Demythologizing Mexican Immigration

As violence among drug cartels in Mexico is sensationalized in the U.S. media, those who enforce immigration law use both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror to justify expanding budgets and the use of excessive force and surveillance of Latino immigrants. Scapegoating Mexicans as the source of high unemployment rates and the loss of federal and state benefits available to citizens divides workers across borders—which is a crucial tool for generating support for legislation that benefits capitalists and places U.S. and Mexican jobs in jeopardy.

U.S. immigration policy, law enforcement practices, and sensationalized media coverage have successfully blurred the distinction between immigrants, terrorists, and criminals, erasing the true story of Mexican immigrants seeking employment for family survival. in Clandestine Crossings, David Spener cuts through anti-immigration claims that those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are armed criminals engaged in drug smuggling, human smuggling, and human trafficking (particularly sex trafficking). He places the largest contemporary migration between any two countries in the world in a historical, economic, and cultural context. His analysis unravels the myths and propaganda used by nativist and anti-immigration activists to fuel the militarization of the border and exacerbate the human suffering that comes with crossing the border to work.

The journey to el norte is a centuryold story, as Spener explains, which has been passed down through several generations and is embedded in border folklore. Making little distinction between citizens and immigrants, the Texas Rangers were notorious for their violent enforcement of the law, which always favored whites. Blocked from equal access to the law and to economic resources, Mexican bandits and raiders became folk heroes. Relegated to second-class citizenship in the U.S., Mexican-Americans residing in the border areas conducted their lives on both sides, visiting family and transporting food, textiles, and other goods from Texas to Mexico.

U.S. employers have regularly recruited Mexican immigrant laborers to work in the fields, mines, canneries, and railroads. At the same time, immigration policy and law enforcement have long been used to regulate labor and meet the needs of U.S. employers. For example, during the Great Depression, deportations—referred to as "repatriation" by the U.S. government—were aimed to reduce the labor force. Less than a decade later, in response to agricultural labor shortages during World War II, the U.S. signed the Bracero Program agreement with Mexico. While the war ended a few years later, the program continued for twenty-three years. As several generations of families crossed the border to work and mail money back home, the journey to work in the U.S. became an adult rite of passage in many states of Mexico. Over the last three decades, this practice—rooted in a U.S. strategy to provide employers with inexpensive labor—has been characterized by U.S. law enforcement as "smuggling" and "illegal immigration." As NAFTA created more demand for workers in the U.S., migration became common in new areas of Mexico.

Clandestine border crossing in Texas involves financing one's trip to the border, determining a place to cross the river to avoid detection, hiking through the brush around immigration checkpoints and away from the border region, and then hitching a ride to one's destination. Frequently, immigrants travel in small groups, which include first-time and experienced migrants. Taking a bus to the border is not without its hazards. Mexican immigration officials sometimes extort money. At the border, migrants must avoid gangs of robbers as they purchase food and water for their trek through South Texas.

The river must be carefully surveyed for shallow areas, and crossing might involve inner tubes. Drowning is always a real danger. To avoid motion sensors, migrants need to move away from the bank as soon as they cross and begin the trek through dense brush, where they are exposed to extreme heat and cold. With no surface water, migrants drink from cattle troughs. Arrangements are made to have drivers pick migrants up, but the drivers risk...