CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Simon Courtauld on the huddled masses
of Mexico who are daily risking their lives to enter the United States
IN Britain they are called bogus asylum- seekers and come mostly from Eastern Europe. In the United States the vast major- ity are Mexicans, referred to as undocu- mented immigrants or indocumentados. (`Mojado' and `wetback' are now deemed politically incorrect, though widely used, not least by the Mexicans themselves.) They do not come to sponge off the state; no social security benefits are available to them. Nor will they be part of a workers' compensation scheme when they get a job. These are gen- uine economic migrants, so desperate to get to the promised land of the USA that they will undertake a journey far more perilous than crossing Europe in the back of a lorry.
On the beach outside Tijuana, a tall fence made from corrugated-iron sheeting pro- jects into the Pacific Ocean. It marks the end, or the beginning, of the border between Mexico and the United States of America, between Third World and First World, which runs from here to the Gulf of Mexico almost 2,000 miles away. A few yards from the sea a long list of printed names, column after column of them, is attached to the fence. These are the 'Migrantes Mexicanos Muertos en la Frontera de California' during the past five years. This month the number will reach 500, many of them, as the list indicates, 'no iden- tzficado'. Most of those named were in their twenties, some as young as 17. Also pinned to the fence is a wreath encircled with barbed-wire, holding the meagre belongings of a typical immigrant: a T-shirt, a pair of canvas shoes, a water bottle, a plastic baby doll and an image of the Virgin Mary.
I heard one young Mexican boasting that he could burrow under the fence, just beneath the list of his dead compatriots. On the other side a party of seagulls stood in the shallows, as if to welcome, or warn, any new arrivals from the sea. A US Bor- der Patrol vehicle was cruising up the beach, and two helicopters flew over the flat, empty land stretching north towards San Diego. Nothing seems to deter the Mexican indocumentados, neither the risk of death nor the prospect of being robbed or raped before they reach the border. Some deaths are due to drowning (there are dangerous currents offshore), a few to shooting (particularly where the immi- grants are carrying drugs), but most to heat exhaustion.
Since 1994 Operation Gatekeeper has been in force in the San Diego/Tijuana sector, making more use of electronic surveillance and nearly doubling the num- ber of Border Patrol agents. It has been successful — but only in diverting the flow of immigrants to the east, to the remote desert areas where, having crossed the line, they are much less likely to survive. The amount of water they carry may be enough for only two or three days. The best they can hope for is to be picked up by a Border Patrol helicopter before they die of dehydration. Summer is the popular time to head north for the seasonal crop- picking, when the desert temperatures go well above 100°F and the immigrant death toll in southern California averages three or four a week.
Along the border, from California to Texas, the Border Patrol arrests and returns to Mexico about a million people every year. Washington likes to convince itself that no more than 100,000 a year cross undetected into the USA, but the Border Patrol doubts if it catches more than 50 per cent of immigrants. Not all of them remain in the USA but there are, at any time, getting on for five million Mexi- cans living there illegally and another six million of other nationalities, mostly Cen- tral American, who are insensitively cate- gorised as OTMs (Other Than Mexicans). The numbers are not diminishing, and the demand continues not only for stoop labour (vegetable- and fruit-picking), but also for Mexican computer operatives in `Well tell me where the phone is and I'll phone a proper carpet fitter.' California's Silicon Valley. As a former Mexican politician put it to me, `Nafta [the North American Free Trade Agreement, between the USA, Mexico and Canada] is all about the free movement of goods. Why can't we and the USA address the question of the free movement of people?' This is unlikely to be on the agenda, however, when President Bill Clinton and President Ernesto Zedillo meet later this month.
Mexico is, of course, embarrassed to admit that so many of its citizens are des- perate to get away from the malnutrition and misery of their own country — though the government quietly welcomes the migration as an escape valve for Mexico's vast population, which has just reached 100 million. But there is now a glimmer of hope for those making the journey north: they have just acquired some unexpected and influential allies, most notably the US Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. Recently he said that the only answer to current labour shortages in the USA is to increase immigration quotas before the labour market shows signs of inflationary pressure.
At the same time the governor of Ari- zona has proposed reviving the concept of the bracero (guest-worker) programme for Mexicans, which was established during the second world war. And the largest Ameri- can labour union, AFL-CIO, announced it was seeking an amnesty for undocumented foreign workers. This is an astonishing turnabout for an organisation which until now has been consistently opposed to immigrant labour. AFL-CIO was largely instrumental in getting sanctions imposed on employers with illegal immigrants on their payrolls. If an amnesty were to be granted to, say, farm workers, and visas were available for seasonal work, Mexicans would then presumably be entitled to the benefits which are at present denied them.
Give a Mexican the potentially good news and he will laugh, not altogether bitterly, shrug his shoulders and say that he will believe it when he sees it. There is a similar reaction when it is suggested that Mexico's government party for the last 70 years will lose the presidential election this summer, or that the other major problem between Mexico and the USA — drugs — is being dealt with. When I asked whether Francisco Labastida, candidate for the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), was bound to win the election, I was told, 'No, but he'll be the next president' — a refer- ence to the 1988 election when, because of some traditional Mexican electoral malprac- tices, the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas, was declared president although he almost cer- tainly received fewer votes than his principal opponent. This time round, it is said, a thou- sand foreign electoral observers will ensure that the man with most votes wins, but no one quite believes it. At the moment, according to opinion polls, Labastida is neck and neck with Vicente Fox, of the Partido de Accion Nacional. Both candidates are promising vigorous action against the drug cartels that control the traffic in Colombian cocaine which passes through Mexico to the USA (also heroin and marijuana originating in Mexi- co). But Fox accuses the PRI of being incapable of tackling the drugs trade, since it has been in the pay of the drugs barons for decades. In case there was any doubt, Mexico was confirmed during the Salinas government as one of the world's principal narco-democracies'.
Labastida says that he received death threats when he was governor of the state of Sinaloa — on the direct drugs route from Mexico City up the coast to the Cali- fornia and Arizona borders — but does not say how he survived. Plata o plomo (sil- ver or lead) are said to be the only options offered by drugs traffickers. Little wonder that so many of the anti-drugs police (fed- erales) decide to take the money rather than risk the bullet. Three were found murdered last month, their bodies dumped in a ravine outside Tijuana. As drugs traffic and drugs seizures on the border have increased, so has the inci- dence of violent crime. Police chiefs, in particular, have been targeted this year. One, in Sinaloa, was murdered last week, possibly by corrupt federal police. Tijua- na's chief of police, apparently taking a stand against the rapidly escalating murder rate, was shot dead at the end of February after attending Sunday Mass. The week before, in a scene also reminiscent of the Chicago killings of the 1920s, the police Chief of another border town, Reynosa, was murdered in a restaurant frequented by tourists.
A few miles downriver from Reynosa, I stood on the Texas side of the Rio Grande with a Border Patrol agent, Jim Hays. He recalled some 'wild times' with drugs smugglers when he was stationed up at El Paso, but had not made any drugs arrests an his current beat. Here, not far north of Brownsville, he was stopping immigrants -- a few of them, at least. Two nights earli- er he had caught a group of five (three of them women), but the policing of this stretch of the border, he admitted, was not effective. They had two vehicles for every mile of river, but once the indocumentados reached the trees 100 yards behind us, they Were not pursued. As we stood on the edge of a field of sorghum, looking across the narrow river to another field planted with sorghum in Mexico, I asked Agent Hays about the pos- sible , loosening of restrictions on immigrant labour. 'If there is an amnesty it will only encourage more people to cross illegally,' he said, 'from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as from Mexico. There are already three and a half million His- Panics living in California. I read some- where that within 25 years there'll be more -,1sPanics in the United States than whites.' ,7 squite a thought. But then, America is a nation of immigrants.
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