252 miles, and the government has been putting new fencing there, too.
Now the question is: How much more should be built?
Border Patrol officials say their current plans are to construct just one more mile of fence, in Texas. But as illegal immigration takes an increasingly central role in Republican campaign debates, several GOP candidates have renewed calls to fence the entire 1,969-mile boundary.
President Obama has made light of such proposals, saying fence advocates won’t be satisfied until the U.S. builds “a moat” stocked with “alligators.” But leading Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have vowed to barricade the entire U.S.-Mexico divide, with Gingrich signing a pledge to install a “double fence” while campaigning in Iowa earlier this month.
With such an endeavor projected to cost tens of billions of dollars, this stretch of California desert might be as good a place as any to assess how the existing border fence actually works.
The new barriers have been particularly effective at stopping vehicles from coming across, Border Patrol agents say. Along one stretch of desert here, the number of drive-through incursions plunged from 350 in 2007 to four so far this year.
But agents also say it is not the case that smugglers and illegal migrants on foot simply go to the place in the desert where the fence ends, and walk around it.
“Anywhere is a good place to sneak across if we’re not watching,” said Special Agent Jonathan Creiglow, a Border Patrol officer assigned to the agency’s El Centro sector here.
But there are also sections of 18-foot fencing right in the middle of downtown Calexico, opposite its sprawling sister city of Mexicali, where border jumpers can be up and over the wall in a matter of seconds, melting into shops and residential streets once they land on the other side.
At night, smugglers toss Hail Marys of pot-stuffed footballs and fling golf-ball-sized heroin nuggets over to waiting receivers. Stealthy ultra-light aircraft bomb the lettuce fields outside town with bundles of dope, then swoop back into Mexico, well below radar but high above the fence.
Then there are rugged sections in the desert where fencing is porous or nonexistent, but crossings rare. And those who do try to slip through are tracked by the Border Patrol’s growing array of sensors, high-powered night-vision cameras and surveillance drones.
In short, agents say, fencing is a tool and a first line of defense, but it does not bestow border security by its mere existence. “Without the fencing we wouldn’t have as much time, but nothing is going to stop them from going over or cutting through it,” explained Creiglow, who, at 26, is one of the many recent hires at the Border Patrol, which has doubled in size since 2002, with 18,500 of its 21,500 agents now deployed along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.
A costly barrier
Most of the barrier does not sit on the actual international boundary, but slightly north of it, allowing maintenance workers to access both sides without technically crossing into Mexico. Upkeep for the existing 649 miles of fencing is projected to cost $6.5 billion over the next 20 years, according to a 2009 report by the Government Accounting Office, and U.S. Homeland Security officials say the fence was breached 4,037 times in the government’s 2010 fiscal year, at an average cost of $1,800 per repair.
With most of the remaining unfenced stretch of border in Texas, the debate has shifted to the question of walling off the Rio Grande. Even in areas where the river can be shallow enough to wade across, putting a fence along the river’s sinuous levees is both costly and unpopular with local ranchers who want to preserve riparian access for thirsty cattle.
In Arizona, where Border Patrol agents catch more illegal migrants than anywhere else, lawmakers are soliciting public donations to put barriers along the remaining unfenced 82 miles of the state’s 370-mile boundary with Mexico. Such a structure would need to climb up and over steep mountain areas where construction costs are exorbitant and the deterrent value is questionable, enforcement experts say.
“I think the question is: What are you trying to achieve? Just to be able to say that you built a fence on top of a mountain?” said Thad Bingle, who was the Border Patrol’s chief of staff from 2007 to 2009. “If someone climbs 10,000 feet to the top of a mountain they aren’t going to be deterred by a 10-foot fence.”
Construction in rugged areas is made even more pricey because every stretch of new fence needs an accompanying road for maintenance and patrols, he added.
Fewer arrests
While the agency tallies the number of migrants it catches, it does not plot the locations of those apprehensions. But after hitting an all-time high of 1.6 million apprehensions in the government’s 2000 fiscal year, the number of arrests dropped to 327,577 in the 2011 period which ended Sept. 30, the lowest level since 1972.
Migration experts attribute the decline primarily to the weak U.S. job market — especially the lack of construction jobs — as well as growing fears of kidnapping gangs in northern Mexico. At the same time, average family sizes have fallen dramatically in Mexico, employment opportunities have improved, and the United States is letting more Mexicans in through the front door.
Mexican workers received 516,000 temporary work visas in 2010, “the highest number since the Bracero Program of the late 1950s,” said Douglas Massey, an expert on Mexican migration at Princeton University.
Tougher enforcement on the U.S. side has also been a factor, driving up the costs of getting across as well as the difficultly. But migrant smugglers on the Mexico side say the fence is hardly their biggest concern.
“There’s too much surveillance now,” said Luis, a husky guide-for-hire known as a pollero, standing in the Niños Heroes park in downtown Mexicali, where recent deportees and would-be border crossers gather. “The Migra [Border Patrol] has cameras everywhere,” he said.
Luis wouldn’t give his last name, but he said for $500 smugglers will get customers over the fence by creating elaborate diversions for the Border Patrol and deploying teams of helpers with roll-up ladders and ropes, even forming cheerleader-style human pyramids Better yet, Luis said, for $3,000 a guide will take you over the fence and through the desert at night, and $6,000 buys a legitimate U.S. visa rented from a look-alike with legal status.
“There’s always a way in,” he said with a wily grin.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/new-fencing-doesnt-stop-illegal-crossings/2011/11/28/gIQAbLdBQP_story.html
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Crossing Over, and Over
New York Times
October 2, 2011
by Damien Cave
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license, all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.
Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he spoke nearly fluent English and had an American son, a wife and three brothers in the United States. "I’ll keep trying," he said, "until I’ll get there."
This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.
They present an enormous challenge to American policy makers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.
And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.
"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.
Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
For the Obama administration, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
President Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.
Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to verify the reported immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.
"You’d reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country’s top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."
"Our societies are so deeply connected," Ms. Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."
The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced in August — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."
Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by congress when it toughened laws related to illegal re-entry in the 1990s.
But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.
"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."
Crime and the Border
The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a Border Patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.
Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.
The impacts are far-reaching. In northern Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only 3 of the 50 rooms were occupied.
"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel’s manager.
New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.
In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirthieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.
It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Tex. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.
"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."
American law enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.
"There’s less traffic, but traffic that’s there is more threatening," Mr. Jimarez, the border agent, said.
Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."
His county, 6,169 square miles of scrub brush, ranches and tiny towns in the state’s southeast corner, has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.
Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime, Sheriff Dever said). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.
This is not the portrait given by Republican border governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, a presidential candidate who recently said that "it is not safe on that border." But while Mexican drug cartels have increased their presence from Tucson to New York — sometimes engaging in brutal violence after entering the country illegally — Americans living near the border are generally safe.
A USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California in July found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.
But the border is not safe for people crossing or patrolling it. The number of immigrants found dead in the Arizona desert, from all causes, has failed to decline as fast as illegal immigration has, while assaults on Border Patrol agents grew by 41 percent from 2006 to 2010, almost entirely because of an increase in attacks with rocks. The heightened risks have stimulated a debate: Has the more aggressive approach — bigger fences, more agents and deportations — contributed to, or diminished, the danger?
Sheriff Dever, lionized as an "illegal immigration warrior" by immigration opponents, says that increased enforcement has made Americans safer and should continue until his neighbors tell him they are no longer afraid.
But some immigration advocates contend that the government’s approach is too broad to be effective. "We have to really separate out the guy who is coming to make a living with his family from the terrorist or the drug dealer," said Peter Siavelis, an editor of "Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know."
Home Is Where the Children Are
Deportations have muddled that delineation. In a recent line of deportees piling off a bus on the San Diego side of a metal gate leading to Tijuana, all were equal: the criminal in prison garb with the wispy goatee; the mother averting her eyes; and longtime residents like Alberto Álvarez, 36, a janitor and father of five who said he was picked up for driving without a license.
"Look, I’ve been in the U.S. 18 years," he said, slinging a backpack over his Izod shirt. "Right now, my children are alone, my wife is alone caring for the kids by herself — they’ve separated us."
During the immigration wave that peaked around a decade ago, deportations often meant something different: many deportees had not been in the United States for long; they were going home.
But now that there are fewer new arrivals, the concept of home is changing. Of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 48 percent arrived before 2000. For the 6.5 million Mexicans in the United States illegally, that figure is even higher — 55 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. There are now also 4.5 million American-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.
Experts on both sides of the debate say this large group of rooted immigrants presents the nation with a fundamental choice: Either make life in the United States so difficult for illegal immigrants that they leave on their own, or allow immigrants who pose no threat to public safety to remain with their families legally, though not necessarily as citizens.
Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the government should revoke automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, and seize assets from deported illegal immigrants so they have fewer incentives to return.
President Obama, having made no progress on getting his legalization plan through Congress, has instead been trying to make enforcement more surgical. Under the new guidelines, officials will use "prosecutorial discretion" to review the current docket of 300,000 deportation cases, suspending expulsions for a range of immigrants.
Several factors prompt "particular care and consideration" for a reprieve, including whether the person has been in the United States since childhood, or is pregnant, seriously ill, a member of the military or a minor, according to a June memo that initiated the change.
The issue of "whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child or parent" appears in the memo’s secondary list of factors to consider. But it is not clear how broadly leniency will be applied. Repeat crossers are given a special black mark, and the administration has already deported hundreds of thousands of minor offenders, despite claiming to focus on "the worst of the worst."
Several Democratic governors and law enforcement officials are particularly angry about Secure Communities, a program to run the fingerprints of anyone booked by the police to check for federal immigration violations. A large proportion of those deported through this process — 79 percent, according to a recent report by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University — were low-level offenders, often arrested for traffic violations.
Administration officials dispute that, saying the ratio of serious criminals is increasing, and that ultimately they must enforce immigration law against all violators. They have mandated that the program be used nationwide by 2013.
Mexico’s border cities offer a portrait of what that could mean. Nearly 950,000 Mexican immigrants have been deported since the start of fiscal 2008. And in Tijuana — a former hub for migrants heading north, which now receives more deportees than anywhere else — the pool of deportees preparing to cross again just keeps growing.
Maria García, 27, arrived here after being deported for a traffic violation. She said she had spent six years living in Fresno, Calif., with her two Mexico-born sons, 11 and 7. She was one of many who said that without a doubt, they would find their way back to the United States.
"They can’t stop us," she said.
The constant flow of deportees has become a growing concern for Mexican officials, who say the new arrivals are easy recruits, and victims, for drug cartels.
One former deportee was arrested this year for playing a major role in the deaths of around 200 people found in mass graves. In Tijuana, a homeless camp at the border has swollen from a cluster to a neighborhood, as deportees flow in, many carrying stories of being robbed or kidnapped by gangs who saw their American connections as a source for ransom.
Minutes after he arrived, Mr. Álvarez, the janitor, said he was worried about surviving — "you’re playing with your life being here," he said. But his twin sons would turn 2 in a few weeks, and like many others, he said that no matter how he was treated in the United States, he would find his way back.
"I feel bad being here, I feel bad," he said. "I’ve got my kids over there, my family, my whole life. Here" — he shook his head at the end of his first day in Tijuana — "no."
A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing Over, and Over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/americas/mexican-immigrants-repeatedly-brave-risks-to-resume-lives-in-united-states.html?_r=2
October 2, 2011
by Damien Cave
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license, all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.
Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he spoke nearly fluent English and had an American son, a wife and three brothers in the United States. "I’ll keep trying," he said, "until I’ll get there."
This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.
They present an enormous challenge to American policy makers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.
And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.
"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.
Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
For the Obama administration, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
President Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.
Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to verify the reported immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.
"You’d reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country’s top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."
"Our societies are so deeply connected," Ms. Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."
The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced in August — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."
Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by congress when it toughened laws related to illegal re-entry in the 1990s.
But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.
"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."
Crime and the Border
The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a Border Patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.
Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.
The impacts are far-reaching. In northern Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only 3 of the 50 rooms were occupied.
"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel’s manager.
New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.
In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirthieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.
It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Tex. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.
"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."
American law enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.
"There’s less traffic, but traffic that’s there is more threatening," Mr. Jimarez, the border agent, said.
Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."
His county, 6,169 square miles of scrub brush, ranches and tiny towns in the state’s southeast corner, has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.
Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.
Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime, Sheriff Dever said). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.
This is not the portrait given by Republican border governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, a presidential candidate who recently said that "it is not safe on that border." But while Mexican drug cartels have increased their presence from Tucson to New York — sometimes engaging in brutal violence after entering the country illegally — Americans living near the border are generally safe.
A USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California in July found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.
But the border is not safe for people crossing or patrolling it. The number of immigrants found dead in the Arizona desert, from all causes, has failed to decline as fast as illegal immigration has, while assaults on Border Patrol agents grew by 41 percent from 2006 to 2010, almost entirely because of an increase in attacks with rocks. The heightened risks have stimulated a debate: Has the more aggressive approach — bigger fences, more agents and deportations — contributed to, or diminished, the danger?
Sheriff Dever, lionized as an "illegal immigration warrior" by immigration opponents, says that increased enforcement has made Americans safer and should continue until his neighbors tell him they are no longer afraid.
But some immigration advocates contend that the government’s approach is too broad to be effective. "We have to really separate out the guy who is coming to make a living with his family from the terrorist or the drug dealer," said Peter Siavelis, an editor of "Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know."
Home Is Where the Children Are
Deportations have muddled that delineation. In a recent line of deportees piling off a bus on the San Diego side of a metal gate leading to Tijuana, all were equal: the criminal in prison garb with the wispy goatee; the mother averting her eyes; and longtime residents like Alberto Álvarez, 36, a janitor and father of five who said he was picked up for driving without a license.
"Look, I’ve been in the U.S. 18 years," he said, slinging a backpack over his Izod shirt. "Right now, my children are alone, my wife is alone caring for the kids by herself — they’ve separated us."
During the immigration wave that peaked around a decade ago, deportations often meant something different: many deportees had not been in the United States for long; they were going home.
But now that there are fewer new arrivals, the concept of home is changing. Of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 48 percent arrived before 2000. For the 6.5 million Mexicans in the United States illegally, that figure is even higher — 55 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. There are now also 4.5 million American-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.
Experts on both sides of the debate say this large group of rooted immigrants presents the nation with a fundamental choice: Either make life in the United States so difficult for illegal immigrants that they leave on their own, or allow immigrants who pose no threat to public safety to remain with their families legally, though not necessarily as citizens.
Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the government should revoke automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, and seize assets from deported illegal immigrants so they have fewer incentives to return.
President Obama, having made no progress on getting his legalization plan through Congress, has instead been trying to make enforcement more surgical. Under the new guidelines, officials will use "prosecutorial discretion" to review the current docket of 300,000 deportation cases, suspending expulsions for a range of immigrants.
Several factors prompt "particular care and consideration" for a reprieve, including whether the person has been in the United States since childhood, or is pregnant, seriously ill, a member of the military or a minor, according to a June memo that initiated the change.
The issue of "whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child or parent" appears in the memo’s secondary list of factors to consider. But it is not clear how broadly leniency will be applied. Repeat crossers are given a special black mark, and the administration has already deported hundreds of thousands of minor offenders, despite claiming to focus on "the worst of the worst."
Several Democratic governors and law enforcement officials are particularly angry about Secure Communities, a program to run the fingerprints of anyone booked by the police to check for federal immigration violations. A large proportion of those deported through this process — 79 percent, according to a recent report by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University — were low-level offenders, often arrested for traffic violations.
Administration officials dispute that, saying the ratio of serious criminals is increasing, and that ultimately they must enforce immigration law against all violators. They have mandated that the program be used nationwide by 2013.
Mexico’s border cities offer a portrait of what that could mean. Nearly 950,000 Mexican immigrants have been deported since the start of fiscal 2008. And in Tijuana — a former hub for migrants heading north, which now receives more deportees than anywhere else — the pool of deportees preparing to cross again just keeps growing.
Maria García, 27, arrived here after being deported for a traffic violation. She said she had spent six years living in Fresno, Calif., with her two Mexico-born sons, 11 and 7. She was one of many who said that without a doubt, they would find their way back to the United States.
"They can’t stop us," she said.
The constant flow of deportees has become a growing concern for Mexican officials, who say the new arrivals are easy recruits, and victims, for drug cartels.
One former deportee was arrested this year for playing a major role in the deaths of around 200 people found in mass graves. In Tijuana, a homeless camp at the border has swollen from a cluster to a neighborhood, as deportees flow in, many carrying stories of being robbed or kidnapped by gangs who saw their American connections as a source for ransom.
Minutes after he arrived, Mr. Álvarez, the janitor, said he was worried about surviving — "you’re playing with your life being here," he said. But his twin sons would turn 2 in a few weeks, and like many others, he said that no matter how he was treated in the United States, he would find his way back.
"I feel bad being here, I feel bad," he said. "I’ve got my kids over there, my family, my whole life. Here" — he shook his head at the end of his first day in Tijuana — "no."
A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing Over, and Over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/americas/mexican-immigrants-repeatedly-brave-risks-to-resume-lives-in-united-states.html?_r=2
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North
New York Times
July 6, 2011
by Damien Cave
AGUA NEGRA, Mexico — The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.
A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States.
Here in the red-earth highlands of Jalisco, one of Mexico’s top three states for emigration over the past century, a new dynamic has emerged. For a typical rural family like the Orozcos, heading to El Norte without papers is no longer an inevitable rite of passage. Instead, their homes are filling up with returning relatives; older brothers who once crossed illegally are awaiting visas; and the youngest Orozcos are staying put.
“I’m not going to go to the States because I’m more concerned with my studies,” said Angel Orozco, 18. Indeed, at the new technological institute where he is earning a degree in industrial engineering, all the students in a recent class said they were better educated than their parents — and that they planned to stay in Mexico rather than go to the United States.
Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research showed that interest in heading to the United States for the first time had fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”
The decline in illegal immigration, from a country responsible for roughly 6 of every 10 illegal immigrants in the United States, is stark. The Mexican census recently discovered four million more people in Mexico than had been projected, which officials attributed to a sharp decline in emigration.
American census figures analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center also show that the illegal Mexican population in the United States has shrunk and that fewer than 100,000 illegal border-crossers and visa-violators from Mexico settled in the United States in 2010, down from about 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004. Although some advocates for more limited immigration argue that the Pew studies offer estimates that do not include short-term migrants, most experts agree that far fewer illegal immigrants have been arriving in recent years.
The question is why. Experts and American politicians from both parties have generally looked inward, arguing about the success or failure of the buildup of border enforcement and tougher laws limiting illegal immigrants’ rights — like those recently passed in Alabama and Arizona. Deportations have reached record highs as total border apprehensions and apprehensions of Mexicans have fallen by more than 70 percent since 2000.
But Mexican immigration has always been defined by both the push (from Mexico) and the pull (of the United States). The decision to leave home involves a comparison, a wrenching cost-benefit analysis, and just as a Mexican baby boom and economic crises kicked off the emigration waves in the 1980s and ’90s, research now shows that the easing of demographic and economic pressures is helping keep departures in check.
In simple terms, Mexican families are smaller than they had once been. The pool of likely migrants is shrinking. Despite the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, birth control efforts have pushed down the fertility rate to about 2 children per woman from 6.8 in 1970, according to government figures. So while Mexico added about one million new potential job seekers annually in the 1990s, since 2007 that figure has fallen to an average of 800,000, according to government birth records. By 2030, it is expected to drop to 300,000.
Even in larger families like the Orozcos’ — Angel is the 9th of 10 children — the migration calculation has changed. Crossing “mojado,” wet or illegally, has become more expensive and more dangerous, particularly with drug cartels dominating the border. At the same time, educational and employment opportunities have greatly expanded in Mexico. Per capita gross domestic product and family income have each jumped more than 45 percent since 2000, according to one prominent economist, Roberto Newell. Despite all the depictions of Mexico as “nearly a failed state,” he argued, “the conventional wisdom is wrong.”
A significant expansion of legal immigration — aided by American consular officials — is also under way. Congress may be debating immigration reform, but in Mexico, visas without a Congressionally mandated cap on how many people can enter have increased from 2006 to 2010, compared with the previous five years.
State Department figures show that Mexicans who have become American citizens have legally brought in 64 percent more immediate relatives, 220,500 from 2006 through 2010, compared with the figures for the previous five years. Tourist visas are also being granted at higher rates of around 89 percent, up from 67 percent, while American farmers have legally hired 75 percent more temporary workers since 2006.
Edward McKeon, the top American official for consular affairs in Mexico, said he had focused on making legal passage to the United States easier in an effort to prevent people from giving up and going illegally. He has even helped those who were previously illegal overcome bans on entering the United States.
“If people are trying to do the right thing,” Mr. McKeon said, “we need to send the signal that we’ll reward them.”
Hard Years in Jalisco
When Angel Orozco’s grandfather considered leaving Mexico in the 1920s, his family said, he wrestled with one elemental question: Will it be worth it?
At that point and for decades to come, yes was the obvious answer. In the 1920s and ’30s — when Paul S. Taylor came to Jalisco from California for his landmark study of Mexican emigration — Mexico’s central highlands promised little more than hard living. Jobs were scarce and paid poorly. Barely one of three adults could read. Families of 10, 12 and even 20 were common, and most children did not attend school.
Comparatively, the United States looked like a dreamland of technology and riches: Mr. Taylor found that the wages paid by the railroads, where most early migrants found legal work, were five times what could be earned on farms in Arandas, the municipality that includes Agua Negra.
Orozco family members still talk about the benefits of that first trip. Part of the land the extended family occupies today was purchased with American earnings from the 1920s. When Angel’s father, Antonio, went north to pick cotton in the 1950s and ’60s with the Bracero temporary worker program, which accepted more than 400,000 laborers a year at its peak, working in the United States made even more sense. The difference in wages had reached 10 to 1. Arandas was still dirt poor.
Antonio, with just a few years of schooling, was one of many who felt that with a back as strong as a wooden church door, he could best serve his family from across the border.
“I sent my father money so he could build his house,” Antonio said.
Legal status then meant little. After the Bracero program ended in 1964, Antonio said, he crossed back and forth several times without documentation. Passage was cheap. Work lasting for a few months or a year was always plentiful. So when his seven sons started to become adults in the 1990s, he encouraged them to go north as well. Around 2001, he and two of his sons were all in the United States working — part of what is now recognized as one of the largest immigration waves in American history.
But even then, illegal immigration was becoming less attractive. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration added fences and federal agents to what were then the main crossing corridors beyond Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. The enforcement push, continued by President George W. Bush and President Obama, helped drive up smuggling prices from around $700 in the late 1980s to nearly $2,000 a decade later, and the costs continued to climb, according to research from the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. It also shifted traffic to more dangerous desert areas near Arizona.
Antonio said the risks hit home when his nephew Alejandro disappeared in the Sonoran Desert around 2002. A father of one and with a pregnant wife, Alejandro had been promised work by a friend. It took years for the authorities to find his body in the arid brush south of Tucson. Even now, no one knows how he died.
But for the Orozcos, border enforcement was not the major deterrent. Andrés Orozco, 28, a middle son who first crossed illegally in 2000, said that while rising smuggling costs and border crime were worries, there were always ways to avoid American agents. In fact, while the likelihood of apprehension has increased in recent years, 92 to 98 percent of those who try to cross eventually succeed, according to research by Wayne A. Cornelius and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego.
A Period of Progress
Another important factor is Mexico itself. Over the past 15 years, this country once defined by poverty and beaches has progressed politically and economically in ways rarely acknowledged by Americans debating immigration. Even far from the coasts or the manufacturing sector at the border, democracy is better established, incomes have generally risen and poverty has declined.
Here in Jalisco, a tequila boom that accelerated through the 1990s created new jobs for farmers cutting agave and for engineers at the stills. Other businesses followed. In 2003, when David Fitzgerald, a migration expert at the University of California, San Diego, came to Arandas, he found that the wage disparity with the United States had narrowed: migrants in the north were collecting 3.7 times what they could earn at home.
That gap has recently shrunk again. The recession cut into immigrant earnings in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, even as wages have risen in Mexico, according to World Bank figures. Jalisco’s quality of life has improved in other ways, too. About a decade ago, the cluster of the Orozco ranches on Agua Negra’s outskirts received electricity and running water. New census data shows a broad expansion of such services: water and trash collection, once unheard of outside cities, are now available to more than 90 percent of Jalisco’s homes. Dirt floors can now be found in only 3 percent of the state’s houses, down from 12 percent in 1990.
Still, education represents the most meaningful change. The census shows that throughout Jalisco, the number of senior high schools or preparatory schools for students aged 15 to 18 increased to 724 in 2009, from 360 in 2000, far outpacing population growth. The Technological Institute of Arandas, where Angel studies engineering, is now one of 13 science campuses created in Jalisco since 2000 — a major reason professionals in the state, with a bachelor’s degree or higher, also more than doubled to 821,983 in 2010, up from 405,415 in 2000.
Similar changes have occurred elsewhere. In the poor southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, for instance, professional degree holders rose to 525,874 from 244,322 in 2000.
And the data from secondary schools like the one the Orozcos attended in Agua Negra suggests that the trend will continue. Thanks to a Mexican government program called “schools of quality” the campus of three buildings painted sunflower yellow has five new computers for its 71 students, along with new books.
Teachers here, in classrooms surrounded by blue agave fields, say that enrollment is down slightly because families are having fewer children, and instead of sending workers north, some families have moved to other Mexican cities — a trend also found in academic field research. Around half the students now move on to higher schooling, up from 30 percent a decade ago.
“They’re identifying more with Mexico,” said Agustín Martínez González, a teacher. “With more education, they’re more likely to accept reality here and try to make it better.”
Some experts agree. Though Mexicans with Ph.D.’s tend to leave for bigger paychecks abroad, “if you have a college degree you’re much more likely to stay in Mexico because that is surely more valuable in Mexico,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.
If these trends — particularly Mexican economic growth — continue over the next decade, Mr. Passel said, changes in the migration dynamic may become even clearer. “At the point where the U.S. needs the workers again,” he said, “there will be fewer of them.”
Praying for Papers
The United States, of course, has not lost its magnetic appeal. Illegal traffic from Central America has not dropped as fast as it has from Mexico, and even in Jalisco town plazas are now hangouts for men in their 30s with tattoos, oversize baseball caps and a desire to work again in California or another state. Bars with American names — several have adopted Shrek — signal a back and forth that may never disappear.
But more Mexicans are now traveling legally. Several Orozco cousins have received temporary worker visas in the past few years. In March, peak migration season for Jalisco, there were 15 people from Agua Negra at the border waiting to cross.
“And 10 had visas,” said Ramón Orozco, 30, another son of Antonio who works in the town’s government office after being the first in his family to go to college. “A few years ago there would have been 100, barely any with proper documents.”
This is not unique to Agua Negra. A few towns away at the hillside shrine of St. Toribio, the patron saint of migrants, prayers no longer focus on asking God to help sons, husbands or brothers crossing the desert. “Now people are praying for papers,” said María Guadalupe, 47, a longtime volunteer.
How did this happen?
Partly, emigrants say, illegal life in the United States became harder. Laws restricting illegal immigrants’ rights or making it tougher for employers to hire them have passed in more than a dozen states since 2006. The same word-of-mouth networks that used to draw people north are now advising against the journey. “Without papers all you’re thinking about is, when are the police going to stop you or what other risks are you going to face,” said Andrés Orozco.
Andrés, a horse lover who drives a teal pickup from Texas, is one of many Orozcos now pinning their hopes on a visa. And for the first time in years, the chances have improved.
Mexican government estimates based on survey data show not just a decrease in migration overall, but also an increase in border crossings with documents. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, 38 percent of the total attempted crossings, legal and illegal, were made with documents. In 2007, only 20 percent involved such paperwork.
The Mexican data counts attempted crossings, not people, and does not differentiate between categories of visas. Nor does it mention how long people stayed, nor whether all the documents were valid.
Advocates of limited immigration worry that the issuing of more visas creates a loophole that can be abused. Between 40 and 50 percent of the illegal immigrants in the United States entered legally with visas they overstayed, as of 2005, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
More recent American population data, however, shows no overall increase in the illegal Mexican population. That suggests that most of the temporary visas issued to Mexicans — 1.1 million in 2010 — are being used legitimately even as American statistics show clearly that visa opportunities have increased.
Easing a Chaotic Process
One man, Mr. McKeon, the minister counselor who oversees all consular affairs in Mexico, has played a significant role in that expansion.
A lawyer with a white beard and a quick tongue, Mr. McKeon arrived in the summer of 2007. And after more than 30 years working in consular affairs in China, Japan and elsewhere, he quickly decided to make changes in Mexico. Working within administrative rules, State Department officials say, he re-engineered the visa program to de-emphasize the affordability standard that held that visas were to be denied to those who could not prove an income large enough to support travel to the United States.
In a country where a person can cross the border with a 25-cent toll, Mr. McKeon said, the income question was irrelevant. “You have to look at everyone individually,” he said in an interview at his office in Mexico City. “I don’t want people to say, here’s the income floor, over yes, lower no.”
This led to an almost immediate decrease in the rejection rate for tourist visas. Before he arrived, around 32 percent were turned down. Since 2008, the rate has been around 11 percent.
Mr. McKeon — praised by some immigration lawyers for bringing consistency to a chaotic process — was also instrumental in expanding the temporary visa program for agricultural workers. Called H-2A, this is one of the few visa categories without a cap.
Around 2006, as the debate over immigration became more contentious, employers concentrated in the Southeast began applying for more workers through the program. Mr. McKeon began hosting conferences with all the stakeholders and deployed new technology and additional staff members. The waiting time for several visa categories decreased, government reports show. For H-2As, Mexican workers can now receive their documents the same day that they apply.
Mr. McKeon also pushed to make the program more attractive to Mexicans who might otherwise cross the border illegally. Two years ago, he eliminated a $100 visa issuance fee that was supposed to be covered by employers but was usually paid by workers. And he insisted that his staff members change their approach with Mexicans who had previously worked illegally in the United States.
“The message used to be, if you were working illegally, lie about it or don’t even try to go legally because we won’t let you,” said one senior State Department official. “What we’re saying now is, tell us you did it illegally, be honest and we’ll help you.”
Specifically, consulate workers dealing with H-2A applicants who were once illegal — making them subject to 3- or 10-year bans depending on the length of their illegal stay — now regularly file electronic waiver applications to the United States Customs and Border Patrol. About 85 percent of these are now approved, Mr. McKeon said, so that in 2010 most of the 52,317 Mexican workers with H-2A visas had previously been in the United States illegally.
“It’s not easy to go through this process,” Mr. McKeon said, “and I think people who are willing to go through all of that and risk going back to the United States where they have to pay taxes, and withholding, I think we should look favorably on them.”
Speaking as the son of a New Jersey plumber, he added: “My bias is toward people who sweat at work because I really think that’s the backbone of our country. With limited resources, I’d rather devote our efforts to keeping out a drug kingpin than trying to find someone who works a couple of months at Cousin Hector’s body shop.”
A Divisive Topic
In the heated debate over immigration, however, this topic is inevitably divisive. Pro-immigrant groups, when told of the expansion to legal immigration, say it still may not be enough in a country where the baby boomers are retiring in droves.
Farmers still complain that the H-2A visa program is too complicated and addresses only a portion of the total demand. As of 2010, there were 1,381,896 Mexicans still waiting for their green-card applications to be accepted or rejected. And the United States currently makes only 5,000 green cards annually available worldwide for low-wage workers to immigrate permanently; in recent years, only a few of those have gone to Mexicans.
On the other side, Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors reduced immigration, said that increasing the proportion of legal entries did little good.
“If you believe there is significant job competition at the bottom end of the labor market, as I do, you’re not fixing the problem,” Mr. Camarota said. “If you are concerned about the fiscal cost of unskilled immigration and everyone comes in on temporary visas and overstays, or even if they don’t, the same problems are likely to apply.”
By his calculations, unskilled immigrants like the Orozcos have, over the years, helped push down hourly wages, especially for young, unskilled American workers. Immigrants are also more likely to rely on welfare, he said, adding to public costs.
The Orozco clan, however, may point to a different future. Angel Orozco, like many other young Mexicans, now talks about the United States not as a place to earn money, but rather as a destination for fun and spending.
Today he is just a lanky, shy freshman wearing a Daughtry T-shirt and living in a two-room apartment with only a Mexican flag and a rosary for decoration.
But his dreams are big and local. After graduating, he said, he hopes to work for a manufacturing company in Arandas, which seems likely because the director of his school says that nearly 90 percent of graduates find jobs in their field. Then, Angel said, he will be able to buy what he really wants: a shiny, new red Camaro.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/06/world/americas/immigration.html
July 6, 2011
by Damien Cave
AGUA NEGRA, Mexico — The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.
A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States.
Here in the red-earth highlands of Jalisco, one of Mexico’s top three states for emigration over the past century, a new dynamic has emerged. For a typical rural family like the Orozcos, heading to El Norte without papers is no longer an inevitable rite of passage. Instead, their homes are filling up with returning relatives; older brothers who once crossed illegally are awaiting visas; and the youngest Orozcos are staying put.
“I’m not going to go to the States because I’m more concerned with my studies,” said Angel Orozco, 18. Indeed, at the new technological institute where he is earning a degree in industrial engineering, all the students in a recent class said they were better educated than their parents — and that they planned to stay in Mexico rather than go to the United States.
Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research showed that interest in heading to the United States for the first time had fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”
The decline in illegal immigration, from a country responsible for roughly 6 of every 10 illegal immigrants in the United States, is stark. The Mexican census recently discovered four million more people in Mexico than had been projected, which officials attributed to a sharp decline in emigration.
American census figures analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center also show that the illegal Mexican population in the United States has shrunk and that fewer than 100,000 illegal border-crossers and visa-violators from Mexico settled in the United States in 2010, down from about 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004. Although some advocates for more limited immigration argue that the Pew studies offer estimates that do not include short-term migrants, most experts agree that far fewer illegal immigrants have been arriving in recent years.
The question is why. Experts and American politicians from both parties have generally looked inward, arguing about the success or failure of the buildup of border enforcement and tougher laws limiting illegal immigrants’ rights — like those recently passed in Alabama and Arizona. Deportations have reached record highs as total border apprehensions and apprehensions of Mexicans have fallen by more than 70 percent since 2000.
But Mexican immigration has always been defined by both the push (from Mexico) and the pull (of the United States). The decision to leave home involves a comparison, a wrenching cost-benefit analysis, and just as a Mexican baby boom and economic crises kicked off the emigration waves in the 1980s and ’90s, research now shows that the easing of demographic and economic pressures is helping keep departures in check.
In simple terms, Mexican families are smaller than they had once been. The pool of likely migrants is shrinking. Despite the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, birth control efforts have pushed down the fertility rate to about 2 children per woman from 6.8 in 1970, according to government figures. So while Mexico added about one million new potential job seekers annually in the 1990s, since 2007 that figure has fallen to an average of 800,000, according to government birth records. By 2030, it is expected to drop to 300,000.
Even in larger families like the Orozcos’ — Angel is the 9th of 10 children — the migration calculation has changed. Crossing “mojado,” wet or illegally, has become more expensive and more dangerous, particularly with drug cartels dominating the border. At the same time, educational and employment opportunities have greatly expanded in Mexico. Per capita gross domestic product and family income have each jumped more than 45 percent since 2000, according to one prominent economist, Roberto Newell. Despite all the depictions of Mexico as “nearly a failed state,” he argued, “the conventional wisdom is wrong.”
A significant expansion of legal immigration — aided by American consular officials — is also under way. Congress may be debating immigration reform, but in Mexico, visas without a Congressionally mandated cap on how many people can enter have increased from 2006 to 2010, compared with the previous five years.
State Department figures show that Mexicans who have become American citizens have legally brought in 64 percent more immediate relatives, 220,500 from 2006 through 2010, compared with the figures for the previous five years. Tourist visas are also being granted at higher rates of around 89 percent, up from 67 percent, while American farmers have legally hired 75 percent more temporary workers since 2006.
Edward McKeon, the top American official for consular affairs in Mexico, said he had focused on making legal passage to the United States easier in an effort to prevent people from giving up and going illegally. He has even helped those who were previously illegal overcome bans on entering the United States.
“If people are trying to do the right thing,” Mr. McKeon said, “we need to send the signal that we’ll reward them.”
Hard Years in Jalisco
When Angel Orozco’s grandfather considered leaving Mexico in the 1920s, his family said, he wrestled with one elemental question: Will it be worth it?
At that point and for decades to come, yes was the obvious answer. In the 1920s and ’30s — when Paul S. Taylor came to Jalisco from California for his landmark study of Mexican emigration — Mexico’s central highlands promised little more than hard living. Jobs were scarce and paid poorly. Barely one of three adults could read. Families of 10, 12 and even 20 were common, and most children did not attend school.
Comparatively, the United States looked like a dreamland of technology and riches: Mr. Taylor found that the wages paid by the railroads, where most early migrants found legal work, were five times what could be earned on farms in Arandas, the municipality that includes Agua Negra.
Orozco family members still talk about the benefits of that first trip. Part of the land the extended family occupies today was purchased with American earnings from the 1920s. When Angel’s father, Antonio, went north to pick cotton in the 1950s and ’60s with the Bracero temporary worker program, which accepted more than 400,000 laborers a year at its peak, working in the United States made even more sense. The difference in wages had reached 10 to 1. Arandas was still dirt poor.
Antonio, with just a few years of schooling, was one of many who felt that with a back as strong as a wooden church door, he could best serve his family from across the border.
“I sent my father money so he could build his house,” Antonio said.
Legal status then meant little. After the Bracero program ended in 1964, Antonio said, he crossed back and forth several times without documentation. Passage was cheap. Work lasting for a few months or a year was always plentiful. So when his seven sons started to become adults in the 1990s, he encouraged them to go north as well. Around 2001, he and two of his sons were all in the United States working — part of what is now recognized as one of the largest immigration waves in American history.
But even then, illegal immigration was becoming less attractive. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration added fences and federal agents to what were then the main crossing corridors beyond Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. The enforcement push, continued by President George W. Bush and President Obama, helped drive up smuggling prices from around $700 in the late 1980s to nearly $2,000 a decade later, and the costs continued to climb, according to research from the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. It also shifted traffic to more dangerous desert areas near Arizona.
Antonio said the risks hit home when his nephew Alejandro disappeared in the Sonoran Desert around 2002. A father of one and with a pregnant wife, Alejandro had been promised work by a friend. It took years for the authorities to find his body in the arid brush south of Tucson. Even now, no one knows how he died.
But for the Orozcos, border enforcement was not the major deterrent. Andrés Orozco, 28, a middle son who first crossed illegally in 2000, said that while rising smuggling costs and border crime were worries, there were always ways to avoid American agents. In fact, while the likelihood of apprehension has increased in recent years, 92 to 98 percent of those who try to cross eventually succeed, according to research by Wayne A. Cornelius and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego.
A Period of Progress
Another important factor is Mexico itself. Over the past 15 years, this country once defined by poverty and beaches has progressed politically and economically in ways rarely acknowledged by Americans debating immigration. Even far from the coasts or the manufacturing sector at the border, democracy is better established, incomes have generally risen and poverty has declined.
Here in Jalisco, a tequila boom that accelerated through the 1990s created new jobs for farmers cutting agave and for engineers at the stills. Other businesses followed. In 2003, when David Fitzgerald, a migration expert at the University of California, San Diego, came to Arandas, he found that the wage disparity with the United States had narrowed: migrants in the north were collecting 3.7 times what they could earn at home.
That gap has recently shrunk again. The recession cut into immigrant earnings in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, even as wages have risen in Mexico, according to World Bank figures. Jalisco’s quality of life has improved in other ways, too. About a decade ago, the cluster of the Orozco ranches on Agua Negra’s outskirts received electricity and running water. New census data shows a broad expansion of such services: water and trash collection, once unheard of outside cities, are now available to more than 90 percent of Jalisco’s homes. Dirt floors can now be found in only 3 percent of the state’s houses, down from 12 percent in 1990.
Still, education represents the most meaningful change. The census shows that throughout Jalisco, the number of senior high schools or preparatory schools for students aged 15 to 18 increased to 724 in 2009, from 360 in 2000, far outpacing population growth. The Technological Institute of Arandas, where Angel studies engineering, is now one of 13 science campuses created in Jalisco since 2000 — a major reason professionals in the state, with a bachelor’s degree or higher, also more than doubled to 821,983 in 2010, up from 405,415 in 2000.
Similar changes have occurred elsewhere. In the poor southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, for instance, professional degree holders rose to 525,874 from 244,322 in 2000.
And the data from secondary schools like the one the Orozcos attended in Agua Negra suggests that the trend will continue. Thanks to a Mexican government program called “schools of quality” the campus of three buildings painted sunflower yellow has five new computers for its 71 students, along with new books.
Teachers here, in classrooms surrounded by blue agave fields, say that enrollment is down slightly because families are having fewer children, and instead of sending workers north, some families have moved to other Mexican cities — a trend also found in academic field research. Around half the students now move on to higher schooling, up from 30 percent a decade ago.
“They’re identifying more with Mexico,” said Agustín Martínez González, a teacher. “With more education, they’re more likely to accept reality here and try to make it better.”
Some experts agree. Though Mexicans with Ph.D.’s tend to leave for bigger paychecks abroad, “if you have a college degree you’re much more likely to stay in Mexico because that is surely more valuable in Mexico,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.
If these trends — particularly Mexican economic growth — continue over the next decade, Mr. Passel said, changes in the migration dynamic may become even clearer. “At the point where the U.S. needs the workers again,” he said, “there will be fewer of them.”
Praying for Papers
The United States, of course, has not lost its magnetic appeal. Illegal traffic from Central America has not dropped as fast as it has from Mexico, and even in Jalisco town plazas are now hangouts for men in their 30s with tattoos, oversize baseball caps and a desire to work again in California or another state. Bars with American names — several have adopted Shrek — signal a back and forth that may never disappear.
But more Mexicans are now traveling legally. Several Orozco cousins have received temporary worker visas in the past few years. In March, peak migration season for Jalisco, there were 15 people from Agua Negra at the border waiting to cross.
“And 10 had visas,” said Ramón Orozco, 30, another son of Antonio who works in the town’s government office after being the first in his family to go to college. “A few years ago there would have been 100, barely any with proper documents.”
This is not unique to Agua Negra. A few towns away at the hillside shrine of St. Toribio, the patron saint of migrants, prayers no longer focus on asking God to help sons, husbands or brothers crossing the desert. “Now people are praying for papers,” said María Guadalupe, 47, a longtime volunteer.
How did this happen?
Partly, emigrants say, illegal life in the United States became harder. Laws restricting illegal immigrants’ rights or making it tougher for employers to hire them have passed in more than a dozen states since 2006. The same word-of-mouth networks that used to draw people north are now advising against the journey. “Without papers all you’re thinking about is, when are the police going to stop you or what other risks are you going to face,” said Andrés Orozco.
Andrés, a horse lover who drives a teal pickup from Texas, is one of many Orozcos now pinning their hopes on a visa. And for the first time in years, the chances have improved.
Mexican government estimates based on survey data show not just a decrease in migration overall, but also an increase in border crossings with documents. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, 38 percent of the total attempted crossings, legal and illegal, were made with documents. In 2007, only 20 percent involved such paperwork.
The Mexican data counts attempted crossings, not people, and does not differentiate between categories of visas. Nor does it mention how long people stayed, nor whether all the documents were valid.
Advocates of limited immigration worry that the issuing of more visas creates a loophole that can be abused. Between 40 and 50 percent of the illegal immigrants in the United States entered legally with visas they overstayed, as of 2005, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
More recent American population data, however, shows no overall increase in the illegal Mexican population. That suggests that most of the temporary visas issued to Mexicans — 1.1 million in 2010 — are being used legitimately even as American statistics show clearly that visa opportunities have increased.
Easing a Chaotic Process
One man, Mr. McKeon, the minister counselor who oversees all consular affairs in Mexico, has played a significant role in that expansion.
A lawyer with a white beard and a quick tongue, Mr. McKeon arrived in the summer of 2007. And after more than 30 years working in consular affairs in China, Japan and elsewhere, he quickly decided to make changes in Mexico. Working within administrative rules, State Department officials say, he re-engineered the visa program to de-emphasize the affordability standard that held that visas were to be denied to those who could not prove an income large enough to support travel to the United States.
In a country where a person can cross the border with a 25-cent toll, Mr. McKeon said, the income question was irrelevant. “You have to look at everyone individually,” he said in an interview at his office in Mexico City. “I don’t want people to say, here’s the income floor, over yes, lower no.”
This led to an almost immediate decrease in the rejection rate for tourist visas. Before he arrived, around 32 percent were turned down. Since 2008, the rate has been around 11 percent.
Mr. McKeon — praised by some immigration lawyers for bringing consistency to a chaotic process — was also instrumental in expanding the temporary visa program for agricultural workers. Called H-2A, this is one of the few visa categories without a cap.
Around 2006, as the debate over immigration became more contentious, employers concentrated in the Southeast began applying for more workers through the program. Mr. McKeon began hosting conferences with all the stakeholders and deployed new technology and additional staff members. The waiting time for several visa categories decreased, government reports show. For H-2As, Mexican workers can now receive their documents the same day that they apply.
Mr. McKeon also pushed to make the program more attractive to Mexicans who might otherwise cross the border illegally. Two years ago, he eliminated a $100 visa issuance fee that was supposed to be covered by employers but was usually paid by workers. And he insisted that his staff members change their approach with Mexicans who had previously worked illegally in the United States.
“The message used to be, if you were working illegally, lie about it or don’t even try to go legally because we won’t let you,” said one senior State Department official. “What we’re saying now is, tell us you did it illegally, be honest and we’ll help you.”
Specifically, consulate workers dealing with H-2A applicants who were once illegal — making them subject to 3- or 10-year bans depending on the length of their illegal stay — now regularly file electronic waiver applications to the United States Customs and Border Patrol. About 85 percent of these are now approved, Mr. McKeon said, so that in 2010 most of the 52,317 Mexican workers with H-2A visas had previously been in the United States illegally.
“It’s not easy to go through this process,” Mr. McKeon said, “and I think people who are willing to go through all of that and risk going back to the United States where they have to pay taxes, and withholding, I think we should look favorably on them.”
Speaking as the son of a New Jersey plumber, he added: “My bias is toward people who sweat at work because I really think that’s the backbone of our country. With limited resources, I’d rather devote our efforts to keeping out a drug kingpin than trying to find someone who works a couple of months at Cousin Hector’s body shop.”
A Divisive Topic
In the heated debate over immigration, however, this topic is inevitably divisive. Pro-immigrant groups, when told of the expansion to legal immigration, say it still may not be enough in a country where the baby boomers are retiring in droves.
Farmers still complain that the H-2A visa program is too complicated and addresses only a portion of the total demand. As of 2010, there were 1,381,896 Mexicans still waiting for their green-card applications to be accepted or rejected. And the United States currently makes only 5,000 green cards annually available worldwide for low-wage workers to immigrate permanently; in recent years, only a few of those have gone to Mexicans.
On the other side, Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors reduced immigration, said that increasing the proportion of legal entries did little good.
“If you believe there is significant job competition at the bottom end of the labor market, as I do, you’re not fixing the problem,” Mr. Camarota said. “If you are concerned about the fiscal cost of unskilled immigration and everyone comes in on temporary visas and overstays, or even if they don’t, the same problems are likely to apply.”
By his calculations, unskilled immigrants like the Orozcos have, over the years, helped push down hourly wages, especially for young, unskilled American workers. Immigrants are also more likely to rely on welfare, he said, adding to public costs.
The Orozco clan, however, may point to a different future. Angel Orozco, like many other young Mexicans, now talks about the United States not as a place to earn money, but rather as a destination for fun and spending.
Today he is just a lanky, shy freshman wearing a Daughtry T-shirt and living in a two-room apartment with only a Mexican flag and a rosary for decoration.
But his dreams are big and local. After graduating, he said, he hopes to work for a manufacturing company in Arandas, which seems likely because the director of his school says that nearly 90 percent of graduates find jobs in their field. Then, Angel said, he will be able to buy what he really wants: a shiny, new red Camaro.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/06/world/americas/immigration.html
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Binational effort helps rescue border fence mural
Nogales International
June 21, 2011
by Jonathan Clark
A community mural painted on the border wall separating the U.S. and Mexico was saved from the scrap heap last week through a binational effort, and an artist who was integral to its creation and salvation says he hopes the artwork, which represents popular resistance, will one day rise again at its original location.
The 60-foot-long mural, titled “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla,” or “Life and Dreams of the Perla Ravine,” was painted by people from both sides of the border in 2005 on the Sonoran face of the landing-mat fence running through Ambos Nogales, a few hundred yards west of the DeConcini port.
It’s a replica of a mural painted in 1998 by Tzetzal Indians on the façade of the community center of Taniperla, Chiapas to represent their lives and dreams after declaring themselves part of an autonomous Zapatista revolutionary municipality. However, on April 11, 1998, a day after the mural and the autonomous municipality were inaugurated, the Mexican Army retook control of the town, destroyed the mural and jailed the man who had directed its creation, university professor Sergio Valdez.
Nogales, Sonora-based artist Guadalupe Serrano, who along with his creative partner Alberto Morackis brought Valdez to the border city for the re-creation project in 2005, said that after U.S. crews replacing the 2.8-mile-long landing-mat fence with a taller, stronger barrier reached the downtown area last month, city officials warned him that the “Vida y Sueños” replica might also be destroyed.
At the same time, he said, he learned that wheels had also begun to turn in Arizona in an effort to save the mural.
“What happened was that in Tucson, there’s an organization called the Sierra Club, and a guy from that organization named Dan Millis got in touch with Congressman Raul Grijalva,” Serrano said.
In a letter dated June 8, Millis, along with Kim Roseman of the K. Newby Gallery in Tubac, Susannah Castro of the Tubac Center of the Arts and Bob Phillips of the Santa Cruz Community Foundation, urged Grijalva to investigate the status of “Vida y Sueños” and other nearby fence art and iconic graffiti, “and act to ensure that these cultural resources are protected for future generations.”
Grijalva responded by dispatching staffer Ruben Reyes to coordinate with the Border Patrol (a Grijalva spokesman said the agency was “very cooperative”), who then worked with contractor Granite Construction to arrange a safe takedown and handover of the mural panels to Serrano.
Early last Thursday, Serrano and members of his art collective Taller Yonke (Junk Studio) showed up at the border fence with a trailer and some tools to dismantle and haul off the mural panels after a Granite Construction crane lifted them off their footing in the United States and laid them on the ground in Mexico.
“We saved the whole mural,” Serrano said. “There were just two pieces at the end that were already gone.”
The other nearby iconography – a mural depicting a loteria card version of the floating eye pyramid, an array of white crosses representing migrant deaths and painted slogans including “Fronteras: Cicatrices en la tierra” (“Borders: Scars on the Earth”) – were not so lucky.
“Those things were in another area, and by the time we realized what was happening, ‘La Migra’ had taken them away,” Serrano said.
There was another important object, not attached to the fence but mounted directly in front of it, that Serrano was able to save: a bust of his collaborator and fellow Taller Yonke founder Morackis, who died in December 2008 from pneumonia, two days short of his 50th birthday.
Border art
Serrano and Morackis began using the Nogales landing-mat fence as a forum for socially and politically conscious art in 2003 when they unveiled “Border Dynamics,” a steel-and-resin piece depicting four, 14-foot human figures pushing against the wall. The artists initially hoped to place the figures on both sides of the fence, but the Border Patrol nixed the plan on the U.S. side, citing security concerns.
The University of Arizona later purchased “Border Dynamics” and displayed it on the campus mall in Tucson before moving it to an area next to the school’s Harvill building.
In March 2004, the artists mounted another provocative piece on the south side of the fence: a series of aluminum human figures and symbols called “Paseo de Humanidad,” or “Parade of Humanity.” Created in collaboration with Tucson-based artist Alfred J. Quiroz, the work represented the suffering of Mexican migrants as they traveled to and from the United States.
But as Serrano noted, “Border Dymanics” and “Paseo de Humanidad” were temporary exhibits at the Nogales fence. The “Vida y Sueños” mural was permanently affixed to it.
The idea for the mural project, he said, came when he met Valdez during a trip to Mexico City. Serrano knew the history of the original mural, and how communities from South America to Europe had re-created it in public spaces as a show of solidarity and resistance. So he asked Valdez to help with a re-creation on the border wall in Nogales, “for what the mural means and what the wall represents,” he said.
Aided by a patron in Hermosillo and an art collective called La Linea, Serrano and Morackis invited people from across Sonora and Southern Arizona to paint the mural in the spring of 2005.
“The only thing we did was coordinate the project,” Serrano said. “We didn’t participate in the painting – all we really did was get the paint ready and coordinate.”
The centerpiece of the colorful painting is a depiction of two doves holding banners reading “Chiapas,” “Peace” and “Mexico,” as a campesino man and woman walk toward them. Above, Emiliano Zapata, the land-reform hero of the Mexican Revolution, rides a horse and sports a bandana reading, “La tierra es de quien la trabaja,” or “The land belongs to the person who works it.”
Other images show an idyllic riverside village where people work the land and hold community meetings as ski mask-clad Zapatista guerrillas stand at the ready on nearby hillsides.
The mural’s political imagery perhaps didn’t have an immediate connection to Nogales and its border wall, Serrano said, but the history of its creation and the efforts to re-create it did.
“More than anything, it was that it was a form of resistance and a representation of what the community could accomplish,” he said. “The social issues don’t have a lot of direct relevance here, but as a representation of civil resistance, that makes it significant.”
Grijalva said the cross-border community effort that created it in Nogales, Sonora also made the local version of the mural significant, and worth saving.
“This mural tells the story of our border community just as strongly as any words,” the congressman said. “One day we’ll look back on this work of art and thank ourselves for preserving it when we had the chance.”
Future plans
As for the future, Serrano said, once the fence construction project finishes, he plans to return the bust of Morackis to its original spot in the border-side strip at the intersection of Internacional and Fenochio streets that’s informally known as the Espacio Cultural Binacional Alberto Morackis.
He’d like to mount “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla” there as well, against the newer, bigger border barrier that replaced its original canvas.
“We’re going to wait for them to conclude the work, and then we’re going to have to talk with the Border Patrol to see if we'll be able to install it there again,” Serrano said, though he noted there may be resistance to the idea, since one of the reasons for the new, interconnected-pole fence was to allow Border Patrol agents to see clearly into Sonora.
“We’re going to talk with them to see if there’s any way that we can install it. If not,” he said, “we'll look for some other space to display it here in the city.”
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2011/06/21/news/doc4e00b7fbc8aa4830128705.txt
June 21, 2011
by Jonathan Clark
A community mural painted on the border wall separating the U.S. and Mexico was saved from the scrap heap last week through a binational effort, and an artist who was integral to its creation and salvation says he hopes the artwork, which represents popular resistance, will one day rise again at its original location.
The 60-foot-long mural, titled “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla,” or “Life and Dreams of the Perla Ravine,” was painted by people from both sides of the border in 2005 on the Sonoran face of the landing-mat fence running through Ambos Nogales, a few hundred yards west of the DeConcini port.
It’s a replica of a mural painted in 1998 by Tzetzal Indians on the façade of the community center of Taniperla, Chiapas to represent their lives and dreams after declaring themselves part of an autonomous Zapatista revolutionary municipality. However, on April 11, 1998, a day after the mural and the autonomous municipality were inaugurated, the Mexican Army retook control of the town, destroyed the mural and jailed the man who had directed its creation, university professor Sergio Valdez.
Nogales, Sonora-based artist Guadalupe Serrano, who along with his creative partner Alberto Morackis brought Valdez to the border city for the re-creation project in 2005, said that after U.S. crews replacing the 2.8-mile-long landing-mat fence with a taller, stronger barrier reached the downtown area last month, city officials warned him that the “Vida y Sueños” replica might also be destroyed.
At the same time, he said, he learned that wheels had also begun to turn in Arizona in an effort to save the mural.
“What happened was that in Tucson, there’s an organization called the Sierra Club, and a guy from that organization named Dan Millis got in touch with Congressman Raul Grijalva,” Serrano said.
In a letter dated June 8, Millis, along with Kim Roseman of the K. Newby Gallery in Tubac, Susannah Castro of the Tubac Center of the Arts and Bob Phillips of the Santa Cruz Community Foundation, urged Grijalva to investigate the status of “Vida y Sueños” and other nearby fence art and iconic graffiti, “and act to ensure that these cultural resources are protected for future generations.”
Grijalva responded by dispatching staffer Ruben Reyes to coordinate with the Border Patrol (a Grijalva spokesman said the agency was “very cooperative”), who then worked with contractor Granite Construction to arrange a safe takedown and handover of the mural panels to Serrano.
Early last Thursday, Serrano and members of his art collective Taller Yonke (Junk Studio) showed up at the border fence with a trailer and some tools to dismantle and haul off the mural panels after a Granite Construction crane lifted them off their footing in the United States and laid them on the ground in Mexico.
“We saved the whole mural,” Serrano said. “There were just two pieces at the end that were already gone.”
The other nearby iconography – a mural depicting a loteria card version of the floating eye pyramid, an array of white crosses representing migrant deaths and painted slogans including “Fronteras: Cicatrices en la tierra” (“Borders: Scars on the Earth”) – were not so lucky.
“Those things were in another area, and by the time we realized what was happening, ‘La Migra’ had taken them away,” Serrano said.
There was another important object, not attached to the fence but mounted directly in front of it, that Serrano was able to save: a bust of his collaborator and fellow Taller Yonke founder Morackis, who died in December 2008 from pneumonia, two days short of his 50th birthday.
Border art
Serrano and Morackis began using the Nogales landing-mat fence as a forum for socially and politically conscious art in 2003 when they unveiled “Border Dynamics,” a steel-and-resin piece depicting four, 14-foot human figures pushing against the wall. The artists initially hoped to place the figures on both sides of the fence, but the Border Patrol nixed the plan on the U.S. side, citing security concerns.
The University of Arizona later purchased “Border Dynamics” and displayed it on the campus mall in Tucson before moving it to an area next to the school’s Harvill building.
In March 2004, the artists mounted another provocative piece on the south side of the fence: a series of aluminum human figures and symbols called “Paseo de Humanidad,” or “Parade of Humanity.” Created in collaboration with Tucson-based artist Alfred J. Quiroz, the work represented the suffering of Mexican migrants as they traveled to and from the United States.
But as Serrano noted, “Border Dymanics” and “Paseo de Humanidad” were temporary exhibits at the Nogales fence. The “Vida y Sueños” mural was permanently affixed to it.
The idea for the mural project, he said, came when he met Valdez during a trip to Mexico City. Serrano knew the history of the original mural, and how communities from South America to Europe had re-created it in public spaces as a show of solidarity and resistance. So he asked Valdez to help with a re-creation on the border wall in Nogales, “for what the mural means and what the wall represents,” he said.
Aided by a patron in Hermosillo and an art collective called La Linea, Serrano and Morackis invited people from across Sonora and Southern Arizona to paint the mural in the spring of 2005.
“The only thing we did was coordinate the project,” Serrano said. “We didn’t participate in the painting – all we really did was get the paint ready and coordinate.”
The centerpiece of the colorful painting is a depiction of two doves holding banners reading “Chiapas,” “Peace” and “Mexico,” as a campesino man and woman walk toward them. Above, Emiliano Zapata, the land-reform hero of the Mexican Revolution, rides a horse and sports a bandana reading, “La tierra es de quien la trabaja,” or “The land belongs to the person who works it.”
Other images show an idyllic riverside village where people work the land and hold community meetings as ski mask-clad Zapatista guerrillas stand at the ready on nearby hillsides.
The mural’s political imagery perhaps didn’t have an immediate connection to Nogales and its border wall, Serrano said, but the history of its creation and the efforts to re-create it did.
“More than anything, it was that it was a form of resistance and a representation of what the community could accomplish,” he said. “The social issues don’t have a lot of direct relevance here, but as a representation of civil resistance, that makes it significant.”
Grijalva said the cross-border community effort that created it in Nogales, Sonora also made the local version of the mural significant, and worth saving.
“This mural tells the story of our border community just as strongly as any words,” the congressman said. “One day we’ll look back on this work of art and thank ourselves for preserving it when we had the chance.”
Future plans
As for the future, Serrano said, once the fence construction project finishes, he plans to return the bust of Morackis to its original spot in the border-side strip at the intersection of Internacional and Fenochio streets that’s informally known as the Espacio Cultural Binacional Alberto Morackis.
He’d like to mount “Vida y Sueños de la Cañada Perla” there as well, against the newer, bigger border barrier that replaced its original canvas.
“We’re going to wait for them to conclude the work, and then we’re going to have to talk with the Border Patrol to see if we'll be able to install it there again,” Serrano said, though he noted there may be resistance to the idea, since one of the reasons for the new, interconnected-pole fence was to allow Border Patrol agents to see clearly into Sonora.
“We’re going to talk with them to see if there’s any way that we can install it. If not,” he said, “we'll look for some other space to display it here in the city.”
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2011/06/21/news/doc4e00b7fbc8aa4830128705.txt
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Fence coming down in town
Nogales International
May 27, 2011
by Hank Stephenson
The old sheet-metal border fence in downtown Nogales is being torn down and being replaced by a see-through, bollard-style fence, but some people on both sides of the border are having a hard time seeing the difference.
The 2.8-mile, $11.6 million project, which Granite Construction has been building on the outskirts of town since March, broke ground in the heart of downtown on Tuesday, leaving a gaping hole just west of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry and a lot of questions in the minds of residents.
To the Border Patrol, the difference is the new fence is stronger, taller above ground and deeper below ground, and, most importantly, agents can see through it to threats that may be waiting on the other side.
“Rockings” are a constant problem and agents at the Nogales Station were victims to 300 rock-throwing assaults last year, according to the Border Patrol. Or, as one agent put it, “any agent worth his salt has been rocked.”
The Border Patrol hopes the new fence will discourage people from assaulting the agents because they will now be able to see their assailants and fight back with non-lethal pepper ball guns.
But to Robert Castro, a pharmacy employee in Plaza de Pesquiera, located just west of the DeConcini port and with a clear view of the border barrier, the type of fence doesn’t matter much.
“What difference does it make?” he asked while watching the old fence being torn down by a backhoe and a bulldozer. “It’s still a wall.”
Castro said he initially thought the construction signaled a new port was being built to help ease the long lines he sees snaking south through the plaza and in front of his shop. When he found out it was just a new, see-through fence, he said, he thought, well, maybe now he can waive to his friends on the other side.
Carmen Villanueva, a life-long resident of Nogales, Ariz., who was born here in 1922, said she remembers the days when the fence was nothing more formal than the chain link fence in her yard now.
She said the landing-mat fence is “ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. Just ugly.” But that doesn’t mean she thinks the government should be spending the money to build a new one.
“That’s tough that they can’t see through this one, they should have thought about that when they built it," she said. “We don’t need to spend that money to build a new one. Someone needs to tell that to Uncle Sam.”
In the end, Villanueva said, it's not going to stop anyone from coming to the United States and seeking a better life, as her parents did in 1918.
“I don’t care what type of fence they build,” she said. “Those people who are determined to cross will. They might die in the process, but they’ll keep crossing.”
In the dark
Businessmen on the U.S. side of the border also have some confusion as to what the project entails.
Greg Kory, owner of Kory’s Department Store, said he understood that Border Patrol contractors would be tearing down the beige decorative wall in the downtown area – a move he opposed. When he found out the concrete wall would remain intact through construction and only the steel fence would be replaced, he was relieved.
“I’m glad to know the concrete one is staying because it’s the better one of the two,” he said. “As far as the landing-mat fence, I think the new one they’re putting in is better looking.”
Kory, whose store faces the border on the corner of Morley and Robbins avenues, said he had had no contact from Border Patrol regarding the project.
Border Patrol just finished construction on a staircase on the corner, and Kory isn’t excited to see more construction tying up traffic in the area, he said. But his real complaint is that the wall is another sign that the government is willing to spend money keeping people out, but not invest a way to bring more legitimate travelers in to the state.
“I don’t put a whole lot of importance on the fence exactly, but I think or government should work on trying to put out a welcome to Mexico instead of putting up a barrier,” he said. “We’re all very much affected by them not coming http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbecause it’s a hassle to cross the line.”
Back across the line, Simon Castillo, another pharmacy employee in Nogales, Sonora, looked through the 20-yard gap in the fence at the construction workers, Border Patrol agents and private security hired for the project. Castillo said it was hard to say if a new fence would be a good or bad thing, but he was sure of one thing: He liked the new view of the United States.
“It’s been many years with no view like that,” he said
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2011/05/27/news/doc4ddfc0ece0a8b942915330.txt
May 27, 2011
by Hank Stephenson
The old sheet-metal border fence in downtown Nogales is being torn down and being replaced by a see-through, bollard-style fence, but some people on both sides of the border are having a hard time seeing the difference.
The 2.8-mile, $11.6 million project, which Granite Construction has been building on the outskirts of town since March, broke ground in the heart of downtown on Tuesday, leaving a gaping hole just west of the Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry and a lot of questions in the minds of residents.
To the Border Patrol, the difference is the new fence is stronger, taller above ground and deeper below ground, and, most importantly, agents can see through it to threats that may be waiting on the other side.
“Rockings” are a constant problem and agents at the Nogales Station were victims to 300 rock-throwing assaults last year, according to the Border Patrol. Or, as one agent put it, “any agent worth his salt has been rocked.”
The Border Patrol hopes the new fence will discourage people from assaulting the agents because they will now be able to see their assailants and fight back with non-lethal pepper ball guns.
But to Robert Castro, a pharmacy employee in Plaza de Pesquiera, located just west of the DeConcini port and with a clear view of the border barrier, the type of fence doesn’t matter much.
“What difference does it make?” he asked while watching the old fence being torn down by a backhoe and a bulldozer. “It’s still a wall.”
Castro said he initially thought the construction signaled a new port was being built to help ease the long lines he sees snaking south through the plaza and in front of his shop. When he found out it was just a new, see-through fence, he said, he thought, well, maybe now he can waive to his friends on the other side.
Carmen Villanueva, a life-long resident of Nogales, Ariz., who was born here in 1922, said she remembers the days when the fence was nothing more formal than the chain link fence in her yard now.
She said the landing-mat fence is “ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly. Just ugly.” But that doesn’t mean she thinks the government should be spending the money to build a new one.
“That’s tough that they can’t see through this one, they should have thought about that when they built it," she said. “We don’t need to spend that money to build a new one. Someone needs to tell that to Uncle Sam.”
In the end, Villanueva said, it's not going to stop anyone from coming to the United States and seeking a better life, as her parents did in 1918.
“I don’t care what type of fence they build,” she said. “Those people who are determined to cross will. They might die in the process, but they’ll keep crossing.”
In the dark
Businessmen on the U.S. side of the border also have some confusion as to what the project entails.
Greg Kory, owner of Kory’s Department Store, said he understood that Border Patrol contractors would be tearing down the beige decorative wall in the downtown area – a move he opposed. When he found out the concrete wall would remain intact through construction and only the steel fence would be replaced, he was relieved.
“I’m glad to know the concrete one is staying because it’s the better one of the two,” he said. “As far as the landing-mat fence, I think the new one they’re putting in is better looking.”
Kory, whose store faces the border on the corner of Morley and Robbins avenues, said he had had no contact from Border Patrol regarding the project.
Border Patrol just finished construction on a staircase on the corner, and Kory isn’t excited to see more construction tying up traffic in the area, he said. But his real complaint is that the wall is another sign that the government is willing to spend money keeping people out, but not invest a way to bring more legitimate travelers in to the state.
“I don’t put a whole lot of importance on the fence exactly, but I think or government should work on trying to put out a welcome to Mexico instead of putting up a barrier,” he said. “We’re all very much affected by them not coming http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbecause it’s a hassle to cross the line.”
Back across the line, Simon Castillo, another pharmacy employee in Nogales, Sonora, looked through the 20-yard gap in the fence at the construction workers, Border Patrol agents and private security hired for the project. Castillo said it was hard to say if a new fence would be a good or bad thing, but he was sure of one thing: He liked the new view of the United States.
“It’s been many years with no view like that,” he said
http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2011/05/27/news/doc4ddfc0ece0a8b942915330.txt
Monday, February 15, 2010
$57.7-million fence added to an already grueling illegal immigration route
February 15, 2009
Los Angeles Times
by Richard Marosi
Some question the cost, effectiveness and environmental effect of erecting a fence on Otay Mountain, where those who hiked three days up a steep, arid peak were often met by border agents anyway.
Reporting from San Diego - The border barrier dips and curves, zigs and zags, hugging the mountain's contours like a slimmed-down version of the Great Wall of China.
Among the costliest stretch of fencing ever built on the U.S.-Mexico border, the 3.6-mile wall of steel completed last fall is meant to block trafficking routes over Otay Mountain, just east of San Diego.
People seeking to enter the country illegally have hiked the scrub-covered, tarantula-infested peak for years, trying to get to roads leading to San Diego.
"We're no longer conceding this area to smugglers," said Jerome C. Conlin, a U.S. Border Patrol spokesman.
But critics are bewildered. Why, they ask, would people determined to scale a rugged, 3,500-foot peak be deterred by an 18-foot-high fence? They also point out that the Department of Homeland Security deemed it unnecessary in 2006.
"I think it's a Bush-era boondoggle that will have almost no consequence in terms of stemming the flow of immigration," said Char Miller, director of the environmental analysis program at Pomona College. "It was a political decision that took in no account of the environment itself, and in the process damages what was once a pretty remarkable landscape."
The $57.7-million project is one segment in the massive expansion of border infrastructure approved by Congress during George W. Bush's presidency. Homeland Security has erected fencing in small towns, remote valleys and high-desert mesas from the Pacific Ocean to Texas.
At about $16 million a mile, the Otay Mountain barrier cost about four times as much as similar border fencing built during this expansion, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The Border Patrol's San Diego sector was already one of the country's most heavily fortified frontiers before the mountain fence was constructed, with about 40 of the sector's 60 miles lined with vehicle or pedestrian barriers.
The fencing shifted immigrant flows to remote areas in the backcountry east of San Diego. But some migrants decided to climb Otay Mountain because of its proximity to a warehouse district in San Diego and its easy access on the Mexican side, where the Tijuana-Tecate toll road lies only a few hundred yards away.
Immigrants dropped off at staging grounds off the toll road headed up steep trails into the U.S. Their hikes through canyons and over the arid peak could take up to three days. With limited road access on the mountain, agents simply waited for people to descend to make arrests.
The lack of fencing did not seem to be a problem, said then-U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Richard Kite, interviewed in a 2006 article in the Arizona Daily Star. At Otay Mountain, "you simply don't need a fence. It's such harsh terrain it's difficult to walk, let alone drive," Kite said. "There's no reason to disrupt the land when the land itself is a physical barrier."
The agency said it changed course after reevaluating conditions in the area. Daryl Reed, a current Border Patrol spokesman, said strategies are in constant flux depending on quickly shifting migrant flows and smuggler activity.
"As we continue in our mission, we're always reevaluating situations," Reed said. "We're always going to adapt and change."
One analyst suggested that pressure from Congress to complete about 700 miles of fence led federal officials to approve some questionable projects.
"There's no question that there's tactical justification for certain fencing, but when you set up a target like that, it inevitably means that they're going to build fencing where the tactical justification is weak, and this sounds like one of those places," said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But others doubted that border authorities would spend resources in an area that didn't need it.
"If there were other better places to build fencing, then I'm confident the Border Patrol would build it there," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
When the federal government broke ground last year, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, said the project would damage the Otay Mountain Wilderness. Portions of the fence and the 5-mile access road lie in the federally protected area.
The federal government, trying to expedite construction of border fencing, waived more than 30 environmental laws in 2008, including the Wilderness Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and others that environmentalists said applied to the Otay area.
Contractors had to cut roads, remove boulders, bulldoze hillsides and remove about 530,000 cubic yards of rock to build the Otay fence, which consists of steel posts 4 inches apart topped with metal plates.
It's not clear whether the fence has been a deterrent.
Since the barrier's completion in October, illegal activity has declined and there have been few signs of people trying to cut or breach the fence, authorities say.
"Having this fence here is definitely going to slow them down. . . . It increases our probability of catching them," said Conlin, the Border Patrol spokesman.
But others say the fence's effectiveness hasn't been truly tested because fewer immigrants have been attempting to cross anywhere on the border due to the economic slowdown.
The funding, they said, could have been better spent hiring more agents or building infrastructure in other areas.
When the economy improves, the mountain will once again draw immigrants, fence or no fence, said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego.
"It seems to me, if someone is able to climb the mountains in the Otay Wilderness, a 15-foot wall will not make a difference," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fence15-2010feb15,0,5691127.story
Los Angeles Times
by Richard Marosi
Some question the cost, effectiveness and environmental effect of erecting a fence on Otay Mountain, where those who hiked three days up a steep, arid peak were often met by border agents anyway.
Reporting from San Diego - The border barrier dips and curves, zigs and zags, hugging the mountain's contours like a slimmed-down version of the Great Wall of China.
Among the costliest stretch of fencing ever built on the U.S.-Mexico border, the 3.6-mile wall of steel completed last fall is meant to block trafficking routes over Otay Mountain, just east of San Diego.
People seeking to enter the country illegally have hiked the scrub-covered, tarantula-infested peak for years, trying to get to roads leading to San Diego.
"We're no longer conceding this area to smugglers," said Jerome C. Conlin, a U.S. Border Patrol spokesman.
But critics are bewildered. Why, they ask, would people determined to scale a rugged, 3,500-foot peak be deterred by an 18-foot-high fence? They also point out that the Department of Homeland Security deemed it unnecessary in 2006.
"I think it's a Bush-era boondoggle that will have almost no consequence in terms of stemming the flow of immigration," said Char Miller, director of the environmental analysis program at Pomona College. "It was a political decision that took in no account of the environment itself, and in the process damages what was once a pretty remarkable landscape."
The $57.7-million project is one segment in the massive expansion of border infrastructure approved by Congress during George W. Bush's presidency. Homeland Security has erected fencing in small towns, remote valleys and high-desert mesas from the Pacific Ocean to Texas.
At about $16 million a mile, the Otay Mountain barrier cost about four times as much as similar border fencing built during this expansion, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The Border Patrol's San Diego sector was already one of the country's most heavily fortified frontiers before the mountain fence was constructed, with about 40 of the sector's 60 miles lined with vehicle or pedestrian barriers.
The fencing shifted immigrant flows to remote areas in the backcountry east of San Diego. But some migrants decided to climb Otay Mountain because of its proximity to a warehouse district in San Diego and its easy access on the Mexican side, where the Tijuana-Tecate toll road lies only a few hundred yards away.
Immigrants dropped off at staging grounds off the toll road headed up steep trails into the U.S. Their hikes through canyons and over the arid peak could take up to three days. With limited road access on the mountain, agents simply waited for people to descend to make arrests.
The lack of fencing did not seem to be a problem, said then-U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Richard Kite, interviewed in a 2006 article in the Arizona Daily Star. At Otay Mountain, "you simply don't need a fence. It's such harsh terrain it's difficult to walk, let alone drive," Kite said. "There's no reason to disrupt the land when the land itself is a physical barrier."
The agency said it changed course after reevaluating conditions in the area. Daryl Reed, a current Border Patrol spokesman, said strategies are in constant flux depending on quickly shifting migrant flows and smuggler activity.
"As we continue in our mission, we're always reevaluating situations," Reed said. "We're always going to adapt and change."
One analyst suggested that pressure from Congress to complete about 700 miles of fence led federal officials to approve some questionable projects.
"There's no question that there's tactical justification for certain fencing, but when you set up a target like that, it inevitably means that they're going to build fencing where the tactical justification is weak, and this sounds like one of those places," said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But others doubted that border authorities would spend resources in an area that didn't need it.
"If there were other better places to build fencing, then I'm confident the Border Patrol would build it there," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
When the federal government broke ground last year, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, said the project would damage the Otay Mountain Wilderness. Portions of the fence and the 5-mile access road lie in the federally protected area.
The federal government, trying to expedite construction of border fencing, waived more than 30 environmental laws in 2008, including the Wilderness Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and others that environmentalists said applied to the Otay area.
Contractors had to cut roads, remove boulders, bulldoze hillsides and remove about 530,000 cubic yards of rock to build the Otay fence, which consists of steel posts 4 inches apart topped with metal plates.
It's not clear whether the fence has been a deterrent.
Since the barrier's completion in October, illegal activity has declined and there have been few signs of people trying to cut or breach the fence, authorities say.
"Having this fence here is definitely going to slow them down. . . . It increases our probability of catching them," said Conlin, the Border Patrol spokesman.
But others say the fence's effectiveness hasn't been truly tested because fewer immigrants have been attempting to cross anywhere on the border due to the economic slowdown.
The funding, they said, could have been better spent hiring more agents or building infrastructure in other areas.
When the economy improves, the mountain will once again draw immigrants, fence or no fence, said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego.
"It seems to me, if someone is able to climb the mountains in the Otay Wilderness, a 15-foot wall will not make a difference," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fence15-2010feb15,0,5691127.story
Saturday, October 31, 2009
5,100 crosses at Mexico border mark migrant deaths
Associated Press
October 30, 2009
TIJUANA, Mexico -- Rights activists in the norhtern Mexican border city of Tijuana have hung 5,100 small white crosses on the fence straddling the U.S, frontier to commemorate migrants who have died trying to cross.
The protest coincides with preparations for Mexico's Nov. 1 Day of the Dead holiday. The crosses represent the number of migrants estimated to have died in the 15 years since the nited States toughened border security.
The Coalition for the Defense of Migrants also erected a traditional floral offering for the dead.
The Mexican government estimates about 350,000 of its citizens migrate to the U.S. annually.
October 30, 2009
TIJUANA, Mexico -- Rights activists in the norhtern Mexican border city of Tijuana have hung 5,100 small white crosses on the fence straddling the U.S, frontier to commemorate migrants who have died trying to cross.
The protest coincides with preparations for Mexico's Nov. 1 Day of the Dead holiday. The crosses represent the number of migrants estimated to have died in the 15 years since the nited States toughened border security.
The Coalition for the Defense of Migrants also erected a traditional floral offering for the dead.
The Mexican government estimates about 350,000 of its citizens migrate to the U.S. annually.
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