Illegal Border Crossings Rise After 3-Year Fall

In the fourth year of landmark immigration reform designed to slow illegal entry into the United States, the number of undocumented migrants arriving daily at the U.S.-Mexico border here and crossing into the United States is once again surging after three consecutive years of declining border arrests.

By almost any measure--from arrests by U.S. immigration authorities to statistics from a migrant shelter in Tijuana to observations of large groups gathering nightly along the border fence--the number of undocumented immigrants crossing into San Diego is rising sharply, possibly toward the record numbers of 1986 that triggered the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

With Easter week past and the coming of the prime season for illegal border crossings, U.S. authorities are bracing for even more new arrivals, mostly of Mexican citizens, in the months ahead.

For critics of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, known as IRCA, the huge groups now massing on the border each evening are clear evidence of the law’s stunning lack of success in turning back the flow of people seeking to enter the United States without papers.

“We count the number of people at the border every day, and I can tell you that it’s about the same as during 1986,” said Jorge A. Bustamante, president of the College of the Northern Border, a Tijuana-based research group.

“The most dramatic failure of IRCA has been its failure to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants,” Bustamante said by telephone from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where he is a visiting professor of sociology.

But Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Gene McNary, during a visit to the border zone this month, defended the effectiveness of the immigration law, which he said had deterred many would-be illegal immigrants. “Without IRCA, there would be a lot more people coming,” McNary said as he stood on the concrete channel of the Tia Juana River, one of the major crossing zones.

Acknowledging that more people were now arriving at the border, McNary voiced the hope that the law’s impact could be broadened with a variety of planned initiatives: the hiring of additional Border Patrol agents, the installation of new border barriers and lights, and a better document verification system to enable employers to more easily recognize phony papers presented by job applicants who are in the United States illegally.

Various studies have shown that the widespread availability of forged documents has allowed many undocumented workers to continue to find employment in the United States, usually in the low-paying jobs long filled by the immigrant work force. That situation persists despite the so-called “employer sanctions” of the 1986 law, which made it a crime for U.S. employers knowingly to hire illegal immigrants.

McNary’s proposed remedies, which amount to additional enforcement and some fine-tuning of the 1986 law, are criticized by some who note that his steps would do nothing to allay the underlying Third World poverty and political instability that is the driving force behind immigration.

“The Congress of the United States continues to view the crossing of the border as a criminal act, and continues to ignore the social, economic and political reality of the situation,” said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, a Tijuana social scientist who has studied immigration. “These people have a necessity to go to the United States, and no police action is going to stop them.”

Reacting swiftly and efficiently to evolving U.S. enforcement tactics, the ever-resilient undocumented flow from Tijuana has recently shifted its major thrust to areas west of the Tia Juana River levees. The major enforcement changes have been the placement of high-power, stadium-type lighting above the area known as el bordo .

The new crossing zone--referred to variously as el cerro (because it is mountainous), las palmitas (after some nearby palm trees), or el Aleman, (because it fronts a neighborhood with that name, after a former Mexican president)--is situated along a rugged hillside that offers commanding views of San Diego, the Coronado Bridge and the Pacific Ocean.

“Everyone has come up here to get away from the lights, so we’re up here as well,” explained Rosario Vasquez de la Cruz, who sells fried chicken, tacos and other goods to passing immigrants from her cart placed strategically in the midst of the binational foot traffic.

Each day, U.S. Border Patrol agents in the San Diego area arrest about 1,500 undocumented immigrants, a figure that is expected to increase in coming weeks. Officials acknowledge that their forces are undermanned, often leaving agents virtually helpless as huge groups enter the United States via San Diego, which is the busiest illegal crossing area along the almost-2,000-mile-long border and provides quick access to California’s seemingly inexhaustible job markets.

Intense enforcement efforts--including repeated patrols by agents in light planes, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, on horseback and on foot--do not appear to have discouraged the great majority of prospective undocumented border-crossers.

“People will continue to cross no matter what,” said Jose Antonio Ramirez, 21, who was moving a group of undocumented people across the border one evening last week. “They may get arrested by la migra (U.S. immigration officials), but they’ll come back again and again and keep on trying until they make it.”

That sentiment was repeated over and over last week by those gathered along the border and by others who monitor the vast movement of people that has made the Tijuana-San Diego area one of the world’s great migratory corridors.

“They can build a moat with sharks and crocodiles and the people will still come,” said Sergio Bernardo Melendez, administrator of a church-run migrant shelter in Tijuana, where the numbers of visitors thus far this year have doubled compared to the same period during 1989. “Now, we’re seeing people coming because of hunger, particularly the Central Americans. They know that they can live better on the other side.”

For some time now, the immigrants arriving at the border have been a heterogenous mix far distinct from the traditional image of Mexican campesinos seeking agricultural work in the United States. More and more of those crossing include former residents of Mexico City and other areas of Mexico that have emerged as “sending areas,” representing vast prospective reservoirs of illegal immigrants.

California, with its robust economy, is increasingly the destination for most immigrants arriving at the border, according to research by Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. Fewer than 15% of undocumented workers now find work in agriculture, instead finding employment in factories, hotels and in various low-wage, service jobs, according to academic researchers.

“We come because we’ve heard we can earn more in a day in Los Angeles that we can in a week in Mexico,” said Miguel Angel Infante, 18, one of four young men who were reared together in a Mexico City neighborhood and had decided to leave together.

The four spoke to an American reporter one evening last week as they crouched on the dirt of the now-popular hillside crossing zone, just a few yards inside U.S. territory, where they awaited nightfall and an opportunity to dash to the other side. Infante said he was headed to the Los Angeles home of an uncle, a U.S. resident who had already visited the youths in Tijuana and taken their belongings across the border, allowing them to travel light.

“I’m sure we can live better over there,” said one of Infante’s friends, Israel Ramos, also 18, who said he was making his first trip to the north. “My salary in Mexico was barely enough to buy clothing and food.”

U.S. authorities have expressed concern about the evolving dynamics of border migration. “Historically, we had a lot of agrarian types (who came) to work in the fields. But that is changing,” said Ted A. Swofford, supervisory agent with the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego. “We’re seeing more and more urban people, and we’re seeing more entire families.”

While U.S. immigration arrest figures suggest that the numbers of undocumented border-crossers have not yet reached the peaks achieved in 1986--when widespread talk of an “invasion” at the border prompted a hesitant Congress into legislative action--the number of undocumented people caught has been rising steadily nationwide in the last six months. There has been a particular surge in the San Diego area.

Between October, 1989, and March, 1990, the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego arrested 215,000 illegal immigrants--an increase of more than 50% over the same period during 1988-89. Along the border, the arrests--viewed as a barometer of illegal immigration--were up by slightly more than one-third.

Arrests of Undocumented Immigrants

By U.S. Border Patrol Agents Based in San Diego Borderwide October ‘89-March ‘90: 215,860 472,121 October ‘88-March ‘89: 141,611 341,675 October ‘87-March ‘88: 237,109 498,937 October ‘86-March ‘87: 239,782 556,866 October ‘85-March ‘86: 270,926 709,734