Illegal transnational labor: Mexicans in California and Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

• Author: Orenstein, Catherine C.
• Position: The Andrew Wellington Cordier Essay - Transcending National Boundaries

Poised on the fence, literally between North and South, a young Mexican hunches his shoulders and awaits his chance. He jumps and goes straight from a crouch to a run, heading for cover on the U.S. side. The Border Patrol agent beside me directs the jeep toward him. Twenty yards away, the boy breaks suddenly from the shrubs and runs like a white flash through our headlights. "On a normal ride - if I weren't here - what would you do now?" I ask. Bryant Brazley, the young, well-pressed black spokesman for the Border Patrol, has fielded questions like this before, and he knows the answers never sound nice in quotes. "It's not as mean as it sounds," he qualifies, "but I would run him down for a while in the jeep, get him real tired. Then jump out and get him, easy." Should Brazley fail, however, the border patrol is equipped with state-of-the-art seismic sensors, thermal scopes that register body heat and a newly augmented force of 4,800 agents, 1,100 of them in the San Diego area, where traffic is heaviest. Seven to eight hundred Mexicans are apprehended here each night; perhaps as many make it through.(4)

The tension at the border is especially palpable in the wake of new California legislation targeting illegal migrants. In November 1994, Latino students walked out of class and took to the streets of Los Angeles to protest Proposition 187, known as "Save Our State" (S.O.S.). Masked men stormed a McDonald's franchise in Mexico City on the day of the vote. Backed by the California Republican Party and some conservative groups, such as United We Stand, S.O.S was passed by California voters as an amendment to the state constitution on 8 November. The amendment, which is currently inactive as it awaits court rulings on its constitutionality, denies welfare and all but emergency medical care to suspected illegal immigrants as well as schooling to their children.(5) The logic, as New York Times columnist William Safire summed it up, is that "the most cost-effective way to change behavior is to make life unbearable under present behavior."(6)

The new legislation reflects a trend in immigration policy. S.O.S. blames illegal immigrants for California's recession, even though statistics show that illegal immigrants may pay more in taxes than they consume in social services.(7) The acronym plays on Americans' fears of being economically capsized by the next wave of poor immigrants, though the amendment may actually exacerbate the state's economic problems in the future by creating an uneducated and unmedicated immigrant underclass. Most significantly, S.O.S. does not even purport to address the major lure for immigrants to California: jobs. "Hay trabajo" ("There is work"), as a young man resting in a burrowed gap between ground and fence said - there will always be reason enough to come North.

U.S. border policies in recent years all have one thing in common: They fail to stop immigration. In fact, immigration is increasing. The U.S. census calculated that Mexican immigration quintupled between 1970 and 1988. As many as nine million immigrants came to the U.S. in the 1980s, and somewhere between 200,000 and one million enter illegally each year. Fifty-five percent of them are thought to be Mexican nationals.(8)

Border Militarization

New laws and new barriers have been constructed along the southern border in the past decade, particularly as the U.S. economy has suffered. In the 1980s the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) subcontracted over 900 jails, increased its border check-points and brought state-of-the-art military and electronic surveillance equipment to the border. In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed with the goal of regaining control of U.S. borders. It granted token amnesty to Mexicans already in the U.S. for five years and created employer sanctions to penalize those who hired undocumented workers. Prior to the passage of IRCA, entering the U.S. without papers was illegal but working without papers was not. The passage of employer sanctions created a pool of street-corner laborers ("dailies") who sell their services on a day-to-day basis. IRCA also doubled the size of the Border Patrol, the uniformed branch of the INS, from 2,500 agents to 4,800.(9)

Around the same time, the War on Drugs began, providing the impetus to further strengthen the border. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 required the Border Patrol to interdict drugs and arrest drug smugglers, but the crackdown was not limited to drug smuggling. In the treatment of Latinos in the borderlands, as Maria Jimenez of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) U.S-Mexico Border Program notes, little distinction was made between fruit sellers and drug smugglers.(10) In 1989 the Border Patrol was armed with M-16s. Along the Arizona border, agents outfitted with night-vision goggles and automatic weapons staked out drug corridors.(11) The Immigration Act of 1990 for the first time authorized the INS to make arrests for violations of any federal law.(12) The same year, a metal fence was erected along a 12-mile stretch at the San Diego border. In 1991, U.S. Marines were summoned to fortify and increase the height of the border fence.

In 1993, the Border Patrol launched "Operation Blockade," which mobilized 400 agents for around-the-clock duty along the Rio Grande. Operation Blockade was hailed by the press - its only problem, reportedly, was that the agents were getting bored(13) - even though it didn't really stop migration, since traffic increased at the edges of the blockade and some migrants simply regularized their crossing status.14 Operation Blockade slashed the twin-city economy of El Paso in the north and Juarez to the south, creating a hostile barrier between families and businesses that had long lived in a borderless state. In part to counter this negative image, Operation Blockade was renamed "Hold-the-line." This strategy has been used as a model for border control in other states, where it has also tended to redirect, rather than stop, the flow of U.S.-bound migrants. In response to the heightened attention along the San Diego border, for example, the neighboring Arizona desert town of Nogales reported a 30 percent increase in apprehensions of undocumented migrants from 1992 to 1993, indicating a higher total number of migrants.(15)

The high-tech futility of immigration control makes for a volatile game. The passage of restrictive immigration acts in the past decade increased the intensity of the border war. Along the Tijuana border, a line of faces peers over the fence at night, eyes illuminated by the high-intensity lighting recently installed in the dark valleys and atop the hills. On "our" side, Border Patrol agents rev the engines of their jeeps. "Exactly the same, every night," Agent Brazley laughs sadly. We pass along a hill known as "the 50s area" because the motion sensors numbered 50 to 60 are buried here. On the 55 finger, an elevated peninsula of land ending in a lookout point, two U.S. soldiers operate a thermal scope. "$500,000 piece of equipment," one says. "See these bright spots on the screen? That's a group of people hiding. This one out front is the coyote, the lookout. When they run, they'll get brighter on the screen. We'll get these ones, because over here" - he points to another spot - "is one of our guys." He notifies the agent on his radio.(16)

At the detention center, the apprehended are handed a simple form which offers them a choice between a hearing or voluntary deportation. On either side of the detention cell's window, the agents and the would-be-migrants are equally matter-of-fact: legs up on the chairs, smoking, chatting, ignoring those on the other side. Once deported, many will attempt to cross again on the same night, often until they succeed. The former San Diego police chief describes the reaction of the Border Patrol agents confronted with this situation: "What [it] breeds is a contempt for the system in the minds of the officers in the sense that ifs usually a useless, senseless game-playing."(17)

It is not difficult to imagine how the game might degenerate - particularly in a city where "tonk," the sound of a flashlight hitting a head, is slang for a Latino migrant. The AFSC Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project reports high levels of human rights abuses by the Border Patrol."(18) Restrictive immigration acts since the 1980s have increased the intensity of the border war. IRCA'S generous amnesty and draconian aftermath roused the Border Patrol and racist hate groups to new levels of harassment of undocumented immigrants. Mexicans are the main victims, and San Diego the most targeted area. The INS is the agency responsible for the largest amount of reported abuses. Ironically, the Border Crime Prevention Unit in San Diego, a law enforcement task force, was itself charged with excessive violations and was closed in 1989.(19)

New private groups have also organized to keep immigrants out. In 1989, the widow of a Border Patrol pilot began a series of monthly vigils called "Light Up the Border." Thousands of people parked along the San Diego frontier at sunset, facing their headlights toward the Mexican hills where migrants waited before attempting to cross into the United States. When Roberto Martinez, director of the San Diego office of the AFSC U.S.- Mexico Border Program, organized counter-demonstrations using mirrors and pieces of aluminum foil to reflect the headlights back toward the United States, he received a letter from a group calling itself the Warboys, which read: "...Starting a war with the white man ... ? We will definitely accommodate you! We don't want any greaseballs coming up here illegally."(20)

In a more gentile version of the same, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington wrote:

In the past, the United States has successfully absorbed millions of immigrants from scores of countries because they adapted to the prevailing European...