Beyond the border: tensions are rising along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border, which a million Mexicans try to cross illegally each year.

• Author: Thompson, Ginger
• Position: Cover Story

First, there was the sound of an engine. Then, a lookout peeked carefully over the mud-brick wall that stood less than 100 feet from the United States. "Get down!" he shouted to the 73 others behind him. Everyone dropped to the dirt, until the sound of the engine faded, and the lookout said that all was clear.

"See what we have to go through?" said one of the men, already so dirty that he didn't bother to dust himself off as he got up from the ground. "We have to sneak around like criminals, and the only thing we want to do is work."

Depending which side of the wall you stand on, the crumbling village of Las Chepas on Mexico's border with the U.S. was either a haven of organized crime or the last hurdle to a land of opportunities. (Recently, the Mexican government demolished the village in an effort to curb the illegal traffic.) About 1 million Mexicans try to sneak across the border each year, with about 400,000 succeeding, according to Mexican authorities. In the last three years, this stretch of the 2,000-mile-long border has become one of the busiest gateways for illegal migration to the U.S.

Since his election in 2000, Mexican President Vicente Fox has been pushing the United States to adopt new policies that would open the border to a freer flow of workers. President Bush has supported this approach and last month he renewed calls for a guest-worker plan that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to apply for renewable work visas. But so far the plan has languished in Congress, and efforts at broad immigration reform have been stymied.

Most Americans just north of the border view the current situation with disdain and fear. Ranchers complain that the migrants trample and litter their fields, steal, and vandalize, and local police worry about the violent drug traffickers and migrant smugglers who move among the immigrants. Some people who live along the border have begun their own armed patrols of the border as part of a militia movement known as the Minuteman Project.

TRY, TRY AGAIN

The men who crouched behind the wall one day in September were afraid to talk much, and none of them gave their names. They came from almost every corner of Mexico and were headed to almost every corner of the U.S. Two of the men, brothers from the state of Hidalgo, opened up a little bit. They said that they had been moving back and forth illegally across the border for the last 10 years. They had worked all over the U.S., as waiters, carpenters, meat packers, and in the strawberry fields around Salinas, Calif.

The first time they entered the United States, the brothers said, they crossed at Tijuana into California. But then...