Alien Crossings

...By refils42 October 2ooo _9 The American Spectator ing to fnnd serious crackdowns on companies known to hire filegals, it leaves the INS without the manpower necessary for such operations...

...Mark Krikorian of the Center for In;migration Studies blames not only the Clinton administration, but Congress as well-for not enforcing the very immigration laws it has passed...

...Historian Fred Siegel examines this prospect in his book, The Future Once Happened Here...

...Ranchers in both San Diego and Coehise Counties have reported seeing armed men on the U.S...

...In 1994 Silvester Reyes, then chief of the E1 Paso sector of the border patrol and now a U.S, congressman, devised a plan called Operation Blockade, later renamed Hold the Line...

...The stream of migrants, however, did not stop but simply flowed around Douglas, mainly to the west where ranch lands with water tanks and a network of roads facilitate this kind of mass smuggling operation...

...Its credo is "to presene and protect...

...S ome despair of ever getting control of the border...

...Mexico has strict immigration laws of its own and does not want aliens working illegally in the country...

...He then generally contributes to the ent 7 of others in the same way he himself has entered...

...The stream thus continues unabated...

...Some have drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River in Texas or the All America Canal in California...

...But the bigger problem is that internal enforcement of immigration laws under the Clinton administration has for all intents ceased...

...Roblcs finally told the authorities, "If you can't do anything about the trespassers, finer at least shoot the clogs so I can get some sleep...

...The majority of Americans favor immigration control...

...He recalls an armed standoffon the U.S...

...Indeed if you saw nothing but the litter you could well believe that a mass migration is underway...

...Once Hold the Line and Gatekeeper made crossing in urban areas more difficult, smugglers eventually identified Douglas as a corridor through which the trade could be channeled with much less risk...

...Some migrants, however, do not make it...

...side, then dash forward en masse in what were known as banzai runs...

...Illegal entrants were robbed every night and often raped and murdered by Mexican bandits and sometimes by Mexican policemen or criminals operating under their protection...

...border patrol apprehended 176,655 illegal aliens in the :l-mile Douglas section of the border alone...

...Where until recently unions backed immigration restrictions, they now favor amnesty for illegal workers, which only increases the flow of low-skilled workers north...

...They come in groups of well over a hundred, he says, the largest he has encountered numbering one hundred sixty-four...

...He also says that the massive influx of cheap labor from abroad drives down wages at the low end of the scale for both the native born and established immigrants...

...tcrcd neighborhoods x\ith litter...

...Besides the surging numbers Mrs...

...Throughout the 198o's and early 9o's the 14-mile stretch of border in San Diego was hostile, violent, and out of control...

...What transforms this legal abstraction into a real flesh and blood community is a common public culture, a common medium of discourse and a unifying collective identity...

...They first arrange a reception with friends and relatives in the U.S...

...The same individual may be apprehended more than once before finally getting in...

...The influx of illegal aliens into southern California, and its mounting cost to taxpayers, spawned a political reaction...

...For years this neglected zone was a dangerous no man's land known for its lawlessness and violence...

...On occasion they also use aliens as "mules" to carry drugs across the border in pa3anent for their passage...

...The ranchers complained about fences broken daily by crowds of migrants, about gates left open leaving cattle free to stray, about cattle that were killed, watchdogs 40 0 c t o b e r 2 o o o " The American Spectator poisoned, water tanks drained, buildings broken into, and property stolen...

...In all respects the current situation is simply not sustainable, and its adverse effects, says Borjas, "will not go away simply because some people do not wish to see them...

...Some believe that they are from the Mexican army acting in support of smugglers...

...Fearing they might all end up killed, he ran to the nearest house begging the rancher to call the police...

...They came i . groups all day long and in a steady stream throughout the night while dogs in town barked till dawn...

...tt was in El Paso, however, that the first attempt to regain control of the border was undertaken...

...The flavor of those violent times has been caught by Joseph Wambaugh in Lines" and Shadows, a factual account of border crime in the 197o's and of the special unit formed by the San Diego Police Department in a futile attempt to combat it...

...A modern nation is a community of citizens defined by common rights and obligations...

...iN The American Spectator _9 0 c t o b e r 2 o o o 43...

...They get stuck and the Park Sea, ice has to call tm~ tracks to remove the abandoned vehic]es, thus further damaging the environinent...

...What helps dine,, it, though, are networks created and maintained between expatriate communities in the U.S...

...Operation Hold the Lfne combined fences, technology, and close monitoring by agents stationed along the border...

...others have died ofcold in the mountains in winter or of dehydration in the desert...

...With public education failing both native-born minorities and middle-class families, the prospect is not good that public schools, the great engine of social change, will help the children of low-income immigrants overcome this handicap...

...Hardly a month goes by, he said, without some kind of incursion by Mexican police or military...

...One rancher estimates that the cost of constant repairs has run into tens of thousands of dollars...

...The result was a significant drop in illegal entry and other crimes in the E1 Paso area...

...All the while the Mexican press demonized the ranchers as "racist xenophobic vigilantes" who hunted down innocent Mexican migrants like animals...

...and their home towns and regions abroad...

...As the situation near Douglas worsened, some of the ranchers decided to take action on their own...

...San Diego was the most notorious, and it was in California that the volume eventually produced a political reaction...

...We pick it up by the hundreds...

...There too illegal entl 3, was sharply reduced and crime dropped, not only in the border zone itself but for the entire San Diego area...

...Green declared a "red alert," and the Mexican government hired Washington lawyers to look into the possibility of a civil suit against the ranchers...

...relatives or friends then contract with a smuggler not only for the border crossing itse]f, but also for safe houses and necessary transportation along the way...

...The plan has failed, however, mainly for lack of resources...

...These are well-armed men, some carrying fully automatic weapons...

...The risk that "the pressure of being trapped in low-wage work without the educational skills to eventually move to the high-wage sector," he writes, "will generate tremendous resentment over time...

...In the Clinton years, most agree, border control has given way to damage control...

...If all this is hard on the environment and on U.S...

...There is no accurate way of extrapolating from those figures how many people actually made it across, since for every 38 October 2000 _9 The American Spectator one illegal apprehended the border patrol estimates that three to five get away...

...border...

...The soldiers were detained but were later returned to Mexico along with their weapons...

...citizens affected by the mass smuggling of drugs and aliens...

...Where one supervisory agent in San Diego calls these shifts "crisis management," Larry Dever, sheriff of Cochise County, tenns them a shell game, with his county as the pea...

...In 1994, the same year as Proposition 187, the border patrol devised a comprehensive multi-phased plan to retake control of the border...

...Their lawyers demanded that the ranchers be prosecuted for false arrest, kidnapping, intimidation, criminal assault, violation of civil rights, in short anything lawyers can come up with to advance their clients' interests...

...The current cost for illegal entry is said to be $1,5oo a head...

...hrdeed "invasion" is a word frequently heard along the border, and official statistics show why...

...Agents and air surveillance units have also been transferred from the Canadian border to the southwest, leaving northern stations undemmnned and without the aircraft they need...

...William Wellman, superintendent of Organ Pipe, estimates that 40,000 to 80,000 illegals passed through the national memorial last }'ear...

...Once they get to the border they are helpless in a strange and hostile environment, often suffering from bandits on the Mexican side and sometimes abandoned on the U.S...

...Iu frustration X Irs...

...The problem is not one of race or nationality, but of violations of the rights of American citizens by an illegal enterprise acting in the United States from Mexican territory...

...Pete Wilson's flagging re-election campaign, eventually carrying him to victory...

...No longer were the migrants just men looking for work...

...The cost and bother of constant trespass and the fear of theft and burglary have meant that many rural people in Cochise County', where Douglas is located, are now arming themselves...

...Warning shots have been fired and many are worried that something worse might happen...

...authorities stray across the border into Mexico...

...Meanwhile, agents are transferred from San Diego on a rolling basis for thirty days' service in Arizona, thus weakening the San Diego sector...

...Larry Vance retorted that "the only rights that have been violated are those of American citizens whose privacy, property, and nation are invaded from Mexico...

...And everywhere there is the trash: piles of empty plastic water bones, food wrappers, dirty' diapers, clothing, feces, toilet paper, anything left by masses of people on the move...

...Ranchers and other rural property owners then began to experience what the rural population of eastern San Diego Count 3 , experienced a few years earlier...

...Jim Bellam), superintcndent of the Coronado National Memorial, says that the passage ofillegals in the park area has increased by some 300 percent in the last two }.'ears...

...It focused not on apprehension once illegals had crossed the border, but rather on deterring them from trying to cross in the firsf place...

...Whether they are or not, however, Mexican army units and armed police are frequently reported entering U.S...

...That's when I realized it was an invasion," she said...

...It is the second largest reservation in the country, with a population of a~,ooo scattered over a million square miles of scrub brush and tall, graceful Sahuaro cactus...

...As a result interior border-patrol sectors are closed down so that their personnel can be transferred south...

...Robles said sine frequently saw tlqem pass through town in pairs or in small groups...

...When hot spots erupt, such as in southern Arizona, the INS simply moves border patrol agents from other sectors to try to put a lid on the situation...

...who line up jobs for them and who often advance them the cost of the trip...

...Roger Barnett owns a 2z,ooo-acre ranch outside Douglas...

...The latest publicized incursion took place in March near Santa Teresa, New Mexico...

...R ural property owners in Cochise County are not the only U.S...

...Such an integrated and consistent policy would send the message through the migrant networks that illegal entry is risky and that apprehension is a strong possibility once across the border...

...What frightens the ranchers most, however, is not the aliens but rather drug smugglers...

...There are two national parks along the border in Arizona: the Coronado National Memorial in Cochise Count, which rtms nearly three and a haffcniles along the border, and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument adjacent to the Tohono O'odham reservation, which shares a 3>mile border with Mexico...

...Although most of the land is designated wilderness, Wellman told the Associated Press that "it's hard to go an}where and not see evidence of trash...

...In fact, his father came from Mexico in 1939, as did Olga Robles's grandparents in t9o 3. Indeed ma W residents of Cochise County are of Mexican descent...

...According to Krikorian, Republican Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, chairman of the Senate hnmigration Subcommittee, epitomizes this contradiction...

...Rosario Green, Mexico's foreign minister, voiced concern about the "intolerant expression of some American ranchers who promote the persecution of migrants along the border...

...Given incoherent enforcement and the obvious lack of will on the part of the federal government, smugglers easily detect where they can best direct the flow of migrants...

...The mass migration we are now experiencing, of which the influx ofillegals across the southern border is an important part, places tremendous strain on the nation so defined...

...Once established in this country and employed in some lowpaying job, the illegal alien usually lives frugally, often no better than at home, until he has paid offhis debt...

...Finally, there is the kind of bullying the Cochise County ranchers know so well, namely accusations of "racism" when the defense of one's rights is not politically correct, or when one challenges economic and political interest groups that exploit immigration in one way or another...

...Even worse, Congress actually interferes with the INS when it does try to enforce the taw...

...This opinion is echoed by other border patrol personnel and advocates of immigration reform...

...Ibhono O'odham Police ChiefSeligman says that his patrols have found people wearing street clothes and street shoes wandering helpless in the desert, who ran to police begging for water...

...As a commercial activity, alien smuggling is sensitive to the business climate...

...Ron Sanders, former Tucson border patrol section chief, while admitting to staffing problems in a booming economy and high attrition rates among border patrol agents, says that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has no commitment to enforcing border or imlnigration policy...

...A hundred miles further west lies the Tohono O'odham (formerly the Papago) Indian reservation, which shares a 71-mile border with Mexico...

...Mrs...

...He opposes illegal migration and advocates stricter border enforcement, but then does everything possible to assure that once aliens have run the gauntlet they can find jobs and remain unmolested in the U.S., thereby increasing the pull of the magnet north...

...Another effect of Gatekeeper, however, was that illegal migration simply flowed to the east beyond the reach of Gatekeeper, spilling into the eastern part of San Diego County,, thus creating problems for rural property owners there...

...But these measures would only work if backed up by mobiIe patrols behind the border and by interior enforcement...

...Expatriate communities serve to attract, support, and absorb newcomers, thus providing an important part of the magnet that pulls them north...

...Women and children are sometimes brought to the border in cattle trucks, and on the U.S...

...The international boundary in San Diego sharply separates the teeming residential sprawl of the Mexican city of Tijuana from the undeveloped canyons and ravines of the southern end of San Diego...

...It is thus time to begin a long overdue debate on a rational immigration policy for the United States...

...Official border-patrol figures show that migrant deaths along the southern border from October 1,1998 to July 21, 2ooo total 756...

...Larry Seligman is chief of the Tohono O'odham police...

...Those advantages, together with a lightly guarded border, turned unsuspecting DougIas in 1994 into the main crossing point of a massive and lucrative international smuggling operation...

...In 1998 the INS raided scattered farm laborers during onion harvest in Vidalia, Georgia...

...Like the ranchers of Cochise County, those Tohono O'odham living near the border are afraid to leave their homes for fear of break-ins, and those living along the migrant trails are disturbed by the crowds passing only yards from their homes, "violating The American Spectator _9 October 2000 41 their space" as Seligman puts it, and leaving the inevitable trail of trasln behind them...

...Like his counterparts in neighboring border communities he complains about the large numbers of illegals crossing his jurisdiction...

...Prospects for the progeny of immigrants at the low end of the income scale is bleak, Borjas argues, since the educational level of one generation affects that of subsequent generations...

...Then about two \ears ago the trickle swelled to a flood with groups of thirty to well over a hundred people at a time pouring across the border, hurrying through al]e\s,, through people's yards and between their houses, climbing over roofs and clanrbering over graves in the cemetery...

...Before 1994 the urban corridors of E1 Paso, Texas and San Diego, California accounted for two-thirds of the illegal entries...

...side by their guides, not knowing where they are, how to deal with the desert the)' must traverse, nor what to do next except walk northward in the murderous hundred-degree heat, hoping that far-offPhoenix lies just over the next hill...

...side of the border, military in appearance, dressed in black, and armed with automatic rifles...

...The border patrol, which apprehended a record 1.6 million illegal entrants in fiscal 1999, says it's "on pace" to exceed that number in fiscal zooo...

...In an economy in which cognitive skills, developed and honed by education, are increasingly important, the progeny of growing numbers of less-educated immigrants will place them at longterm disadvantage they may not overcome...

...One rancher near Douglas tells of a young illegal who knocked at a neighbor's door one night...

...Crowds would gather on the Tijuana side and pelt borderpatrol agents with rocks...

...Within days," Krikorian says, "both Georgia senators and three representatives wrote Attorney General Janet Reno fiercely criticizing the INS for 'lack of regard for farmers.'" Such "none-toosubtle messages" from Congress, Krikorian says, eventually put an end to INS worksite enforcement...

...At times they mingle with groups of aliens, or follow them for cover...

...187 in 1994 (with 59 pcrcent of the x otc) also resuscitated Gov...

...This includes half the Latino population...

...For Central Americans the cost and risk are even greater, since they must first illegally cross Mexico's southern border, and then clandestine]y travel the entire length of that country" before arriving at the U.S...

...In this sense, says historian Benedict Anderson, a modern nation is an "imagined community," the product of a sustained act on the part of millions of people to constantly imagine what they all have in common despite the otherwise tremendous internal diversity that is inherent in any population of that size...

...Ron Sanders was for five years the chief of the Tucson sector of the border patrol until his retirement in August r999...

...People all along the border call this the balloon effect: Squeeze it in one place and it bulges in m~other...

...Monument spokeswoman Mitzi Frank says that smugglers drive through the fragile desert in cars unsuited for the country...

...Instead, says Borjas, those effects will accumulate and in the long run their impact will be "much more perilous" than if we were to face them now...

...When caught, the alien sometimes suffers abuse at the hands of Mexican police that would not be tolerated in the U.S...

...The ~Ibhono O'odhalll revere the en\ ironmcnt, says Se]igman, and are especially-offended when thesee it defiled in this manner...

...Shots were sometimes fired across the border at patrolling agents, and almost daily thousands of Mexicans would gather on the U.S...

...still others are injured or die in accidents in overcrowded vans carrying them north from the border...

...side a]iens are often packed into vans like sardines...

...T he incentive for migration into the United States is the availabili~ of low-skill jobs here and poverty, low wages, and an expanding population in Mexico and Central America...

...Thus as migrant communities grow in the United States the magnet for illegal immigration becomes more powerful...

...In the first six months of this }ear, the U.S...

...Drug smugglers often use lonely and difficult trails through the mountains, or go on horseback through more remote parts of the desert...

...The National Park Seaice also reveres the environment...

...For years men have i]legall} crossed the border on their \va\-nortla looking for work...

...That figure will certainly have grown by summer's end...

...citizens, it can be far worse on the migrants themselves...

...That same year similar measures were taken in San Diego under the name of Operation Gatekeeper...

...All along the migrant routes vegetation is trampled and the soil is compacted resulting in scars to f/~c landscape that will last for centuries...

...Advocacy groups howled in protest, as did the Mexican government...

...Such large numbers not only threaten the reserve, he says, but in the case of drug smuggling, pose a potential hazard to visitors and park personnel...

...This means regular worksite inspection, worker validation, employer sanctions, and deportations...

...Border patrol agents use terms like "chaos" and "anarchy" to describe it, saying that they faced riot conditions every night...

...Illegal migrants do not simply show up at the border and then cross over...

...Thus we see the passage of restrictive laws and border shell games to keep the public quiet (no one of either party wants another Proposition 187), while at the same time underfunding enforcement and turning a blind eye so that business can continue as usual...

...The same public sentiment that assured an overwhelming victo D for Prop...

...In his recent book Heaven's Door, Borjas writes that the present wave of immigrants is less educated and at an income level lower than was the case of previous immigrants...

...The town lies on the Pan American Highway that connects the interiors of Mexico and the United States...

...This population transfer would not be possible without the existence of an organized and lucrative smuggling industry involving millions of dollars each year...

...The problem is further complicated by other t:actors...

...As one journalist observed, the authorities and citizens of that small border town were suddenly confronted by a "global population shift passing through their back yards" for which none of them was prepared...

...There was no official protest from Washington, even though firing on a U.S...

...It took the form of a popular initiative, Proposition 187, which would deny public services to anyone residing illegally in the The American Spectator _9 October 2000 39 state...

...I mmigration as it is now structured, not just illegal immigration, poses problems that we must face sooner or later...

...Vance emphasizes that nobody blames the aliens, nobody's mad at them, and nobody hates them...

...One is labor unions and their political backers...

...Sometimes shooting is involved...

...Cut down the flow ofillegals in E1 Paso or San Diego, and it moves to places like Douglas and from there to ranch lands and ever deeper into the desert beyond...

...Its "twin city," Agua Prieta on the Mexican side provides a convenient staging ground for illegal crossing...

...But according to think tank and government experts, since 1983 about half a million a year have managed to enter the United States illegally along the southern border...

...Robles noticed something else...

...Soon he and his brother Don, like his neighbor Larry Vance and others, began rounding up aliens on their property and holding them until the border patrol arrived to arrest them...

...We are thus threatened with the creation of"an immigrant driven underclass," the kind that will hinder assimilation into the mainstream and exacerbate tensions not only along economic and class lines, but along ethnic, racial, and perhaps linguistic lines as well...

...territory, a violation that evokes angry response when U.S...

...now there were women and children as well, whole families illegally crossing and streaming north...

...law officer is a felony offense...

...The result is what Krikorian describes as a pro-immigration and an anti-immigrant policy...

...side of the border between the Nogales police and the Mexican army...

...In other words, despite relief in the urban corridors the overall problem remains unsolved...

...Yet the addiction of American agriculture and some industries to cheap foreign labor creates contradictory interests within the country and an attempt by the government to cover both bases at once...

...The migrant or his U.S...

...And as more money is pumped into the smuggling enterprise, that illegal industry, continues to thrive and grow...

...The young man had slipped away from his group because its guide had forced them all to carry illicit drugs...

...They knocked down fences, trampled flowers and shrubs, and clutCLYNN CUSTRED is professor o( anthropology at California State University, Hayward...

...Others, however, are convinced the number ofillegals could be greatly reduced with the right combination offences, all-weather roads, technology, and adequate staffiilg adapted in different mixes to the different enviromnents of the border...

...The net effect, he says, is that we are currently importing poverty into the United States...

...In Douglas,_Arizona, a town ofls,ooo, there's been a sudden rise in taxi services...

...Faced with declining membership, unions now actively recruit among people they know' are here illegally...

...Two Mexican army Humvees penetrated more than a mile into the United States and fired on a mounted border patrolman and on a border-patrol vehicle...

...Then there is the "huddled masses" mindset, an abstracted and sentimentalized vision of immigration that places immigration beyond the reach of rational debate...

...Harvard economist George Borjas, himself an immigrant, provides some disturbing data...

...The mob scene through Douglas finally ceased once a strengthened and illuminated fence was erected, and once the border patrol had beefed up its presence in town...