Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (12 page)

According to the Human Rights Coalition report, “Migrants are typically captured on the trains themselves, or while waiting along the tracks. Groups of heavily armed persons approach the migrants, force them onto pickup trucks, and take them to safe houses. The kidnappings are carried out with unremitting brutality. In the ‘safe houses’ where they are held they suffer all kinds of tortures, cruel and inhuman treatment, and physical and psychological punishments, until their family in the United States (or in Central America) collects the money for their ransom.”
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Mexican government officials have also been heavily implicated in these abuses. The Mexican INAMI and state security forces carry out “migration verification operations” on the trains, sometimes using electric shock instruments. They detain some migrants, leaving others in the hands of the gangs or armed groups.
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While it might be tempting to simply blame this violence against migrants on Mexican actors, the situation really can’t be separated from its larger context: the criminalization of migrants by the United States, and its pressure on Mexico to enforce similar policies. While Mexico has publicly denounced US anti-immigrant policies, its government has also collaborated in many ways. US policies create a political context—illegality—that legitimizes abuses against migrants. The Bishop of Saltillo in northern Mexico articulated what many Mexicans and Central Americans believe: “My conclusion is that the Mexican government’s migration policies are aimed at preventing migrants from crossing into the United States. It is abundantly clear that the impunity enjoyed by organized crime, like that previously enjoyed by gangs, is a policy of terror.”
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A policy of terror that thrives in and serves the climate of criminalization of immigrants in their destination.

ON THE BORDER

Crossing the US-Mexico border used to be a rather mundane affair, as described in earlier chapters. With politicians pandering to (and fanning the flames of) the rising anti-immigrant climate inside the United States in the early 1990s, the border changed dramatically. Operation Hold the Line in El Paso in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in California in 1994 began today’s still-ongoing obsession with the border.
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In September 1993, the Border Patrol chief of the El Paso Sector, Silvestre Reyes, launched his new policy, a “highly visible show of force along a 20-mile section of the boundary dividing El Paso from Ciudad Juárez. Inspections at official ports of entry also intensified. The strategy represented a radical departure from the prior Border Patrol strategy of pursuing and apprehending unauthorized immigrants after they had crossed the boundary into the El Paso area.” Apprehensions quickly fell in this sector, not because overall border crossings declined, but because migrants simply shifted to new crossing points.
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Likewise, Operation Gatekeeper in California succeeded in deflecting migrant traffic away from the sixty-six-mile stretch known as the San Diego Sector of the border. Operation Gatekeeper included construction of a wall, massive deployment of Border Patrol agents along the border, stadium lighting, vehicles, sensors, and other equipment. Beginning at the Imperial Beach Station in the west and moving east, the Border Patrol hoped to bring the entire San Diego Sector “under full control” within five years.
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As in Texas, “control” did not mean that migrants stopped coming; they simply moved to other, much more treacherous entry points.

In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union and Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission on accused the US government of causing thousands of deaths at the border. “This report is the sounding of an alarm for a humanitarian crisis that has led to the death of more than 5,000 human beings,” they declared. The crisis was a direct result, they said, of US decisions: “The deaths of unauthorized migrants have been a predictable and inhumane outcome of border security policies on the US-Mexico border over the last fifteen years.” The new policies implemented by Gatekeeper, militarizing the more populated San Diego Sector, “intentionally forc[ed] undocumented immigrants to extreme environments and natural barriers that the government anticipated would increase the likelihood of injury and death.”
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To reach safety, migrants had to hike for miles over treacherous desert terrain, enduring the extreme heat of the days and cold of the nights. Few were able to carry enough water. As the death rate rose precipitously, “the chief cause of death shifted . . . from traffic fatalities to deaths from hypothermia, dehydration, and drowning.”
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The Arizona-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos has tallied the dead in the Arizona sector since 2000. Basing its figures on recovered remains, the organization noted that at least 100 to 300 have died each year, with the highest number, 282, being reached in 2006. Since many remains are not recovered, the actual death rates are considerably higher. The organization attributes the slight decline after that (down to 179 in 2011–2012) to lower numbers of total crossings.
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A GAO investigation in 2006 found that border-crossing deaths had doubled in the past decade, to a high of 472 in 2006. Three-quarters of the increase was due to rising death rates in the Tucson sector, and most were due to heat-related exposure.
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The Pima County, Arizona, medical examiner’s office took custody of the remains of 1,915 migrants who died in the desert between 2001 and 2010.
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The Border Patrol’s own figures corroborated the high (492) in fiscal year 2005 and show that despite a slight drop after that, numbers rose again, to 483 in fiscal year 2012.
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Even as the total number of people crossing may have declined after 2006, the process became increasingly dangerous. The
Arizona Daily Star
noted that the ratio of known deaths per apprehensions rose from three per one hundred thousand in 1998 to thirty-nine in 2004 and eighty-eight in 2009. “That means the risk of dying is more than twice as high today compared with five years ago and nearly 30 times greater than in 1998,” the newspaper reported at the end of 2009. “Border-county law enforcement, Mexican Consulate officials, Tohono O’odham tribal officials and humanitarian groups say the increase in fencing, technology and agents has caused illegal border crossers to walk longer distances in more treacherous terrain, increasing the likelihood that people will get hurt or fatigued and left behind to die.”
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In response to the growing death rate and the outcry it provoked, the Border Patrol initiated the Border Safety Initiative in 1998 and formed BORSTAR to train agents in search, trauma, and rescue. The goal was to address the humanitarian crisis created by the United States’ own new border policies. Border Patrol agents did provide life-saving aid to hundreds of migrants in the years since the program was initiated. But “while the Tucson Sector BORSTAR unit routinely provided search, rescue, and medical intervention to undocumented immigrants under harsh conditions, the number of times it responded was insignificant in comparison to the volume of Border Patrol law enforcement activities.”
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Soon, other, independent church-based and grassroots organizations began to form to try to respond to the issue.

CONCLUSION

The laws that allow or disallow entry into the United States are and have always been arbitrary and discriminatory. One set of laws, primarily for Europeans and for the wealthy, allows freedom of travel. Another set, for Latin Americans and the poor, creates a labyrinth of enticements and obstacles.

The Las Americas Premium Outlets complex on the US side the Tijuana–San Ysidro crossing just south of San Diego symbolizes the contradiction. Looming over the border, the 125 outlet stores beckon to tourists from the Mexican side, offering them a consumer mecca if they cross to shop. “The big fence surrounding the outlets and the Mexican flag [just beyond the complex, on the other side of the border] was a bit distracting,” wrote one US reviewer on the popular website
Yelp.com
.
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Between the mall and the flag are the imposing border wall and the security apparatus that sustains it, reminding Mexicans that their welcome is decidedly conditional.

Myriad historical and economic factors draw and sometimes force migrants from their homes into the US economy. Many of these factors are the result of deliberate decisions implemented by US employers, investors, and government. At the same time, increasingly convoluted webs of laws, restrictions, and discrimination ensure that migrants remain in a subject position, exploitable and exploited. Today, the system works by drawing or forcing them into a status deemed illegality.

The borders that divide immigrants from the United States are not just physical. Once inside the country—whether by means of a traumatic border crossing or a simple visa overstay—people without documents live behind another kind of border, a baffling and sometimes terrifying border that separates them from those around them and the country and society in which they live. These internal borders are the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 4

Arbitrary and precarious. If life for poor people in Mexico and Central America seems to be filled with precarious status and arbitrary events to which they must simply adapt in order to survive, life in the United States continues the pattern. Why do some government agencies welcome the undocumented, while others ignore them, and still others threaten, imprison, and deport them? What really determines their status, and why does it seem to change so frequently and unpredictably? How can they plan for the future or prepare, when everything seems so capricious?

THE BLURRINESS OF CATEGORIES

In the minds of most citizens, the terms “legal” and “illegal” are clearly defined and clearly distinguished categories. In real life, though, there is a large gray area between the two ostensibly opposite poles. Most people who are undocumented live ordinary lives and are not immediately distinguishable from immigrants with documents or from citizens. Yet in some ways, hidden to the outside, documented world, their lives are very different. As Jose Antonio Vargas puts it, “Everyday life for an undocumented American means a constant search for loopholes and back doors.”
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Most of the approximately 11 million undocumented people in the United States have been here for quite a while. As noted earlier, only 14 percent arrived in the country after January 1, 2005, meaning that 86 percent have been in the country for over seven years.
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While the law may consider them alien, most of them are people who have deep roots in the United States.

Mexicans are overrepresented among those deported: Mexicans make up 58 percent of the undocumented population, but 70 percent of those deported are Mexican.
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Apparently, being Mexican makes you somehow
more
undocumented, in the eyes of society and of law enforcement, than others. Since undocumentedness is a socially imposed status, then how you are seen by those in authority is in fact what brings it into being.

Many individuals have experienced being both documented and undocumented. Laws have changed, as in 1986 when many undocumented people were offered the chance to legalize. Individuals who entered the country legally may fall out of status if they violate the terms of their visa in some way, while, more rarely, those who are undocumented may find a way to regularize their status.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the country’s most recent attempt at some sort of supposedly comprehensive immigration reform, exemplified the arbitrary nature of immigration law. In order to qualify for legalization, migrants must have resided in the country continuously since January 1, 1982. This cutoff date meant that the large numbers of Central American immigrants who arrived later were excluded. Of the 500,000 to 850,000 Salvadorans in the country in 1986, only 146,000 qualified.
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The
American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh
(or ABC) Settlement Agreement in 1990 reopened thousands of political asylum cases, offering a new chance for legal residence for undocumented Salvadorans and Guatemalans. But the process was agonizingly slow, and tens of thousands of Central Americans remained in limbo through the 1990s, renewing their work permits every eighteen months as their cases languished.

The Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT)—among many other provisions—created the new category of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), offering temporary protection and work authorization to immigrants from countries affected by war or natural disaster. Salvadorans were granted TPS, based on the state of civil war in the country that made it impossible for them to return. Guatemalans, despite the war in their country, were not included. TPS for Salvadorans was extended several times, but ended in 1995 after a peace agreement ended the war. At that time, some 1 million Salvadorans lived in the United States. Half of them were legal immigrants, and between 90,000 and 190,000 had been protected by TPS.
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(Some 200,000 applied originally, but many failed to complete the repeated renewal process.)
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When TPS ended, many Salvadorans returned to the stalled asylum process.

The 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central America Relief Act (NACARA) was an attempt to address the backlog in asylum cases by offering permanent residency to certain asylum seekers. But NACARA too left many Guatemalans and Salvadorans in limbo, as it favored Cuban and Nicaraguan petitioners and continued to be plagued with backlogs. In 2001, the INS estimated that it could take “up to 20 years” to process the pending, almost three hundred thousand Central American applications.
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Between 1999 and 2003, the approval rate for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum applicants hovered between 7 percent and 11 percent, not much higher than the low rate in the 1980s that had led to the ABC lawsuit. For applicants from other countries, the rate was 33 percent to 44 percent.
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Salvadorans and Guatemalans, in the words of Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego, “have faced being granted only temporary permits, seemingly interminable applications, re-applications, long waiting times for their applications to be processed, and the threat of imminent deportation.” Neither fully legal nor illegal, they exist in a state of “permanent temporariness” or “liminal legality.”
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