Immigration is indeed a problem, but not in the way it’s generally defined. Immigration is a humanitarian problem. People leave their homelands, their families, and their livelihoods and risk their lives. What is needed is a humanitarian solution: the creation of a new model of global economic integration—one that redistributes the planet’s resources more equitably among its inhabitants, and one that respects and nourishes traditional peasant lifestyles.
Instead, U.S. policies have turned a humanitarian problem into a humanitarian disaster. U.S. foreign policies foster more, rather than less, global inequality. Domestic policies keep domestic inequality, and the demand for secondary-sector workers, high. And border enforcement policies have created a humanitarian crisis. The $20 billion that the United States has spent on militarizing the border in the past decade has had no appreciable effect on immigration levels, but it has caused thousands of deaths and untold human suffering.
One of the places where the problems created by U.S. immigration policies play out most dramatically is on the U.S.–Mexico border. Since 1994, the United States has poured money and resources into trying to close various stretches of the border. Rather than slowing unauthorized border crossings, the campaign has turned the border into a death zone. Between 1985 and mid-1992, some 175 immigrants were killed as they tried to navigate their way across the freeways in San Diego, the most common border crossing area. Between 1995, when “Operation Gatekeeper” went into effect, and the end of 2004, some three thousand died crossing the border, most in the deserts of Arizona, as the crossing points have been pushed farther and farther east.1 Close to another 500 died in 2005.2 And that’s only documented deaths: the bones of others who were abandoned in the desert, dead or dying, remain to be found.
While the human cost of “Operation Gatekeeper” has been significant, it has had “no statistically significant effect” on the number of unauthorized crossings. Wayne Cornelius found that the only substantive change it has brought, as far as overall immigration trends are concerned, is that unauthorized migrants are likely to stay longer in the United States and to bring their families, because going home to visit has become so much more dangerous.3
Between 1993, when the new border enforcement program began, and 2000, the average length of an undocumented Mexican immigrant’s stay rose from forty weeks to fifty weeks, then to seventy weeks by 2002. The composition of the Mexican undocumented population also shifted, away from the predominantly single male migrants of the past to approximately 50 percent women and children. Some 48,000 children cross the border each year, many of them coming to try to find a parent—especially a mother—who is already in the United States. One study of domestic workers in Los Angeles found that 82 percent of live-in nannies and 24 percent of housecleaners were women who had left children behind in their homelands.4
The greatest beneficiaries of the change were the smugglers. The cost of crossing illegally rose—from around $500 in 1993 to $2,500 in 2004.5 Border smuggling grew from a small-scale, individual operation to encompass sophisticated rings with links to organized crime and drug trafficking.6 A Mexican study found over one hundred large-scale smuggling rings operating in 2004.7
The real victims are people like María Eugenia Martínez, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of eight from the indigenous region of Huehuetenango, Guatemala. Huehuetenango was one of the regions hardest hit by the counterinsurgency of the 1980s in Guatemala. While genocide against the country’s indigenous population has five-hundred-year-old roots, the war of the 1980s was also a manifestation of U.S. post–World War II policies. In 1954 the United States orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected government, deeming it too soft on Communism. It put into place a series of ferociously right-wing military regimes, which ruled by terror until the mid-1990s.
Martínez’s hometown of El Terrero was one of the areas the army considered to be a guerrilla stronghold, which meant that the entire population was treated as the enemy. Eighty percent of Huehuetenango province’s inhabitants, primarily indigenous Mam, Chuj, and Kanjobal Maya people, fled their homes under army attack between 1980 and 1981. Some ended up in refugee camps just across the border in Chiapas, Mexico.8 Others made it to the United States, especially Los Angeles. By 1990, Los Angeles had 159,000 Guatemalans recorded in the census—as usual, the actual population was probably much higher. Many of them were women domestic workers.9
Martínez, however, came in 2003, well after the signing of the peace accords in 1996. During the first years after the accords thousands of refugees returned from Mexico. But the economic devastation of the war had led to a continued high level of out-migration, overwhelmingly to the United States and often following links that had already been established.
Martínez had a half-brother and cousins in a Central American neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles. The situation in her hometown was becoming intolerable: her husband was abusive, and the money that she earned selling homemade sausages in a market stall wasn’t enough to send her younger children to high school. So she did what so many others were doing: she crossed the border illegally, and joined her relatives in Los Angeles. She was working at a garment factory there when she was picked up and deported a little over a year later, in June 2004.10
About a million Guatemalans were living in the United States in 2005. Ten percent of them came from Huehuetenango, and over 35 percent lived in Los Angeles.11 Martínez’s experience was part of a much larger story.12
Her job in Los Angeles allowed her to send home money for her children’s education and for her older son’s wedding. Again, she was not alone: over one-third of Guatemala’s population received some of the $3 billion in remittances that migrants to the United States sent home in 2005.13 Deported across the border and deposited in Tijuana, Martínez wanted to get back to Los Angeles, to her job, as quickly as possible.
Crossing the border in Tijuana was extremely difficult, so Martínez and several others traveled 150 miles east toward Mexicali. It’s easier to cross the unguarded border in the desert between Tijuana and Mexicali, but it means an eight- to ten-hour hike through remote trails in punishing heat.
Martínez’s group succeeded in getting across the border. But after four hours of hiking in hundred-degree heat with little water, she began to suffer from heat exhaustion and finally collapsed at the side of the trail. Part of the group continued, but when their water ran out they panicked and turned back to Mexico along a different trail. Martínez’s sun-blackened, decomposing body was discovered by a Border Patrol helicopter days later.14 Her story reveals the real “problem” of immigration—a problem that few U.S. citizens ever see.