BROWNSVILLE (Texas) HERALD June 2, 2006 A line in the sand Border fence critics say expansion would lengthen a deadly divide from the California desert to the Gulf of Mexico
BY SARA INÉS CALDERÓN
The Brownsville Herald
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — It was an invasion by most accounts. Immigrants were flooding in from Mexico daily with no end in sight: The country was being taken over.
In the daily shuffle, the confusion of comings and goings, Fernando Rowers snuck across the border.
The 21-year-old Honduras man entered undetected, smuggled in with the help of a coyote he contracted in Agua Prieta, Sonora.
Landing on U.S. soil cost just $1,500 and was simple to accomplish, he said: After his guide left him, he walked for two hours, got into a truck, and his brother picked him up in Phoenix. From there, he traveled north and found family and work in Denver.
He was eventually caught driving under the influence and charged with illegal entry. When U.S. Border Patrol agents deported him, Rowers ended up in Tijuana, Mexico, instead of his native Honduras, because he convinced them he was Mexican. The government’s expedited removal policy returns Mexicans and Central Americans to their home country.
Rowers found himself at La Casa del Migrante, a shelter for migrants in Tijuana. It was a long way from his job at the Colorado restaurant.
Before the DUI and the deportation, Rowers had a steady job and lived close to his five brothers. He had a girlfriend, a 3-year-old son, and a whole life that he wasn’t ready to give up.
“I can’t adjust to this life,” he said at the migrant shelter in April. “I’m going to return to the U.S.”
On the day he agreed to this interview, he said he was waiting for word from his brother in Denver. Details on another attempt at entering this country were unsettled — cross alone or wait for a smuggler?
“For a migrant, it’s a powerful impact to come from a country with a lot of opportunity to a country with no opportunity,” Rowers said of being deported to Mexico. “From my point of view, I don’t have a lot, but I have the ability to get it.” He was determined to return to the United States and showed little concern for barriers meant to deter him. On the U.S.-Mexico border, there are two kinds — “virtual walls” made of cameras, sensors, vehicle and agent patrols, and a physical wall that stands in pieces from California to Texas.
Congress is working to expand the fence and make it more complete, including 176 miles from Brownsville to Laredo.
Will it work?
Christian Ramírez, a San Diego native and director of American Friends Service Committee, says “no” and points to Fernando Rowers as the reason.
“The fence signifies the contradiction of free trade that calls for the flow of money, but it is an obstacle for workers,” Ramirez said.
“Now, it’s going to Brownsville. The only difference,” he said, “is, you’re not rich.”
Tijuana and San Diego, not unlike Brownsville and Matamoros, are starkly contrasted economically — though on different scales.
The average per capita income for Brownsville is $9,762. For San Diego, it’s $23,609, according to the 2000 census. Poverty in Mexico is rampant, disrupted by small pockets of affluence.
“We have one of the richest communities in the U.S. here (in San Diego),” said Mike D. Hance of the U.S. Border Patrol.
“And then we have a poor community in Tijuana with a dividing line. … It’s kind of ironic that you can just draw a line and divide like that.”
On the Mexican side of that line is the Rev. Luis Kendzierski. He has run the Casa del Migrante for six years. The shelter is part of the Scalabrinian missionary order, focusing their efforts on migrants and refugees.
The Casa gives male migrants food and shelter for up to 15 days. Some of them arrive to Tijuana from the south, 60 percent have been deported and most are Mexican, Kendzierski said.
In the 19 years since the shelter opened, more than 150,000 have come through here. There were 7,000 last year alone. On average, there are 100 people here every day. Almost all are pursuing el norte, the northern United States, where most undocumented immigrants can find jobs with little interference from law enforcement, unlike the southwestern U.S.
“El norte is always going to exist because it’s historical in Mexico,” said Kendzierski, whose father was an immigrant from Poland to Brazil.
“The future of La Casa is that it will continue,” he said, predicting a need for migrant services in the future, but “I would like to close it.”
Dreams drive migrants, he said, and sometimes it drives them to death. More than 500 died trying to enter the United States in 2005.
According to the Center for Immigration studies, most deaths in the Border Patrol’s McAllen sector are attributed to drownings in the Rio Grande or Gulf of Mexico. In the San Diego sector, exposure to the elements from crossing desert terrain is the biggest killer. In both sectors, homicide is a distant second-most common factor.
Attempts to crack down on illegal immigration across the southern border have been ongoing, most notably stepped up in 1994 with the launch of Operation Gatekeeper.
This border control plan exclusive to San Diego was meant to channel illegal immigration to specific areas and seal the border here. Gatekeeper’s combination of people and technology has now become standard operating procedure for the U.S. Border Patrol.
It began along the first five miles of the southwestern border and was deemed a success, prompting Congress to mandate construction of a 14-mile border fence in 1996.
Nine miles of the fence has been completed; another five miles are to be done by 2011. It is the extension of this fence that would dot between 300 and 700 miles of the border if legislation passed by the House and Senate is reconciled and becomes law.
Before these measures, “It was totally out of control. It was chaos,” Hance said, referring to immigration pre-Gatekeeper. Hance is the border infrastructure specialist for the San Diego sector.
In 1994, the area accounted for almost 25 percent of illegal immigration nationwide. The number of recorded crossings has since decreased to less than a third of that. “We have shown that, with the right type of enforcement, you can control an area,” Hance said, surveying the metal wall separating Tijuana from San Diego. “We’re finally working smarter, and we’re actually being effective.”
The border fence is multi-layered. First comes a thick, brown metal fence made of old military airstrip; the Border Patrol cleaned out the government stash, Hance said.
A 15-foot wire fence that slants at the top works as a second barrier, and separating the fences is a 150-foot gap with an all-weather road for Border Patrol vehicles. Cameras along parts of the fence will be installed this month.
It’s not been a complete block. This sector detained about 127,000 people crossing along 66 miles of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico last fiscal year. That’s nearly 11 percent of the nationwide total.
“It was pretty much an open border before,” said Ricardo Terrazas, deputy district chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-San Diego. Duncan is responsible for the 700-mile fence proposal included in the U.S. House bill passed in December.
Terrazas grew up on the border here. He said things have changed for the better since the initial fencing went up. It’s a positive thing for both border residents and the migrants themselves.
“The fence is going to prevent people from crossing,” he said. “If you can prevent people from crossing, that’s going to prevent a lot of deaths.”
Nothing can stop immigration, Christian Ramirez countered, who was less impressed with the fence. “Gatekeeper brought a lot of tranquility, but at what expense?” he said.
Like a razor’s edge, San Diego’s border fences have proven lethal to those who would drag their bodies across them. As security increases, so do deaths in the rivers and deserts of the border. These fences meant to keep uninvited neighbors out are forcing them under and around, sometimes proving more lethal than insulating.
Brightly painted coffins line part of the fence here, announcing the body count for each year since it was built. “1995 61 MUERTES,” 61 deaths, one reads while cars and buses whiz by on the nearby highway.
“San Diego, before the fence, was a place accustomed to border life. Now, we have this really sinister, sanitized version of the border: Everything is OK,” Ramirez said, complaining that what’s out of sight now is not out of most minds.
“Almost 4,000 people have died, but they haven’t been able to stop migration,” he said.
A major criticism and crack in the fence plan comes from tunnels constructed under the fence, away from the watchful eye of border agents.
These tunnels are not signs of failure, rather successes, Border Patrol agent Hance said. Tunnels show that the surface is controlled. The scene on the other side of the wall might contradict this calm.
Smugglers have made a business of making and selling ladders for those wishing to scale and climb over the Border Patrol’s fence.
“We knew people would either dig under it or go over it,” Hance said, adding that storm drains are also a popular router for illegal entry.
“What it has done was discouraged people from that area, so they moved to other areas.”
The majority of illegal traffic has moved to the Arizona border, a harsh and remote region that accounts for a large share of the 3,800 counted migrant deaths since 1995.
The fence solved a surface problem, said David Fitzgerald, field research director for the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California-San Diego.
“It’s been effective politically because people in San Diego no longer see people running down the freeway or in their back yards,” Fitzgerald said, noting that immigration here is not only about people, but “certain types” of people.
“Unauthorized migration is definitely seen as a Mexican problem,” Fitzgerald said.
The solution to that problem, at least in San Diego, comes in the form of a dividing metal line. If Congress can compromise on the House and Senate legislation, the line will extend to Brownsville.
“In Mexico, it’s definitely seen as a new Berlin Wall,” Fitzgerald said, and like the Berlin Wall, its influence has spread beyond the border it marks.
Officials from other countries have toured the area in hopes of creating their own version. Spanish authorities came to San Diego to see the fence, Fitzgerald said. Fences have been built around the Spanish cities of Cueta and Melilla in northern Morocco.
If the United States expands the fence on its southern border, it is only a matter of time before a fence must go up on the northern border, according to Gustavo Cano, director of the Mexico-North Research Network’s Transnationalism Research Project in Washington, D.C.
“It would push the U.S. to also build a wall with Canada,” Cano said. “What would be the new route for Mexican immigrants to go to the U.S.?”
A fence is not going to stop illegal immigration, Cano repeated. In a globalized world, a fence doesn’t mean much, and Fernando Rowers proves it.
About a month after speaking from La Casa Del Migrante in Tijuana, Rowers phoned from somewhere in the United States.
He had successfully returned via Southern California, again by enlisting a smuggler, but what became of his family, his job, while he was arranging the crossing?
“Ya perdi todo eso,” he said, “I’ve lost all of that.”
All he has now is the chance to get it all back. |