“WHEN MEXICO SENDS its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [sic] us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”1 With this speech, the property tycoon Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States in June 2015. As his campaign gathered pace, one of his most popular pledges was a plan to build a “beautiful” wall along the border. This promise, alongside further assurances that he would deport illegal immigrants, was coupled with the campaign slogan “Make America great again”—countered by a few quick wits who produced hats with the slogan “Make America Mexico again.”
Throughout the campaign Trump put forward policies that would adversely affect Hispanic people living in the United States and made negative references to them, using the phrase “bad hombres” in the third presidential debate, something no other candidate has ever done. At other times he would deliberately embrace his idea of Hispanic culture, posting on Twitter a picture of himself eating from a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo with the line “I love Hispanics!” At one point, Trump even traveled to Mexico to meet with the president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the two held an awkward press conference that skirted the issues, not least Trump’s demands that Mexico pay for his proposed wall. For the Mexican president, already struggling with low approval ratings, the move did not play well to a nation worried about the implications of a Trump presidency for their families and friends across the border. A few hours later, Trump was back in the United States, at a rally in Phoenix, where he said: “We will build a great wall along the southern border and Mexico will pay for the wall. One hundred percent.”2
Although the Hispanic vote has long been seen as important to the Democratic Party, its presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, did not choose a Hispanic running mate; she did, however, find one who speaks Spanish. Tim Kaine, a senator from and former governor of Virginia, had spent time working with missionaries in Honduras, where he learned the language. In addition, Kaine is a Catholic, no small matter for some Hispanic voters. On the eve of the election, many observers thought the Republican candidate’s rhetoric would spur a record number of Hispanic voters and secure Clinton’s victory, but such hopes were misplaced.
The overall number of eligible Hispanic voters in 2016 was twenty-seven million, up from twenty-three million in 2012, and the total Hispanic share of the vote grew from 10 percent in 2012 to 11 percent in 2016. Clinton took about 66 percent of the Hispanic vote, and Trump 29 percent, while in the previous election Hispanics gave Barack Obama 71 percent of their vote and gave 27 percent to Mitt Romney. Both figures represented significant Republican declines since George W. Bush polled 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000.3
Overall, Hispanics’ participation in U.S. politics is rising, owing to their growing numbers and to changes in the law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was extended ten years later to protect what were referred to as “language minorities”—groups that had struggled to cast a vote despite having the legal right to, facing discrimination or threats that blocked them from the polls. The legislative alteration also helped open the way for more active Hispanic involvement at all levels of politics. The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, for instance, claims that it has helped register 2.5 million voters since it was founded in 1974.4 Now there are fears that some voting rights could be rolled back after the Supreme Court struck down part of the original 1965 voting rights legislation in 2013, opening the way for states to impose their own restrictions, including controversial demands for photo IDs such as driving licenses. Not everyone who is eligible to vote has a photo ID and, as with the literacy tests of the past, critics of such measures claim they could disproportionally affect Hispanic voters.
Progress for Hispanics in public life has been uneven. While there have been some high-profile gains, such as appointment to the Supreme Court in 2009 of Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, the judiciary, Congress, and state and local politics do not have representation proportional to the size of the Hispanic community. For instance, a report in the Austin American-Statesman found that 1.3 million Hispanics in Texas—more than 10 percent of the overall Hispanic population—live in cities or counties with no Hispanic representation on the city or council commissions. Statewide, about 10 percent of mayors and county judges are Hispanic, although Hispanic people make up about 38 percent of the population of Texas.5
Another study, by the California Latino Legislative Caucus and affiliated groups, found in 2015 that at 38.6 percent, “Latinos represent the most populous ethnic group” in California, but they made up only 19.6 percent of its registered voters. Latino political representation remains low as well, with the state assembly being 23.8 percent Latino and the state’s city councils 14.6 percent.6 There are some exceptions, such as Santa Ana in Orange County, California, which has a city council made up entirely of Hispanic officeholders, in a town where the population is 78 percent Hispanic.7
Nationally, the 2016 election saw the first Hispanic woman to reach the Senate, Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, while the 115th Congress (January 2017–January 2019) can count a record forty-five Hispanic members: thirty-one Democrats and fourteen Republicans. They are 8.4 percent of Congress, though their numbers remain some way off the 17 percent of Hispanics nationally.8
However active the Hispanic community was in the 2016 election and political life, what all Hispanic people—documented or not, U.S. citizens or not—face now is a climate of increasing hostility within the debate on immigration. Nativist ideas of the United States as a white, English-speaking country have resurfaced, as have economic anxieties, specifically that cheaper labor in Mexico is undercutting U.S. jobs, while fears about narco drug gangs permeate border communities and beyond. Trump’s wall has become a powerful symbol of an answer to these problems, whatever the demographic or economic reality that underpins it. In that sense, there are echoes of the mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s, but the context is markedly different, not only because of the diversity of people from Central and South America who have emigrated to the United States—this issue now goes far beyond the United States and Mexico—but also because of the changes wrought by increased economic globalization and the rise of China’s industrial powerhouse.
One particular irritant to Trump and many other people in the United States has been the North American Free Trade Agreement. Grumbling and at times strong disagreement over trade have long been a hallmark of U.S.-Mexican economic relations, which have not always run smoothly. The later decades of the twentieth century saw various experiments in trade, including the further cutting back of restrictions, in a border region that was familiar with pressures to lower tariffs, and the development of free trade zones long before the implementation of NAFTA in 1994.
The maquiladoras (factories) that are now strung along the border had their start with the Border Industrialization Program of 1965, coming fast on the heels of the end of the bracero scheme. These plants imported, duty-free, materials that needed assembling, processing, or finishing into a final product, which was then shipped out of Mexico. The tariff on the product reflected the value of the labor, not the total value of the materials, and U.S firms were quick to utilize this scheme.9 The Mexican government at the time also thought that by putting these plants—and jobs—along the border, it could stop people from leaving the country. Well before NAFTA was signed, around 550,000 Mexicans were working in some two thousand maquiladoras. Besides an economic change, there was a significant gender shift, as many of the employees were women, who were deemed to be less likely to unionize.10
Under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who came to power in 1988, Mexico had also experienced further economic reforms. Salinas lifted the conditions placed on foreign investment that had earlier been written into the 1917 constitution’s controversial Article 27, while also privatizing land held by the communal ejidos and selling off many of the state’s public services.11 By 1990, leaders in Mexico, the United States, and Canada agreed that a larger trade deal could benefit all three nations. There was an implication as well that such an arrangement could offer more domestic opportunities so Mexican citizens would stay home. That same year, the number of Mexican-Americans in the United States was around fifteen million, and the number of undocumented workers was between two million and three million.12
As NAFTA came into force on January 1, 1994, a group of people in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, started a rebellion named in honor of the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), led by the balaclava-wearing, pipe-smoking Subcomandante Marcos, denounced NAFTA and pressed its case for land reform and indigenous rights.13 Marcos and the other Zapatistas feared that the reforms in the plan would affect the poor, mostly indigenous, farmers in the region. Marcos also wanted a fuller political inclusion of people who had continued to be marginalized—fellow citizens whose land and livelihoods were now at further risk as the country was opened to more foreign investment.
A trade deal as large as NAFTA had both positive and negative outcomes for the economies involved, though there have been some clear impacts on certain groups.14 For instance, NAFTA has been tough for Mexican farmers. Under NAFTA, U.S. farmers, who receive government subsidies, were able to undercut Mexicans by selling meat and grain below market price, including the staple commodity maize. This led to subsidized U.S. corn flooding the Mexican market, driving farmers to look for work elsewhere, including in the United States. Between 1993 and 2008, the number of Mexicans employed in agriculture dropped from 8.1 million to 5.8 million, leaving far more unemployed than could be absorbed by the factories along the border.15
Throughout the 1990s, the way of life of many people changed beyond recognition, in rural hamlets and in the growing cities of the border. Women’s unpaid work was critical to households, but now many women were leaving home for jobs in factories, uprooting whole communities.16 As people moved north within Mexico, many decided to cross the border—legally or otherwise. The number of Mexican-born residents in the United States hit 12.6 million in 2009, up from 4.5 million in 1990.17 Many of these immigrants had good incentives to go across, not least because jobs in Mexico often paid less for a day’s work than what a U.S. worker could make in an hour. The industrial zones in Mexico had also become blighted by pollution, poverty, and violence: at least 370 female workers have been murdered around Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere along the border in the state of Chihuahua since 1993.
Mexicans remain ambivalent about the positive impact of NAFTA, not least because 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, a figure that is more or less unchanged since the deal went into effect. A poll in 2016 found that only 20 percent of Mexicans felt that NAFTA had benefited them.18 A 2014 report from the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Economic and Policy Research documented that, twenty years on, the deal had indeed done little, on balance, to help Mexico, at least compared with the economies in the rest of Latin America. It explained that if NAFTA had worked as designed, and restored Mexican economic growth rates to pre-1980s levels, it “would be a relatively high income country, with income per person significantly higher than that of Portugal or Greece.” Instead, Mexico ranked eighteenth out of twenty Latin American nations for growth of real GDP (gross domestic product) per person.19
The United States has also had its problems with NAFTA. Many people blame NAFTA for the decline of manufacturing and unskilled labor jobs in the United States, a constant theme during the 2016 presidential election campaign. However, a report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that overall the United States had gained from the deal because for every 100 jobs U.S. firms created in Mexico for manufacturing, they created 250 at their operations in the United States.20 In addition, U.S. unemployment has remained low in general since the enactment of NAFTA, though income inequality has worsened in both countries. Trump has pledged to renegotiate NAFTA or leave it altogether. The United States’ trade with Mexico and Canada is worth $1 trillion annually, or about 30 percent of total U.S. trade in 2016, and its leaving the agreement could send shock waves through the economies of all three members.21
Related to the shifts brought about by NAFTA, perhaps no issue has been debated in the United States in recent years with such ferocity as that of immigration and the question of what to do about undocumented or unauthorized migrants. Attempts at immigration reform continued into the 1990s, with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, which gave more funding to the Border Patrol and pressured employers to comply with the law by not hiring undocumented workers. At the end of 2005, a bill passed the House of Representatives that proposed measures to curb the number of migrants; the most controversial of these measures was to make it a felony to be in the United States illegally. In addition, anyone who hired or assisted an undocumented worker could face the same charge.22
As the Senate met to discuss this bill, and other reforms on the table, lawmakers were taken by surprise by a wave of marches and protests that started in March 2006 in support of Hispanic immigrants, documented or not. Tens of thousands of people came together in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and Phoenix, and the marchers in Los Angeles were estimated to have numbered almost 1 million.23 The marches continued into April 2006, with some occurring in smaller cities, like Nashville, Tennessee, that had not had traditional associations with Hispanic populations. Then, on April 9–10, simultaneous rallies took place across the country, with a total estimated turnout of 1.3 million to 1.7 million.24 This culminated in another round on May 1, a day celebrated in other nations as a workers’ day, and this time many people went on strike. For the political establishment, it was an eye-opener. For many Anglos, it was the first time they had a sense of just how widespread Hispanic communities were across the nation. The bill was shelved. However, the anger from the Hispanic community and from supporters of immigration would lead to a backlash soon enough, as the tone of the debate about illegal immigration grew even shriller in the aftermath.
The administration of George W. Bush made a final attempt to resolve some of the issues surrounding immigration in the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007. This plan stalled, in part owing to provisions that could have allowed a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented workers. The Republican-controlled Senate voted to end debate on it, and it died in Congress.
Immigration remained an issue during the presidency of Barack Obama after he took office in 2008. Under his administration, deportations began to rise, reaching more than two million by 2015, this time in the context of policies that would make it almost impossible for a deportee to return to the United States. This made the most impact on people who had recently crossed over, as two-thirds of the people picked up were within 100 miles of the border. In the past, many of these apprehensions would have been considered “voluntary returns” and not counted as formal deportations or removals, but this system changed during the later part of George W Bush’s term. The change in classification—from return to removal—was intended to discourage people from making repeated attempts to enter the United States: having formal charges on their records would be a deterrent.25
In November 2014, Obama passed a number of executive orders aimed at immigration, including the expansion of the number of people eligible for the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, so that it would include anyone who had entered the United States before the age of sixteen and had lived in the country since January 1, 2010. He also introduced the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program, covering qualifying parents who had lived in the United States from January 1, 2010. Meanwhile, repeated attempts to pass a version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would give people who came over as undocumented minors a pathway to permanent residency, continued to fail. DACA, therefore was intended to provide temporary permission to work, to have access to a driver’s license, and to attend college and pay in-state tuition fees.
A few months earlier, in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration had faced a perfect storm, of drugs, gangs, and immigration along the southern border. Women and children fled Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to escape the mounting violence perpetrated by the narcotraficantes in these countries where governments were too weak or corrupt to protect the public. Mexico, too, had spent much of the 1990s battling the rise of the drug cartels and continued to do so through the 2000s. The center of the drug world had shifted north from Colombia over those years, heading toward the border, in part because the main market for illegal drugs remains the United States. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have been racked by gang violence related to the cartels. Anxious to make sure their children were safe, many parents had a coyote (smuggler) take them across the border. Some teenage boys were sent on their own by their families to get them away from the gangs, whose power in some places is so strong that they can recruit or strong-arm members straight from the school classroom.
The particular surge in the summer of 2014 was fueled in part by a rumor, which started in Central America, that women and children who made it across the border would be allowed to stay, something U.S. officials took pains to correct. The confusion lay in people’s thinking that being allowed to stay with relatives rather than in a detention facility meant they could remain in the United States. Federal law mandated that there must be attempts to find and send children to relatives living in the United States while the children awaited immigration hearings, but they still faced the prospect of deportation.26 Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people arrived that summer and temporary accommodation had to be set up for them.27 Warehouses, military bases, and other makeshift spaces along the border filled up in those summer months. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, in the fiscal year ending in 2013, 5,990 “unaccompanied alien children” arrived from El Salvador; 8,068 from Guatemala; and 6,747 from Honduras. The numbers for the end of 2014 had more than doubled to 16,404; 17,057; and 18,244, respectively.28
Vice President Joe Biden met with the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador and high-ranking Honduran and Mexican officials in 2014, pressuring them to address the root causes of this wave of immigration, though part of the problem originated in the United States.29 A United Nations report noted that the presence of one of the biggest street gangs in El Salvador, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), “is almost certainly a result of the wave of criminal deportations … after 1996.”30 The gangs were born on the streets of Los Angeles, formed by young people who had left—or whose parents had fled—El Salvador in the 1980s. Some of them ended up in prison and were later deported to El Salvador, where they could reestablish their gangs. Their involvement in the global drug trade means they have evolved to be more a military force than a street gang, now spreading terror and violence, driving more people to make the dangerous crossing into the United States.
Within the United States, the media raged with a polarized debate on whether the children involved should be considered “refugees,” and public sympathy was mixed. An editorial in the New York Times summed up the hysteria:
In Congress, which gave up on creating an orderly immigration system, Republicans are watching President Obama struggle to get a handle on the problem, and trying very hard not to help. Their reaction is one part panic, two parts glee. Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia is warning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about migrants carrying the Ebola virus. For Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, it’s H1N1 flu virus. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is using the crisis to demand an end to President Obama’s program deferring deportations of young people known as Dreamers. There is no time like a crisis to blow up earlier efforts to fix the system’s failures.31
Refugees continued to flow north, and from October 2015 to May 2016, around 120,700 people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador were stopped at the Mexican border. Figures from the U.S. Border Patrol put total apprehensions for the fiscal year (FY) 2016 (October 2015–September 2016) at 408,870, with just under 60,000 being unaccompanied children, for the most part from Central America.32 Thousands more were turned back before they could even attempt to cross, as Mexican officials stepped up their vigilance, encouraged in part by U.S. pressure and extra funding; in 2016, Mexico deported around 177,000 Central Americans. In FY 2017, the numbers dropped by more than 20 percent, with total apprehensions of 310,531 and 41,435 apprehensions of unaccompanied children.33 However, earlier in 2017 the Mexican government—now antagonized by the Trump administration over the border wall—said it would not cooperate with any plans to deport apprehended non-Mexicans to Mexico.34
Another related issue that emerged during the Obama years and the run-up to the 2016 presidential election was that of the so-called anchor babies, a loaded term used to describe children born to foreigners in the United States; these children are entitled to citizenship. According to the Pew Research Center, three hundred thousand children a year are born to unauthorized immigrants. A common misconception is that giving birth to a baby in the United States entitles an undocumented parent to remain in the country, but it does not. The question of what happens to children when a parent is deported has taken on a new urgency since Trump came to office, and in 2017 it was a problem faced by an estimated five million children, who have at least one undocumented parent.35
The Department of Homeland Security received guidance in 2017 allowing it to prioritize the deportation of unauthorized immigrants who have a record of criminal convictions, no matter how minor, or are suspected of a crime.36 At the same time, some six hundred thousand people in 2017 were awaiting their immigration hearings, with the legal system struggling with the case backlog.37 Then, in September 2017, the Trump administration announced that DACA would be stopped, though renewals were permitted to continue while legal and legislative issues were resolved, leaving around eight hundred thousand young people—the majority of whom were from Mexico but who also included people from other parts of Latin America—facing a very uncertain future. In addition, some 2,500 Nicaraguans and 200,000 Salvadorans with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) were informed that they would have to leave the United States by 2019. TPS was created in 1990 to help foreigners fleeing from war or natural disasters, providing legal status to affected people even if they had made an unlawful entry. In late 2017 Trump announced that TPS for these two groups would no longer be renewed. The Salvadorans who qualified for TPS arrived in 2001, after two earthquakes devastated their country, and were the largest group in the program. After living in the United States for nearly two decades, many of the people with TPS have a cause for great concern about what lies ahead.
By the spring of 2018, the Trump administration had put into effect a “zero-tolerance” policy to deter migrants or refugees entering at the border, which meant adults would face criminal charges and any children traveling with them would be placed in a separate holding facility, leading to an estimated 2,300 children being separated from their parent or guardian. This drew heavy criticism from across the political spectrum, and by June the president signed an executive order declaring that families must be kept together while awaiting trial. The following month, a federal court ordered that any separated children must be reunited by the end of July, though it was clear that this deadline would not be met, in part because of the numbers involved and problems the different agencies were having in matching information in order to reunite families. This particular moment came at a time of heated debate about immigration, and the question of how to reform the system—especially given that opinions remain deeply divided—will continue to challenge policy-makers on all sides.38
Mexicans remain the largest group of Hispanic people in the United States, making up some 64 percent of the Hispanic population, and correspondingly making up a large segment of unauthorized immigrants.39 Overall, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2015 was 11 million, which is about 3.5 percent of the nation’s total population. This number has remained steady since 2009 and represents a decline from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007.40 Underneath these figures, some significant changes are occurring. The number of people arriving from China and India is beginning to overtake the number from Mexico, especially in states farther away from the border, such as Ohio and New York. According to a 2016 Wall Street Journal analysis, around 136,000 people immigrated from India and 128,000 from China in 2014, while only 123,000 came from Mexico; a further 82,000 arrived from other Central American countries.41 In the same year, thirty-one states saw the arrival of more Chinese than Mexican people in 2014, and twenty-five states had more Indian immigrants than Mexican. Although many of these newer migrants are highly skilled and brought in on work visas, not all are, and not everyone is legal. Asians have become the second-largest group of undocumented immigrants, but at around 13 percent of all undocumented people in the United States, they are still quite a way behind people from Mexico and Central America, who between them make up about 71 percent.42 Mexicans have actually seen an overall net fall in migration. Net migration from Mexico has actually fallen below zero, according to a 2015 Pew study, with a net loss of some 140,000 between 2009 and 2014. In those years, around 1 million Mexicans left the United States to return to Mexico, while another 870,000 Mexicans came to the United States.43
In 2015, the overall Hispanic population—including recent immigrants and U.S. citizens—reached a new high, at fifty-seven million people, and accounted for 54 percent of total U.S. population growth from 2000 to 2014.44 Hispanic people are also living in more diverse regions, with 2014 data pointing out that half of the counties in the United States had at least one thousand Hispanics: the place with the fastest-growing Hispanic population growth from 2007 to 2014 was Williams County, North Dakota, with an increase of 367 percent.45
MEXICO’S HISTORY WITH illegal substances goes back many decades, but the rise in the twenty-first century of narco crime has been without precedent. No part of Mexico remains untouched, and the associated violence—wars between cartels, or shoot-outs between narcos and the police and military—has cost, according to some estimates, at least eighty thousand lives, with tens of thousands more people disappearing as well. Journalists have paid a high price, as those trying to report on the cartels or corruption in their own towns end up silenced by a gun.46
One indirect solution to part of the problem may lie in the growing number of U.S. states willing to legalize marijuana. The Border Patrol’s seizure of that drug in FY 2016 was the lowest it has been in a decade, at just under 1.3 million pounds.47 Legal growers in states like Colorado are forcing the price down while keeping the quality high. In fact, in 2015 the Drug Enforcement Agency reported some evidence that marijuana from the United States was being smuggled into Mexico.48 Now the more lucrative substances for the cartels are methamphetamine and heroin. Demand for the latter is fueled by prescription opioid abuse; no longer able to obtain legal opioids, many users have turned to heroin, and in parts of the United States the number of overdoses has skyrocketed.
The cartels’ access to arms—often smuggled from the United States—allows them to win the battle against police and the Mexican military. Corruption infiltrates the system at the highest levels. The United States has poured more than $2.5 billion into the Merida Initiative since its inception in 2008, aiming to target organized crime, establish anticorruption programs, build up the police, and reform the judiciary.49 The violence has infiltrated the lives of millions of people along the border and well beyond, as a network of distributors moves Mexican drugs throughout the United States, from Alaska to Atlanta. Even the music of the frontera has been infused by the cartels, as narcocorridos—a variation of the corrido ballad—provide a sound track for the stories of communities struggling with violence and loss.
There is also another sort of drug trafficking taking place along the border. The expense of pharmaceuticals in the United States draws people across, where they can buy the same drugs in cheaper forms produced in Mexico at what seem like endless blocks of pharmacies in most border towns. These pharmacies are a crucial part of local economies. At the entrance to the pedestrian crossing at the Progreso–Nuevo Progreso International Bridge, a sign in English reads: “Thank God for America & for Our Winter Texans. Welcome Home.”
Well before Donald Trump’s insistence on building a wall at the Mexican border, many efforts had been made to tighten control along the frontier. The number of agents was increased along sections of the border near El Paso under Operation Hold the Line in 1993, and in Operation Gatekeeper the following year in San Diego, both heavily trafficked sectors. Some fencing was put up in this period, but the push for an even more fortified border came after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. The U.S. government began to spend billions shoring up the border region, fearing that its porousness could lead potential terrorists to come in from the south. The Department of Homeland Security was created and the Immigration and Naturalization Service was put under its command and reorganized into new departments, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), under which the Border Patrol operates.
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 provided ten thousand more agents for the Border Patrol, pushing the total number employed to some twenty thousand in 2016. In addition, unofficial border agents arrived around 2004, in the form of a vigilante group known as the Minutemen Project, which would patrol parts of the border looking for the Mexican it calls “José Sanchez”—a catchall applied to people who made the illegal crossing.50 At first the group of mostly white, working-class, ex-military men attracted visits from the American Civil Liberties Union to make sure no Mexicans were being harmed, and the Minutemen remained controversial, with some people praising them as patriots and others condemning them as racists.51 One member explained that he joined because, “What’s happening is nothing less than an invasion. We have already lost California.”52 In the end, the group splintered and membership declined, particularly after one prominent member, Shawna Forde, was sentenced for murder, while the group’s cofounder, Chris Simcox, was imprisoned for child sex abuse.
In 2005, the Secure Border Initiative was introduced; its aim was to create a “wall” of surveillance between the United States and Mexico with high-tech monitoring equipment. The aircraft manufacturer Boeing won a bid to work on the project and was given a $1 billion contract.53 Technology such as radar, drones, infrared detectors, and sophisticated cameras does not come cheap, and the program’s costs rose so much that it had to be suspended.54 The changes in this period also attracted criticism for the “militarization” of the border. This was further extended by the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which funded additional fencing. By 2011, about 650 miles had been completed, at a cost of around $3.4 billion.55 A bipartisan bill in the Senate in 2013—the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Bill—sought to further increase spending on the border, as well as provide pathways to citizenship for undocumented people. It passed the Senate but died in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The next phase of border security may be Trump’s promised wall, though its political support, design, construction, and funding remain, for the moment, under heated discussion.
ON A COOL evening in Tucson in 2014, visions of the dead paraded through the city’s downtown streets during the annual All Souls Procession, held around the time of the Mexican Day of the Dead (día de los muertos). Faces glowed with white paint, disguised as elaborate Mexican death masks; some paraders donned full costumes, looking like smartly dressed Victorian skeletons though the genesis of this skeletal imagery goes back much earlier, to the pre-Columbian commemorations of the dead.
Others in the procession took a simpler approach, wearing everyday clothes, with no makeup, each holding a stick to which an empty plastic water jug was tied with a string. Each jug had a small light inside, giving off a dim glow. The jugs swung in the desert night air, an eerie and powerful symbol of the thousands of people who have died near Tucson trying to cross the border through the Sonoran Desert. Water could have saved their lives. These gallon jugs are among the common artifacts found throughout southern Arizona, left behind by people trying to enter the United States, along with knapsacks, clothing, and children’s toys.
This gathering has become a city tradition, falling on the first Sunday after the Day of the Dead, on November 2. The whole evening is somber—there is no alcohol sold, and the mood is quiet and respectful. People walk the parade route carrying pictures of loved ones, often mounted on placards and decorated with flowers and tinsel. Participants and observers can also write down names of people who have died, which are put into a giant urn at the end of the night. This is hoisted onto a platform by a crane and set ablaze.
The procession was the idea of two local artists who were inspired by the Mexican tradition, and they began it in the 1990s as a way of coming to terms with their own losses. Today it is an event that involves an estimated one hundred thousand people.56 Mexican-Americans did not take part at first, but more have started to join in, bringing the communities together in a town that has long been segregated, and which continues to face many problems because it is on the front line of the immigration debate. As a handwritten sign two young men carried in the procession said: “If you use/steal our culture and would still deport us, you’re honoring no one.”
In Arizona alone, the border fencing stretched 180 miles by 2010, impelling people to find another way across, one that has caused a lot of problems for the state.57 The routes through the Sonoran Desert into Arizona are fraught with dangers, not least the extreme temperatures and the ease with which a person can become disoriented and lost amid the sagebrush. According to data collected by the local charity Humane Borders, there were 3,002 deaths from October 1, 1999, through July 31, 2016, in southern Arizona, with dehydration being a main cause. The charity’s maps plot the deaths in the area, and the dots around Tucson look like red blood cells clustered under a microscope.58
Everyone in Tucson seems to have a story—from a friend of a friend, or from someone who owns land to the south—of helping people across, or finding old clothes and shoes, dropped knapsacks, toothbrushes. The artist Valarie James, who lives in the Tucson area, began to collect such objects, using them in her work, including a collaborative creation of three life-size sculptures—Las Madres, or The Mothers—to honor those who had died in the desert. She told the Wall Street Journal, “For those of us who live close to the border, the humanitarian crisis is not an abstraction.”59 Some landowners and residents in Arizona now want the wall Trump promised so that it will put an end to the grisly encounters in their fields.
The Tucson area is one of the busiest corridors of undocumented immigration traffic, though it has begun to slow. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 70,074 people in Arizona in FY 2015, a significant decline from the 613,346 in 2000.60 Likewise, there has been a more than 50 percent reduction in the number of undocumented people living in the state between 2007 and 2014, from 500,000 to around 244,000, in an overall population of nearly 7 million.61
In 2010, Arizona’s legislative efforts to curb undocumented migrants came to national attention, owing to state senate bill SB 1070.62 This bill in the state legislature proposed allowing police to check a person’s immigration status if there was “reasonable suspicion” that he or she might be illegal, and this could be done during routine policing, such as a simple traffic stop for a minor violation. Before it could go into effect, President Obama’s Department of Justice filed an injunction against Arizona on the grounds that the legislation was unconstitutional, and a nationwide controversy followed. The bill also required immigrants to carry their documents or face a misdemeanor charge; and it gave law enforcement the ability to make arrests without a warrant if there was “probable cause” that the person could be removed from the United States.
To opponents, the legislation looked like a bill to sanction racial profiling. SB 1070 inspired a group of rappers to produce “Back to Arizona,” an updated version of Public Enemy’s “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” which was itself written in response to Arizona’s 1990 opposition to a state holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After the 1993 Super Bowl was pulled from Tempe, a vote was taken again, and the holiday was reinstated. Similar economic boycotts took place over SB 1070, with conference bookings dropping by 30 percent.63
The state launched an appeal, but the injunction was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2011. It reached the Supreme Court the following year. In its June 2012 decision, the Court upheld section 2B, which required “law enforcement officers to determine immigration status during a lawful stop.” The three other contested sections—making it a crime not to carry alien registration papers; forbidding an unauthorized immigrant to solicit or undertake work; and allowing an arrest without a warrant for anyone suspected of being undocumented—were struck down. Still, other states followed suit, with attempts at or passage of similar legislation in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah.
Arizona is also home to Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, who came to national prominence for his own controversial methods in dealing with detainees and prisoners. Although voters in the 2016 election decided to end his twenty-four-year reign, denying him a seventh term, he was back in the public spotlight in August 2017 after receiving a presidential pardon. Arpaio and the Maricopa Country Sheriff’s Office had been charged with routinely violating the rights of Hispanic people by detaining them on the basis of racial profiling. In 2011 he was ordered to stop such behavior, and in July 2017, after much legal wrangling, he was found guilty of criminal contempt of court for defying that order. The pardon was a controversial move for Trump and immediately met with criticism from Hispanic and immigration rights groups.64
A 2009 New Yorker profile of Arpaio highlighted many of the reasons he has been embraced by opponents of immigration.65 In response to prison overcrowding, he set up army surplus tents and surrounded them with barbed wire until his tent city held twenty-five hundred inmates. He banned cigarettes, coffee, hot food, even salt and pepper, spending 30 cents per meal on the inmates. Most television was banned, and he put the prisoners to work in chain gangs. He also tried to humiliate them by making them wear pink garments, including underclothes.
Many of those in his custody had not been charged with a crime; indeed, most were undocumented people rounded up by the police. Arpaio charged illegal immigrants as “coconspirators” in their own human trafficking, making their transgression a class 4 felony—and rendering them ineligible to post bond.66 Yet what Arpaio saved in salt and pepper was far outstripped by the cost of lawsuits. Inmates, and families of inmates who died in custody, have gone to court in droves, and by the time of his run for reelection in 2016, the county had paid out nearly $80 million in legal costs.67
THE FIRST TWO decades of the twenty-first century have also been eventful for Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Relations between the United States and Cuba were rocky throughout the 2000s, starting with the fight over Elián González. In November 1999, the five-year-old boy was found floating in an inner tube off the coast of Florida. His mother and others who had tried to leave Cuba on a raft had drowned. He was turned over to relatives in Miami, but the Cuban government requested that the boy be taken back to Cuba where his father lived. The Immigration and Naturalization Services ruled that his father be given custody of the boy. This decision was met by protests and lawsuits, and by January 2000 it had been turned over to the attorney general, Janet Reno, all the while growing into a national issue.
Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, arrived in the United States that April, but the boy’s Miami family continued to fight in the courts. The situation reached a climax on the morning of April 22 when federal agents burst into the home of his relatives in Miami and seized the boy. A photographer captured the moment when an armed INS agent holding a machine gun in his right arm reached out with his left to grab the terrified boy being hidden by one of his relatives in a closet. The shocking and dramatic image was transmitted around the world. The boy was taken back to Cuba—though not before another two months of lawsuits and paperwork—and greeted as a hero. He has lived on the island ever since. The episode was another low point in the relationship between the United States and Cuba, but in 2014 entirely new prospects appeared on the horizon.
That December the Obama administration announced its plans to normalize relations with Cuba, a deal agreed on with the Cuban president Raúl Castro and brokered by Pope Francis. There would be a release of political prisoners and a loosening of U.S. restrictions on travel and banking transactions, allowing more tourists and more money into the island. However, a total end to the embargo would require a vote from Congress. Within a few months, rumors began to circulate within Cuba that Cubans would soon lose their privileged immigration status enshrined in the Cuban Adjustment Act, leading thousands to rush to reach the United States. Some Cubans with the money to leave by air were flying to Ecuador, which did not require a visa for them to enter, and then traveling by land through Central America to cross on foot at the Mexican border, hoping to get into the United States under the “dry foot” proviso of the existing legislation. In the last three months of 2015, around 12,100 Cubans entered via Texas border crossings alone, and a total of 43,159 arrived via all ports of entry in the whole year.68 Indeed, as feared, before he left office in January 2017, President Obama announced the end of “wet foot, dry foot,” as part of the normalization of relations. This left thousands of Cubans who were trying to get into the United States overland stranded at the border or elsewhere in Latin America.
This was followed by Trump’s rolling back the Obama deal by the summer of 2017 and bringing back restrictions on travel and some trade, on the basis that the United States had a bad deal with Cuba and political reform there had not gone far enough. Some in the Cuban-American community think no relationship between the two nations should exist while Cuba remains communist. However, with Raúl Castro handing over the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel in April 2018, coupled with the death of Fidel in November 2016, the island has entered a post-Castro age, at least officially, though it remains unclear what it will take for the two nations to rekindle their relations.
PUERTO RICO HAS also had a rough ride with the United States in recent decades, suffering a debt crisis; mass depopulation; and Maria, a devastating category 4 hurricane that slammed into the island in September 2017.
At the root of the financial problems was Section 936, an exemption status created by the U.S. government in 1976 that allowed U.S. companies to operate in Puerto Rico tax-free. Pharmaceutical companies were among the firms that moved in, and economic growth followed, with some one hundred thousand people working in the pharmaceutical sector by the 1990s.69 Firms like Johnson & Johnson were estimated to have saved $1 billion in taxes between 1980 and 1990, while also providing the island with jobs.70 However, Congress decided that such a large corporate welfare scheme was too costly and in 1996 resolved to phase out Section 936 over the following decade. By 2006, much of the industry had departed along with it. The island scrambled to create a loophole that would persuade some businesses to stay, which took the form of allowing U.S. firms to create subsidiaries that would not pay tax on their revenue, so long as the money was held offshore.71
To compound these problems, a debt crisis began to form in 2012. This would inflict more damage on Puerto Rico’s already fragile economy; by 2014, credit rating agencies had downgraded the island’s debt to junk status.72 Part of the reason Puerto Rico found itself in this mess is that its bonds are “triple-exempt,” meaning bondholders do not pay city, island, or federal tax on the interest; this made them a popular investment. When the economy faltered after 2006, the island government continued to issue bonds to cover budget shortfalls, and when those bonds—which were considered “safe” investments for many Puerto Ricans and their pension funds—were downgraded, hedge funds swooped in to provide loans to the indebted island, worsening its plight.
Because of its commonwealth status, the island is not allowed to declare bankruptcy, unlike a U.S. state. As of 2017, Puerto Rico had $123 billion in debt and no way to pay it, lurching toward a default. One article in the New York Times in August 2016 branded it a “failed state” within the United States.73 The U.S. government established a seven-member “federal control board,” under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) passed in 2016 to restructure the island’s finances. In May 2017, Puerto Rico went to federal court to attempt to obtain some bankruptcy relief, as the lawsuits from creditors continued to mount.74
Referendums on the island’s status continued to point in different directions. A plebiscite in 1993 gave a narrow victory, at 48.6 percent, to continuing as an Estado Libre Asociado (Commonwealth), while statehood garnered a close 46.3 percent.75 Another, in 1998, had a more complicated result. It offered: territorial free associated state (commonwealth status), free association, statehood, independence, or “none of the above,” and angry voters gave that last option 50.3 percent of the vote, with statehood gaining 46.5 percent. The next vote, in 2012, came in two parts. The first asked if the island should continue with the existing commonwealth status, to which 970,910 voters, or around 54 percent, said “no.” Voters were then asked a second question on the future options: statehood, “sovereign free association,” or independence. Statehood won, supported by more than 61 percent of people who cast a vote on the second question.
In the 2016 elections, the pro-statehood politician Ricardo Rosselló, of the New Progressive Party, won the governorship of the island. He took office in the face of a population crisis: the island had lost about 9 percent of its residents since 2000, around 334,000 people, with three-quarters of that exodus taking place after 2010.76 Instead of New York, Florida, especially the Orlando area, has become home for many of these people, pushing the Puerto Rican population in the state past the one million mark.77 Rosselló held another plebiscite on the island’s status in June 2017; the results came back with 97 percent (518,199 votes) in favor of statehood, though turnout was only 23 percent, compared with the usual 60 to 70 percent, in part because of a boycott by the other parties.78
Then, a few months later, the island was thrown into chaos by the 150-mile-per-hour winds of Hurricane María, which made landfall on September 20. The island lost all power, homes were destroyed, crops were wiped out. Official figures claim 64 people were killed, but an investigation by the New York Times calculated the number to be around 1,052, in part because people died after the storm owing to factors like the lack of electricity and the scarcity of medical provisions.79
The Trump administration was criticized by many—including people on the island—for being too slow in its response. The image of inefficiency was compounded by a picture of Trump tossing rolls of paper towels to people at a shelter in San Juan when he made a visit to see the devastation in early October 2017. Puerto Rico also found its initial relief efforts hamstrung by the Jones Act of 1920, which required that trade between all U.S. ports had to be in ships built, owned, and operated by Americans, a legislative hangover from a time when the country wanted to encourage shipbuilding. The law stayed on the books and disproportionally affected Puerto Rico compared with other U.S. ports. In the aftermath of the hurricane, it was temporarily waived to allow shipments of food, water, medicine, and other supplies to arrive.
As the relief effort got under way, it emerged that only around 54 percent of people in the United States even realized Puerto Rico was a U.S. colony and that its 3.4 million people are U.S. citizens, which made the disaster a domestic, not a foreign, one.80 In the aftermath of the storm, thousands of Puerto Ricans used their citizenship to move to, or at least take respite in, the mainland United States. Many observers now expect the fall in the island’s population that was already under way to accelerate.
Months after the event, Puerto Rico continued to suffer blackouts, with just under half of the island without electricity and its infrastructure still deeply damaged. However, in December 2017, lawmakers decided to allow a further financial blow to the island with a Republican tax plan that would bring to an end breaks for U.S. subsidiaries remaining there. The new rules would force any U.S. subsidiary to be treated like a foreign company, and so be subject to paying tax on any income generated from offshore assets, compounding the island’s problems.81
Puerto Rico may be facing its biggest test since the combination of the 1898 Spanish-American War and the 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane, and it will take years for the island to recover. There are no signs in Washington of any interest in extending statehood to the island, and so it will struggle on as a territory, trying to rebuild its devastated infrastructure and solve its debt crisis.
THE LEGACY OF the Hispanic past has made itself felt in the troubled present. As the United States grapples with immigration, NAFTA, relations with Cuba, and the reconstruction of Puerto Rico, uncertainty hangs in the air for everyone involved. Time pushes forward, though, and down on the border, on the U.S. side of the existing wall, cell phone users receive texts saying, “Welcome to MEXICO.” It is a useful reminder that borders remain elusive, and even if they can be drawn on a map, they are changeable. Controlling the fickle waters of the Río Grande proved tricky in the past, but changes in engineering reined it in; likewise, mobile phones and the internet now make it easier to bridge divides, connecting people whether or not they physically cross.
It is the imagined walls or boundaries that are more difficult to traverse. The U.S. border will always loom large in the public imagination as long as it remains a symbol of a United States that wants to distance itself from its neighbors. More than that, beyond the wall is the zone of the other, the boundary of the unknown, the place of lawlessness so enshrined by lore and Hollywood legend. Perhaps that is the reason that one of the few films to capture the nuance and complexity of this tangled relationship is set in a border town. John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) allows family secrets to overlap with local history. While he is trying to solve a murder, Sam Deeds, the sheriff of fictional Frontera, Texas, rekindles his romance with his former high school girlfriend, Pilar, now a history teacher in the town. Deeds later discovers that his father had a long-running affair with Pilar’s mother, Mercedes Cruz, a Mexican businesswoman. Throughout the film, Cruz claims she is “Spanish” and laments the arrival of undocumented immigrants from the other side of the border who don’t speak English, but whom she hires to work in her restaurant.
Decades earlier, both parents—their affair then unknown—had been opposed to Deeds and Pilar’s dating when they were teenagers. The final scene reveals why: Deeds and Pilar were half siblings, sharing, as it transpires, the same father. Deeds and Cruz decide to continue their relationship anyway. Pilar says, “All that other stuff, all that history—the hell with it, right?” She continues, in the final line of the film: “Forget the Alamo.”