Illegal immigration, it's just getting worse
Huge boost in enforcement fails to deter border crossings
SITUATION HERE AT HOME
The Mexican border is within a two-hour drive of the Coachella Valley.
According to the most recent estimates from the regional director of
the United Farm Workers, undocumented workers make up between 3
percent and 15 percent of each Coachella Valley city’s population.
Officials say most live and work in the southern part of the valley,
around Thermal and Mecca, helping to grow and harvest grapes, oranges
and other farm products.
An estimated 25,000 undocumented workers are employed in the Coachella
Valley.
Daniel González and Susan Carroll
The Arizona Republic
June 19, 2005
illegally and fewer migrants will try to sneak in.
For 12 years, the United States has backed that strategy, pumping
billions of dollars into fortifying the border. Annual spending on
border enforcement has nearly tripled; the Border Patrol has almost
tripled its ranks; and the Southwestern border has become heavily
militarized with fences, aircraft, sensors and cameras.
It hasn't worked.
In that same time, illegal immigration from Mexico has almost doubled,
millions more undocumented immigrants have settled in the United
States permanently, and the human-smuggling trade has boomed.
Instead of thwarting illegal border crossings, the Southwestern border
has simply become an expensive obstacle course that hundreds of
thousands of migrants successfully overcome each year, more than ever
relying on professional smugglers.
Drawn by plentiful jobs in this country and driven by a scarcity in
their own, the migrants are being fenced in by the tighter border
security that was supposed to keep them out in the first place.
Consider:
Since 1993, when the federal government began its major push to secure
the borders, annual spending on border enforcement has gone from
$480million (adjusted for inflation) to $1.4billion, most of it for
the Southwestern border.
The Border Patrol's ranks along the 1,950-mile Southwestern border
have swelled to more than 9,700 agents from 3,389 agents to become the
nation's largest uniformed police force.
Towering steel fences, sensors and cameras are in place to make
crossing difficult and daunting. Agents are equipped with helicopters,
Humvees, hovercrafts, ATVs and fixed-wing aircraft to patrol the vast
expanse.
About 1.14million arrests were made on the Southwestern border last
fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, an average of one undocumented
immigrant arrest every 30 seconds.
"We feel we have become extremely effective in border enforcement,"
said Mario Villarreal, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border
Protection.
On the surface, that appears to be true.
But by other measures, illegal immigration has only gotten worse.
The number of undocumented migrants from Mexico entering the country
increased to the current 485,000 from 260,000 a year in the early
1990s, according to a March study by the Pew Hispanic Center using
2004 data.
Legal immigration from Mexico actually decreased, from 110,000 legal
immigrants a year to 90,000, the study by the nonpartisan research
organization said.
The undocumented-immigrant population in the United States shot up to
the current 11million from about 6million in 1997, fueled largely by
illegal immigration from Mexico, according to the Pew Hispanic Center
and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University
of California, San Diego.
Hundreds of people keep dying trying to cross the Southwestern border.
Last year, 330 migrants lost their lives in the crossing. The tally
was up from the 266 migrant deaths logged by the Border Patrol in
1998, the first year the agency began keeping track, though down from
the record 383 who died in 2000.
And in 1993, the year the border strategy kicked off in Texas, the
Border Patrol actually made more arrests, 1.21million, than last year,
and that was before all the extra money, equipment and manpower.
"The current border crisis has been years in the making, but it now
appears to have reached a critical mass," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said
June 7 in congressional testimony. He called the U.S.-Mexican border
situation "catastrophic."
Turning to smugglers
There is no question that fortifying the border with more agents,
aircraft and technology has made it less porous.
Beefed-up Border Patrol operations sharply reduced illegal immigration
through ElPaso, San Diego and Nogales, the main gateways of the past.
And since last Sept. 1, biometric-fingerprinting technology has helped
Border Patrol agents stop more than 16,260 suspected criminals from
entering the country, including 364 homicide suspects.
But although more money and manpower curtailed illegal immigration in
some places, it simply was rechanneled to more remote desert and
mountain areas. The squeeze in border towns from the east and west has
turned Arizona into a superhighway for illegal immigration.
The tighter controls also mean more and more migrants have turned to
professional smugglers, or coyotes.
In 1993, crossing the border was so easy, most migrants didn't bother
with a smuggler. Those who did paid only a few hundred dollars.
"It used to be your friend or uncle would smuggle you in. Now, it's in
the hands of the professionals," said Deborah Meyers, border policy
expert at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in
Washington, D.C., that studies migration worldwide.
And in the cat-and-mouse game that plays out thousands of times a day
along the border, the professionals have helped tip the balance in
favor of the migrants.
"One clear consequence of the fact that a higher percentage of
migrants are using coyotes is that more and more of them are able to
get through because they are making professional-assisted crossings,"
said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Studies
at UC San Diego and one of the nation's foremost experts on Mexican
immigration and border enforcement.
Take Phoenix tire worker Jose Aguayo, a native of Guanajuato, Mexico,
who first crossed the border illegally in 1990. All he had to do was
jump a fence at the border in Nogales, Sonora, and take a taxi from a
McDonald's to Phoenix.
Those days are gone.
Keep on trying
With so much at stake, migrants make repeated attempts to cross the
border. The Border Patrol would not say how many of the 1.14million
arrests last year were of people caught multiple times.
But officials acknowledged that many of those who are caught and
returned to Mexico just turn around and try again.
And again. And again.
One recent Monday, June 6, Brauilio Benitez Serno was arrested on his
second attempt to make it across the desert outside Yuma.
The 19-year-old from Aguascalientes was scanned into the Border
Patrol's fingerprinting system and later dropped back at the border.
Benitez said he paid a smuggler $1,500 and wasn't planning on giving
up until he reached his destination, Los Angeles.
"Everybody said it would be hard," he said. "I still have hope."
The high smugglers fees would seem to be a deterrent to most cash-poor
migrants. But relatives already working in the United States usually
help defray the costs.
In a January survey of 603 people from Jalisco and Zacatecas, two
high-migration states in Mexico, 84 percent admitted hiring a coyote.
The researchers from UC San Diego surveyed residents ages 15 to 65 who
had migrated to the United States at least once since 1993 as well as
potential first-time migrants.
Ninety-two percent said they made it into the United States within
five tries, according to the survey. Seventy percent said they made it
across on their first or second tries.
Only 8 percent failed to get in and went home.
Most also said they knew crossing the border had become harder and
more dangerous. Sixty-four percent knew someone who had died trying.
Still, nearly half said they planned to try again in 2005.
Only 20 percent of those who didn't plan to try cited tougher border
enforcement as the main reason.
"We've got a revolving door at the border, and what we've done by
spending all this new money on border enforcement is speed up the
revolving door," Cornelius said.
More are staying
Fortifying the border is supposed to keep undocumented immigrants out.
But, instead, it has hemmed many in.
In the past, when border enforcement was more lax, undocumented
immigrants tended to be men who shuttled between jobs in the United
States and families in Mexico.
Now, once they get across, more undocumented immigrants stay out of
fear they will be caught on another attempt and to make the high
smuggling fees worth their while. Migrants are more likely to arrange
for their families to cross to join them in the United States.
"They don't want to risk coming back and forth," said Belinda Reyes, a
social sciences professor at the University of California, Merced. She
co-authored a 2002 study that said the economic rewards of a job in
the United States outweigh all risks linked to illegally crossing the
border. The study was based on census data, focus groups and the
Mexican Migration Project, a database dating to 1982 compiled by
researchers from the United States and Mexico.
Undocumented migrants who shuttled between Mexico and the United
States stayed in this country an average of about six months during
1993-97, according to Mexican government surveys. The stays had
increased to more than a year by 2001-04, Mexico's National Population
Council said.
The longer migrants stay, the more likely they are to settle
permanently in the United States, experts say.
Aguayo, 30, who jumped the fence at the border in Nogales 15 years
ago, found that the longer he stayed, the tougher it got to cross.
He is now married to a woman who also is an undocumented immigrant
from Mexico. The couple have four U.S.-born children.
"If there wasn't so much border security, I would return. But the
reality is my life is here now," Aguayo said.
The tougher border security is one of the main reasons the number of
undocumented immigrants residing in the United States has grown so
rapidly and why so many are now women and children. In fact, women and
children now make up nearly half of the nation's undocumented
population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
"This is a logical consequence of making it more costly and more
dangerous to come and go across the border," Cornelius said. "The
strategy has really been a powerful stimulus for family reunification
on the U.S. side of the border."
Of course, not all undocumented immigrants sneak across the border.
Some enter the country legally using tourist and other types of
temporary visas and then remain in the country as "overstays" after
their visas expire.
But the "vast majority" of undocumented Mexican immigrants sneak
across the border, said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew
Hispanic Center who studies the undocumented population.
The federal government does not track visa overstays by country. In
January 2000, there were roughly 2.3million people residing in the
country who had overstayed their visas, according to congressional
auditors.
Death toll climbs
In 2000, Doris Meissner, then-Immigration and Naturalization Service
commissioner, acknowledged that the Southwestern border strategy had
one major "unintended consequence": the growing number of deaths.
The strategy was based on deterrence, and the Border Patrol built
walls and saturated popular border cities with agents, figuring the
mountains and deserts would act as natural barriers. But the strategy
underestimated just how determined migrants would be, and the federal
government found itself confronted with a growing death toll as
smugglers led more and more people through Arizona.
In 1998, the agency launched its Border Safety Initiative and created
search-and-rescue squads, hoping to reduce the growing number of
exposure-related deaths. Under pressure from human rights groups, the
Border Patrol for the first time agreed that year to keep track of
deaths along the border and counted 28 in the state.
Last year, the agency counted a record 172, although a review by The
Arizona Republic, based on data from medical examiners and foreign
consulates, put that total much higher, at 219.
More of the same
Experts say fortifying the border has not worked because it ignores
the "job magnet" in this country and the lack of good jobs south of
the border.
"The forces that are driving people out of Mexico and pulling them
into the United States are still extremely strong and haven't
diminished in the last 10 years. If anything, they've intensified,"
said Cornelius.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies, a Washington think tank, that favors tighter limits on
immigration, supports more border enforcement. But he said it can work
only when coupled with tougher enforcement inside the country.
Federal immigration officials rarely investigate employers. When they
do, their priority is to combat terrorism, major smuggling and
criminal operations. From 1995 to 2003, the number of businesses fined
for immigration violations declined to 909 from 124.
"It's a fantasy that the Border Patrol alone can solve the problem,"
Krikorian said.
Political leaders are starting to recognize that a broader approach is
needed to deal with illegal immigration.
President Bush has called on Congress to adopt a temporary-worker
program. In May, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy,
D-Mass., introduced a bipartisan bill that aims to improve border
security but also increases temporary-worker visas and gives
undocumented immigrants a chance at legal residency.
Kyl and fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas also have announced plans
for an immigration bill that includes a guest-worker program.
Theirs would require workers to leave the United States in three years
and calls for the government to make good on its promise to add 10,000
more Border Patrol agents on the Mexican and Canadian borders within
five years and add 1,000 immigration inspectors at the ports of entry
at a cost of $500million a year.
Any kind of immigration reform, however, faces a fierce battle in
Congress.
In the meantime, the government keeps pouring more money into tougher
border enforcement.
And the migrants keep coming.
Arizona Republic reporters Chris Hawley and Jon Kamman contributed to
this article.
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