BROWNSVILLE HERALD

January 29, 2006

Border violence likely affecting migrants

BY SARA INÉS CALDERÓN
The Brownsville Herald

A recent wave of violence against Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley has the potential to harm immigrants who pass through here.

Officials say human smuggling has become ensnared with drug trafficking, making it a more dangerous, desperate and expensive game. This raises the stakes and makes the whole process more violent for everyone involved.

“When millions of Mexicans crossing the border are perceived as enemies, they are going to try to respond to that situation,” said Ignacio Corona, professor of Mexican and Latin American Cultures at Ohio State University.

Danger has increased for migrants who pass through the U.S.-Mexico border, Corona said, and economics, increased enforcement and movements within the drug cartels all contribute to this danger.

The current economic situation on the border has become more desperate, Corona said. The boom experienced by the border in the early 1990s ended later in the decade with thousands of people losing their jobs, potentially prompting them to turn to the criminal world to survive, he said.

What’s more is that the population along the border — where migrants inevitably have to pass to enter the U.S. — has been increasing for the past few decades, he said. Partly because of the job growth in the early 1990s, more people means more crime.

Increased enforcement at the border — more Border Patrol agents for example — makes migrants more desperate, driving them to extreme measures or dangerous geography, according to Karl Eschbach, a demographer who studied the causes of migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1990s through 2003.

“It would affect the ordinary labor migrant who attempts to come across, and I can’t imagine that it’s affecting them for the good,” Eschbach said. “As enforcement becomes more effective, there becomes a motivation to act in a desperate way.”

Some call this trend “increased militarization” of the border, which Corona said is bound to increase violence. A stronger militarized presence at the border makes smugglers, and by extension immigrants, more desperate, a perfect recipe for violence.

“Forces are going to be opposed, and they are going to provoke some kind of response, some kind of retaliation,” he said. “If you don’t have a weapon, you are going to use a stone.”