In this entry I want to give a brief overview of immigration and the border for those of you that are not familiar with the topic or area. For those of you that are experts on these issues, I welcome you to comment and challenge my simplifications. I will include some citations for those of you that would like to read more, but I will base the majority of the information on observations that we have collected during interviews.
In the past, the process of unauthorized migration began in a small rural town in Central Mexico (Guanajuato, Michoacan, Jalisco etc.), where a local coyote would accompany a group of men through the border and to their destination in the U.S. Usually, there are one or two destinations based on the social contacts with migrants that have succeeded at finding employment in a specific city or town in the U.S. Some of this has changed recently. The local guide is not as common as it once was. Today, more migrants travel to the border region, knowing that they will be able to find a coyote or pollero as they are sometimes called, to take them into the U.S. When crossing the Arizona border, which has the highest number of undocumented crossers, most people come to Altar, Sonora to find a guide that will take them across the border. These professional guides offer a greater likelihood of crossing, but at greater expense and risk of foul play. For a good discussion on different types of border guides see Lopez (1998). Moreover, the migration stream has shifted farther south in Mexico to the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas, as well as a large increase in the number of women that are attempting to cross the desert. There are obviously multiple ways to cross, hidden in cargo or using fake documents for example, but, the vast majority of undocumented migrants cross through long treks in the desert. This is also a fairly new phenomenon. Border militarization started in the mid-1990's with Operation Gatekeeper, with goal of securing the cities and forcing people to cross in the more remote, dangerous desert areas.
Once a guide has been found, he informs people how long it will take to cross and what the experience will be like. There is almost always exaggeration or flat out lies aimed at convincing people that they would be better with him than with another guide. The most common promise is "one day and one night" of walking. Since there are many different meeting points where groups of migrants get picked up by vans and are driven to their subsequent destinations, the time it takes to cross can vary greatly. However, the crossing has been getting longer. People have been walking all the way from the border to Casas Grandes (about a hundred miles as the crow flies). This takes about 7 or 8, 16 hour days walking all night to avoid detection and the hot sun. Those that cannot keep up, due to exhaustion or injury are abandoned. Since people do not bring sufficient water, they look for it wherever possible, drinking from cattle troughs, windmills or puddles. There is also the added complication that few people are aware of the topography and the climate in the border region. It snows frequently atop the Arizona mountain ranges near the border during winter and 110 degree heat is all too common in the summer. Few people can be prepared for the immense variations in climate that occur each day because nights are significantly colder than the days in the desert. A 2007 report by the Comision Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (The Mexican Government Human Rights Commission) one migrant has died per day since the start of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. The worst year was 2005 when the Mexican government reported 516 deaths, and local humanitarian groups report 238 deaths in the Tucson sector alone.
Aside from the perils of the desert, migrants must be wary of bajadores, the bandits that roam the border. If a migrant is forced to make three or four crossing attempts due to apprehension by border patrol, robbery and assault are raised from a likelihood to near certainty. These bandits have been accused of forcing women to remove their clothes or worse. Bajadores always threaten people with weapons and inform people that if they fail to hand over all of their cash and sometimes food or necessary supplies, they will be killed. There is often a suspicion that the coyotes are collaborating with the bajadores so as to collect a portion of the money in return for bringing groups of migrants to the bandits.
If the group is successful and arrive in Phoenix, there is the risk of being kidnapped in a "safe house." These are apartments or houses in Phoenix where smuggling and drug running operations are based. Migrants are held, packed into tiny rooms, often thirty or forty to an apartment (based on my interviews and phoenix police reports). They are given very little food and water, while they wait for family members to pay a ransom. The people that I talked to who had this experience were forced to pay between two and three thousand USD for their release. This was on top of the price for the coyote. This is an issue that is hard to gauge because the only people I talk to that have had this experience are those that are rescued by ICE or were apprehended after paying the ransom. Since groups usually crossed in coordinated, staggered groups, if one is caught, those behind them often make it. I do not know how many of these kidnappings are taking place.
If the crossing is not a success and migrants are apprehended by the border patrol, they are taken to a processing center where they are held in a small cage, often kept at very cold temperatures for about 8-12 hours. If they are unlucky enough to be randomly selected to participate in a new program called operation streamline, they are sent to the federal courthouse to see a judge. The group of 80 - 100 people a shackled at the ankles, waist and wrists and filed into the grandiose courtroom where a judge lectures them on their rights to plead not-guilty, to the charge of entering the U.S. at a time or place not sanctioned by the U.S. government. Those that already have a criminal record are brought forward and incarcerated for anywhere from one month to two years at a prison, run by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company. Those that have no criminal record are then lectured, through simultaneous translation headsets, that they will be given a formal deportation and must plead guilty. Those that do not plead guilty are instructed to stand up at this time. No one stands. The chorus of "culpable" that echoes through the courtroom is contrasted by the eerie jangle of chains clanking together during the nervous movements of the scared and demoralized crowd. If anyone does not believe this description of mass trial in the U.S., federal courtrooms are open to the public so visit your local courtroom if you live by the border. They are doing this several times a day in most border cities. After the proceedings, the migrants are given a formal deportation, and are now considered criminals in the U.S. If they attempt to return they will be sentenced to anywhere from 30 to 180 days in jail depending on the district. In the past, most people received "voluntary departures" which was not a criminal offense and allowed people to keep trying and not be detained in jail, for the most part. Voluntary departures result in repatriations whereas criminal offenses result in deportations.
Next, the migrants are picked up by another private company, profiting from human misery called Wackenhut, that drives people back to the border in buses and dumps them on the streets of a strange city. For those that have had the misfortune of losing their identification cards in the process of immigration, they are unable to receive a wire transfer and must find someone to trust enough that they can put a transfer in his or her name without fear of the person running off with the money. Unfortunately, losing ID or the credencial electoral as it is known, is extremely common for people coming out of operation streamline.
Nogales receives the second largest amount of repatriations along the border, only surpassed by Tijuana. Since many people have been robbed or no longer have much money, they are in an extremely vulnerable position. There are few social services for repatriated migrants. In Nogales there is one overnight shelter, one soup kitchen and a government agency, Grupo Beta, that provides people with a 50% discount on a bus ticket back home and access to a phone. According to the Instituto Nacional de Migracion in Mexico (Mexican Immigration Services), there were 47,000 people repatriated to Nogales in the month of April. Officially, there are only 200,000 people living in Nogales (INEGI 2005) but, as you may well guess, this number is an underestimate. For people that do not know about these services or are turned away due to lack of resources or space, the city can be a dangerous place. Most of you are aware of the violent drug war that exacted a huge toll in lives this previous year. I have heard stories of people that have been repatriated being forced to carry drugs across, whereas others join willingly due to the need for money. Carrying about 80 lbs of marijuana into the U.S. in a backpack pays you $1800. However, collecting this money is another matter. One must keep doing jobs in order to collect this pay, causing people to get sucked farther and farther into the drug trade.
Some people are able to make their way back home, others try again and still others remain in the border region because there is a higher minimum wage in Northern Mexico and more jobs because of the established maquiladora/industrial sector. The flow of people into the border zone puts an enormous strain on cities that have experienced huge rates of growth in the past few decades. Housing is difficult to find. There are many informal settlements that lack adequate infrastructure such as water, sewage or electricity. Many of the long term residents of the border resent having a large amount of people deported to their doorstep that are essentially homeless and have little to no resources. This can cause clashes between locals and those that are trying to do something to help migrants. Last week a popular radio personality in a border town denounced the migrants and suggested that they be locked up immediately by the police when they arrive.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to give my interpretation of the necessary background information on immigration. I will undoubtedly challenge or complicate the majority of the statements that I made here. The border and undocumented crossing is constantly changing and evolving. It makes it hard for a researcher to come up with concrete answers. Our tools and medium for disseminating information is far too slow, whereas journalists are often too fast and fail to see the whole picture.
For more authors' research and interpretations on migration see Joseph Nevins, Josiah Heyman, Wayne Cornelius, Katherine Dauvergne and Douglas Massey to name a few. I cited Gustavo Lopez Castro - Coyotes and Alien Smuggling 1998.
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