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
The fence should be in 3 zones. The first zone green with signs and warnings, the second yellow zone with obstacles and barriers and the third red zone with deadly force.. You were warned.. send flowers and prayers for your soul.. IMHO.
I didn't get a Christmas or a "Holiday" card from the White House last year.
They will be begging for humanitarian repatriation.
"You don't know what we suffer just to get here."
Maybe what the U.S. suffers trying to get rid of you.
Another price that will be paid at election time is by the politicians of both parties who are supporting this huge outrage to America.
If it's for MY country it's an American tear.
"You don't know what we suffer just to get here."
Stay home and stay dry.
"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.
Well, then, that's different, then.
We should stop trying to prevent it..."
Good point. If a murderer or sexual predator says he's going to keep doing it, we don't say to ourselves why bother with laws that keep him from doing those things. We lock his @$$ up.
Forget about the electric fence plan, were talking Mexico here. There would be extension cords running all the way to Mexico City. Wouldn’t be enough juice left fry a mosquito.
Build an Israeli style fence and these criminal invaders will never make it!
I disn't think the "sarcasm" tag was necessary, there.
Is it an American tear because it's shed in America? Or BY an American, or otherwise resident alien? No, I'm not just messin' with ya! ;o)
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
"There would be extension cords running all the way to Mexico City"
Funny but true. It's been my observation that in the Mexican culture if it ain't nailed down then it's fair game. If you don't value your stuff enough to protect it than you're saying it's up for grabs. If you can afford a wall and gate around your property, you do so.
Because Ellis Island existed when there were no immigration quotas. Ellis Island was there to process all comers, and sort out the undesirables.
There is no point in an Ellis island now. There's no way anyone can show up at a legal point and get screened to get in.
Quotas and demand for US immigration in places like El Salvador are such that there are thirty-year waiting lists. That Salvadoran has no realistic hope of getting in legally, and if he did, by the time he go to the head of the line he wouldn't do the US much good, being in his fifties.
Thanks for the ping. So the Mexican police are extracting money from the OTMs. They could care less if these people are from South America or the Middle East.
Just amazing. The US is roundly denounced as heck on earth, the Great Satan, terrible, stupid, evil, mean, unfair, unkind, rotten, yet they're all dying to get here. They should read our Constitution and figure out how to put it to good use below the border and points south. But I guess it's not PC to say that. No, we should just lie down and let the world walk all over us.
Breed a new species of Piranha fish that can only live in the Rio Grande. Stock it up.
If anybody messes with the fish population, the Fish and Wildlife Service, in the Department of the Interior, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, in the Department of Commerce, come after the perps for violation of the Endangered Species Act.
add a moat with hungry gators and posionous water snakes.
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