Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings

9 Coming to America

114 | 9 Coming to America The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1999), 25 As long as everything remains this way, we will keep crossing. If they throw out two by Nogales, ten will enter by Mexicali. And if they deport five by Juárez, seven will come through Laredo. If today they throw me out, tomorrow I’ll come back. —Remarks of undocumented immigrant in Rudy Adler, Victoria Criado, and Brett Huneycutt, Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants & Minutemen on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2007), n.p. Reviewing the history of border crossings into the United States by immigrants—documented and undocumented—confirms two fundamental points. First, immigrants are lured by compelling economic forces sourced in el Norte, namely employment opportunities and wages in the United States that far surpass those available in Mexico. Second, no means of border enforcement ever undertaken will deter immigrants driven to improve their life and especially their families’ futures. As with the U.S. drug interdiction campaign, undocumented immigration enforcement tends to concentrate on intercepting the undocumented crosser at the border, as well as within U.S. territory.1 Quelling the demand side of the immigration equation—here employers that throughout U.S. history have sought out desperate immigrant laborers willing to work for substandard wages in miserable conditions—is a lesser focus of immigration policy, ensuring the continued cycle of border crossings and deportations back to Mexico that marked the last 100 years of border history. U.S. residents often regard Mexican immigrants as greedy hordes chasing an undeserved American dream. For the vast majority of Mexican immi- Coming to America | 115 grants, however, there is no gold rush of riches awaiting their journey. Rather, they will toil for cut-rate wages in the shadows of the American dream, lured by U.S. labor demand and the desperation, not greed, it invokes. Despite what the history detailed below suggests, many xenophobes contend further that criminal motives draw Mexican immigrants northward. Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project vigilante group, offers this unsympathetic characterization of Mexican immigrants: Supporters have tried to portray illegal aliens as hard-working men and women who just want to earn a living, even if their jobs involve picking strawberries or cleaning our offices and homes. The truth is that hardworking immigrants are not the only people snaking their way across the border under cover of night. Criminals and terrorists cross the border right along with them. Drug runners smuggle drugs, sowing the seeds of violence, despair, and broken lives associated with drug abuse. . . . Illegal immigrant gangs ravage the streets and terrorize our citizens.2 Some politicians further conflate Mexican undocumented immigrants and criminals, such as Tom Tancredo who wrote during his campaign for the 2008 U.S. presidency that even “some of the illegals who are not directly connected to drug trafficking have been very . . . aggressive . . . to the ranchers in the area,” by threatening and physically assaulting Southwestern ranchers and their families.3 Others accuse immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, of streaming north to claim government benefits in the United States, especially welfare, health care, and public education—the latter constitutionally mandated for children of undocumented immigrants.4 Supporters of the antiimmigrant Proposition 187 in California (adopted in 1994 by voters but eventually gutted by a federal court) painted immigrants in unflattering terms in their campaign materials: “Welfare, medical and educational benefits are the magnets that draw these ILLEGAL ALIENS across our borders. . . . Vote YES ON PROPOSITION 187. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”5 These sentiments, of undeserving Mexican immigrants crossing the border to collect government benefits, prompted Congress in 1996 to exclude undocumented immigrants from receiving most federal public benefits, including Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment compensation.6 Although family reunification is a goal of some U.S. immigrants, immigration laws deny admission to family members without an affidavit of financial support from sponsoring relatives. In other words, an immigrant seeking 116 | Coming to America reunification who is likely to depend on the U.S. government for subsistence is excluded from entry. Thus, arriving relatives, assuming they navigate the lengthy backlog for most family reunification admissions, tend to join their U.S.-based sponsor who no doubt is engaged in productive employment in order to deliver that support affidavit. Likely these new...