Heck, just give Ted Kennedy and the gang a call, they'll come and pick you up at the border for a couple bottles of Tequila, they'll even give you a place to stay.
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 complete border fence and a bigger border force (3x or so) will shut the leakage to a fraction of what it is. This has happened in places where such things have been done, it moves the traffic to less guarded places. Its just a matter of closing the last holes.
And if anything the flow through the border is actually lower than it used to be when people could easily cross from Tijuana to San Diego.
No need for land mines or machine-guns.
If life wasn't so fruitful in America, we'd have none of these wetbacks. Employers must stop hiring them. We MUST stop providing them with education, medical care, welfare etc. This is insane for the feds to be providing anything to illegals.
"I disn't think the "sarcasm" tag was necessary, there."
What do you mean?
"That leaves two other options: Improve Mexico so they stay, or eliminate the hiring of illegals."
Too put a finer point on it: It really isn't our job to improve Mexico. Instead, what we may need to do is foment change within their political system (propaganda, etc...).
So far the Mexican gvt has done a relatively remarkable job of insulating itself from the plight of its own people. That has to change.
"Breed a new species of Piranha fish that can only live in the Rio Grande."
Will Piranah fish slow Rio Grande swimmers? [Texas]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1584955/posts
Toothy invader causes piranha scare [Texas pacu]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1467086/posts
Why?
The North Koreans said the same thing until Ike put that minefield on the border. Reagan expanded it allowing him to reduce the number of troops needed to keep them out. Minefields work wonders at keeping borders safe.
There's a bigger one: cut off the flow of US dollars from the illegals back to Mexico. That's Mexico's third-largest source of national revenue...and the reason their government wasts the northward flood of economic refugees to continue.
Second time (law enforcement sees they HAVE a tattoo): Six months hard labor, with no pay, then sent back.
Each time thereafter: Longer stretch of labor, no pay, and sent back.
Labor without pay compensates for cost of catching them and holding them, but they wind up with "no reward."
Dynamite and shovels are both cheap.
Nah. Just put some of these up.
It may be that we should look at taking over Mexico. Given an option to be our 51st state, they'd all take it. We might be better off absorbing people and territory south, rather than have permanent infiltration north.
Mexico is a nice chunk of dirt. Toss the entire Mexican bureacracy, install a normal state government, and the economic possibilities are endless. Those folks undoubtedly work hard given the opportunity, but the Mexican government just quashes opportunity.
So maybe the revolutionary proposal to end all this is not yet on the table:
Invite Mexico to be a state.
(donning flame retardant suit....)
Our southern border is why landmines were invented...
If there are NO jobs there's NO money to send back to Mexico.
Yesterday on Sean Hannity's radio broadcast a caller asked him this same question. His reply was that it would be too hard and take generations. I couldn't believe it, what a sap. Thank God our forefathers didn't have that lazy attitude!!!!
Use the border as a training ground for the military, snipers and all, live ammo.
Maybe more humane to send Cheney & his hunting party with bird shot.. hee hee....
Immigrants cannot just show up at the border. They need to apply at a US consulate for an appropriate visa. And then they get put on one of several waiting lists.
Travelers are another matter, but this depends mainly on their nation of origin.
Would be 8 or 9 states.
And you don't want it. Its a fixer-upper, with limited prospects for rental income.
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