Please FReepmail me if you want on or off this South Texas/Mexico ping list.
Posted on 03/31/2006 11:36:21 AM PST by SwinneySwitch
No matter how tough the laws or hard the journey, migrants vow they won't give up
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - At least six times this week, Salvador Hernandez has waded into the chilly waters of the Rio Grande and fought the treacherous currents to reach U.S. soil. And every time, he has turned back rather than fall prey to U.S. Border Patrol agents, lurking just beyond the bushes on the other side.
"You don't know what we suffer just to get here. We can't risk being sent home," said Hernandez, a Salvadoran who trekked through miles of jungle and hopped seven moving trains to reach this Mexican border city.
But, he said, "I'm going to keep trying until I make it."
Others along the Texas-Mexico border echoed that feeling: No matter the obstacles, how high the fence, or how tough the law, they're going to keep on coming to the United States.
Alarmed, some U.S. lawmakers have been wrestling with proposals to overhaul immigration laws. Foes of one plan, which calls for hundreds of miles of new border fencing, protested this week in Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix and other cities.
But along the muddy banks of the Rio Grande, little of that mattered to would-be crossers eyeing the narrow stretch of water standing between them and their American dream.
They vowed to continue their northward journey, largely indifferent to what happens in Washington or anywhere else, including Cancun, where President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox met Thursday to discuss immigration and other pressing concerns.
"Hunger knows no borders," said Nestor Gonzalez, a Honduran electrician who was fishing for food in the Rio Grande, which he planned to cross later. He hopes to work for several years in the United States and send money back home to support his three small children.
About 400,000 people illegally enter the United States every year, by one estimate, despite U.S. border security measures costing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
473 migrants died last year
The flow continues despite the increasingly deadly toll. A record 473 migrants died last year — most from dehydration, exposure and drowning — as they chose less patrolled, but more dangerous routes across deserts in Arizona and Texas, according to the Border Patrol.
That figure does not include scores of Central American migrants killed or injured while traveling through Mexico, according to human rights groups. For Central Americans, the U.S. border is only the final hurdle in a long, perilous journey.
Rights activists in Nuevo Laredo estimate that more than half of the migrants that reach the border have been robbed along the way, most of them by Mexican police.
"We're like cheese. Everyone wants to take a bite," said Carlos Gomez, 38, a Salvadoran migrant who was plotting his return to the U.S. two months after being deported. He said he was spurred on by the thought of his 7-year-old, mentally handicapped daughter waiting for him in Miami.
But Central Americans' journey has gotten harder since Hurricane Stan knocked out railroad bridges across Mexico's southern state of Chiapas in September.
Where the migrants once hopped the train near the border, they now have to walk about 200 miles through jungle and highlands to reach the nearest working station. Along the way, many are attacked by gang members or extorted by police. Others are maimed or killed in falls from speeding trains.
Still, they continue traveling north, spurred by poverty and natural disasters in their home countries. And the immigrant flow is rising, said Leonardo Lopez, an outspoken Jesuit priest who runs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Nuevo Laredo.
In 1999, 4,647 migrants took refuge in the shelter. That number swelled to 11,400 last year, he said.
Increased border security on the U.S. side has achieved only two things, he contends: "More people die and migrants have to pay more" to immigrant smugglers.
A U.S. Senate proposal would beef up border security and give temporary guest-worker permits to as many as 400,000 migrants. Some of that plan's opponents prefer enforcement only. They want to spend $2.2 billion to add 700 miles of fence to the border and to make it a felony to slip into the U.S. illegally.
Bush to press Fox
While in Cancun, Bush hopes to persuade Fox to crack down on immigrant smugglers and help prevent Central Americans from using Mexico as a trampoline into the United States.
Fox has promised to do what he can in hopes of seeing U.S. lawmakers establish a guest worker program, which Bush backs. But previous Mexican government efforts to halt the flow of migrants have yielded few results, largely because of corruption among Mexican officials, human rights activists say.
Threat of extortion
Both police and immigration officials "are in bed with the migrant smugglers," said Arturo Solis, who directs a human rights group in the border city of Reynosa. He said there are few deportations, particularly along the northern border, since police prefer to extract money from the migrants.
Among the abuses, rights workers say: Police kidnap migrants and take them to safe houses. There, smugglers force them to call their families to get money for the journey across.
Other smugglers abandon their charges along the way, or simply rob them without bringing them to the border, activists say.
"Because they're migrants, they don't have the protection of the law," said Lopez, whose shelter provides the only haven for the thousands of migrants headed north into Laredo.
Dionisio Paniagua, a haggard-looking Honduran migrant, said he was robbed at gunpoint by an immigrant smuggler, so he complained to police in Reynosa. They promptly threw him in a detention center.
But he got lucky: A human rights worker learned of his case and freed him.
He is now trying to get legal residency in Mexico, rather than take his chances with the Border Patrol.
"I'm not going to risk my life so that they can hunt me down on horseback or in a truck," Paniagua said from an overcrowded migrant shelter in Reynosa.
Others remain undaunted, Lopez said.
"The migrants are like kamikazes," he said. "They'll throw themselves at the border, regardless of what the law says."
marionlloyd@gmail.com
A few philosophical principles make the difference between this, and that.
Well, then, that's different, then.
We should stop trying to prevent it...
Say, is this guy related to George Bush, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt by any chance?
I've thought the same myself...but can you IMAGINE the outcry?
Why! That would be HORRIBLE! Discriminating! *gasp*
Hmmm....
susie
Unless they add electronic fences?
I'ma real sucker for a sob story...
Quick open the borders and give them all YOUR money....
If they would put this much effort into making their own homes a better place, imagine what they could accomplish. Instead, they'll just end up bringing us down to their level.
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off this South Texas/Mexico ping list.
He will get a Christmas card from Bush for his "compassionate conservatism"....(/sarcasm)
THAT is powerful...
No waY!
Electric maybe. High voltage.
And a minefield strip on both sides. Warning sigs: Unless you want to "blow your mind", stay the hell out. In Spanish and Arabic...
That's great, but we can't tell if the tear is American or Hispanic...?
Put the smackdown at the border NOW! This is insane, national suicide.
If we built a fence that made it nearly impossible to sneak across the border, think of all the human suffering we could alleviate!
We don't know what they suffer to get here. Poor ILLEGALS. I feel for them(not really). Why don't they put some of that suffering into making THEIR country a better place to live. You don't see Americans running across the Rio Grande to live in that shithole of a country, now do you? Why is that do you think? Is it because they have let their corrupt politicians shit all over them for a couple of centuries without doing anything about it and made their country into a place no one wants to live, unless of course you are one of the political elite. Jorge and the boys are in for a surprise come Nov this year. It will hurt us bigtime but many are going to stay home or vote third party. I say don't stay home, vote third party, this will bring the lesson home to them more forcibly and also show the Dems we don't want their type of leadership( I use this word laughingly) either.
My point exactly. The economic incentives are essentially infinite.
The only possible control is landmines and machine guns. When you will assuredly die trying, you won't try.
Are Americans willing to mow down illegal border crossers? Nope. I'm willing, but the vast majority of American won't allow us to kill them.
That leaves two other options: Improve Mexico so they stay, or eliminate the hiring of illegals.
Illegals' incentives are so strong, they've shown themselves able to overcome any documentation requirements we have put into place over 20 years. I know of no proposal that would assuredly keep them from getting sufficient documentation to get a job.
Mexico is a h#{{-hole, and is unlikely to improve. We surely have little control over that.
So Congresscritters can pass any and every law they wish. I don't believe we can control illegal immigration until we are prepared to kill illegal border crossers. We can't even get a consensus on making it a felony, much less mow them down with machine guns.
Prediction: I think we'll have lots of noise and smoke and probably laws, none of which will have any effect. Until someday Al Qaeda infiltrates a squad across the border and blows up a few thousand Americans. Then we'll install the fence, landmines and machine guns.
You forgot the most draconian Big Brother in America you've ever dreamed of.
He said he was spurred on by the thought of his 7-year-old, mentally handicapped daughter waiting for him in Miami.
Supposed to make me feel sorry for him. I don't! He snuck in, had an anchor baby, and now it is guaranteed that mentally handicapped baby is costing us (american taxpayers) an arm and a leg.
Only in America!
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