<i> El Norte</i> Luring More Families : Growing Numbers of Women, Children Risk Perils of Border Crossing for Better Life

Tomasa Juarez Figueroa arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border recently with five children, including her oldest, 22-year-old Clara, and her youngest, Blanca Estrella, 10. Their destination: the Paramount home of a first cousin who invited them to the north.

“I made the decision to go with my family, hoping to live a little better than we have in Mexico,” Juarez, 41, who is separated from her husband, said one evening last week in a bedroom of a church-run shelter here that assists migrants en route to the north. “We’ve heard of so many people who have improved themselves on the other side, we thought we would do the same.”

These days, women and youths seem to always be among the groups of people gathering in major crossing zones along the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego and Tijuana. Single men predominate among prospective immigrants, but U.S. immigration officials and researchers say that the increasing numbers of families belies the stereotypical image of single agricultural laborers that is still associated with the border zone.

“There’s greater opportunity in the north, at least that’s what my brothers told me,” said Carlos Lopez, 19, who was sitting along the border fence one evening last week with his wife and two children, Luis, 5, and Lidia Paula, 4.

His family, from the Mexican city of Guadalajara, was en route to Bell Gardens, where he says his four brothers recently attained legal status via the amnesty program. Lopez says he hopes to find a job as a truck driver, work he did in Mexico.

The border is a kind of melting pot, with diverse numbers of new immigrants en route north. But, unlike the migrants of old, who often returned to Mexico or elsewhere on a seasonal basis, many of today’s border-crossers come to stay--an ominous trend for U.S. policy-makers seeking to stop the flow.

The trend toward greater variation in border-jumpers was accelerated during the 1980s, researchers say, particularly after the 1986 revisions in U.S. immigration law, which gave legal status to more than 3 million foreign nationals--mostly men, many of whom promptly sent for their wives and children, who became illegal immigrants by crossing into U.S. territory clandestinely. More than half of all amnesty beneficiaries live in California.

In response to the problem of divided families, U.S. immigration authorities

created a so-called “family fairness” policy. Inspectors were instructed to be lenient in allowing spouses and minor children of newly legalized immigrants to remain in the United States. However, the policy applies only to those who were in the United States by Nov. 6, 1986, the day that the amnesty statute was signed into law. Thus, the family fairness doctrine excludes the many families who were outside of the United States when the law went into effect.

In fiscal 1978, women and juveniles accounted for less than 10% of Mexican nationals arrested by U.S. immigration agents in San Diego. That figure rose to almost 12% in 1986 and more than 18% in 1989.

This June, women and children accounted for more than 20% of the 33,500 arrests of undocumented Mexican citizens along the border in the San Diego area, according to the Border Patrol.

There have been some tragic incidents. Among them was the case of Emilio Jimenez Bejines, the 12-year-old Mexican boy shot and killed in May along the border in San Diego. He was en route to the family’s home in Stanton, where his father had gained legal status via amnesty, authorities said. San Diego police are still investigating the case.

A year ago, 14-year-old Luis Eduardo Hernandez was killed when he was run over by a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet inside U.S. territory in San Diego. He and a brother were headed to the Los Angeles home of his father, a laborer who had gained legal status via amnesty.

Whatever the motivations propelling immigration, it is now impossible to make blanket statements about the kinds of people crossing the border. On any given evening, one might encounter rural Indians and sophisticated city folk, doctors and farmers, octogenarians and children, grandmothers and little girls.

“Mexican migration to the United States has become so much more heterogeneous that it virtually defies generalization,” Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego stated in a recent paper.

There is widespread agreement that the largest root cause of the continued exodus from the south is the economic crisis that has gripped Mexico since the early 1980s. The real earning power of Mexican citizens has dropped by 50% or more since then, according to scholars. Middle-class Mexicans have joined in the exodus that once consisted almost entirely of rural peasants. Unskilled laborers in the United States can usually garner an hourly wage of $5--a not-atypical daily wage in Mexico, assuming one can find a job.

“I think we’re seeing more and more of a cross-section of Mexico,” said Ted Swofford, supervisory agent with the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego, the busiest legal and illegal crossing zone along the 2,000-mile border. “We used to see mostly agrarian people coming up to work in the fields, and now we’re seeing a lot of city people as well. We used to see mostly adult males, now we’re seeing women and children and younger males.”

A 13-year veteran of the patrol in San Diego, Swofford has seen the dramatic transformation. “The trend is moving away from seasonal migration to more permanent migrants.”

And, although Mexican nationals have historically predominated, a variety of nations today is represented along the border; each year, the Border Patrol in San Diego arrests the citizens of more than 70 nations, from Africa to South America to China to Chile.

Everyone, it seems, has an interest in heading north.

Alberto Martinez, 84-year-old patriarch of a large family from the Mexican state of Durango, recently ambled through the swamps and canyons of southern San Diego county along with his wife, Matilde Sanchez 65, her sister-in law, Ignacia Nieto, and the in-law’s 6-year-old daughter, Maria de Los Angeles. The family, guided by a smuggler who picked them up after another coyote had abandoned them, hid below a bush as U.S. immigration agents searched the Tijuana River basin. Carrying a staff to support himself, Martinez, hobbled but game, explained during a break in the journey that he wanted to visit three sons who now live in the north.

“I’m going to Los Angeles to see my children one more time,” Martinez explained, as he stood alongside Interstate 5 in San Diego, where the smuggler had taken the group in search of a ride. “At my age, I don’t have much time left.”

Now, almost five years after the amnesty program began, many newly legalized residents and their spouses are sending for even more distant relatives--cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews. Almost everyone interviewed along the border recently seemed to have some kind of loved one or ex-neighbor or friend who has attained legal status and has offered shelter in the land of opportunity. Immigration remains primarily a family affair--new immigrants create networks and then send for friends and family.

“Everytime you create a new immigration, you create a network node, and that node creates more immigration,” said Leo Chavez, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Irvine, who has studied immigration patterns. “I think that reunification of families under amnesty created a curve that has already peaked. Now we’re seeing a kind of network spinoff effect.”

However, researchers say that the 1986 law only accelerated a long-term trend, which is tied in part to the booming market for low-wage female immigrant workers in the U.S. economy, particularly in California’s service industry. Immigrant women have taken jobs in apparel manufacturing shops, electronics factories, hotels and restaurants.

“Women come to the United States, and they find that they can make it, and they pass the word on to other women who come up and take the risk,” said Chavez of UC Irvine.

Yet many interviewed along the border these days are trailblazers: They have no relatives in the north but simply left in search of better opportunities, trusting to chance. Many have idealized versions of life in the United States, much like the European immigrants of old, who had heard tales of streets paved with gold on the other side of the Atlantic.

“I have heard that your people are much more noble to us than our fellow Mexicans,” Concepcion Armendares, 50-year-old mother of five, told a U.S. journalist in a Tijuana shelter.

She and her husband, Ramon Valenzuela, 34, had come to Tijuana, headed to California along with their four children, aged 5 to 12. They left their home in the Pacific port of Mazatlan, where her husband is a part-time fisherman, part-time construction worker. They had only a general idea of where they were headed, but Armendares exuded confidence about the good nature of Americans. She was very encouraged by vague news about a U.S. priest who helped immigrants.

“We’ve never had much, but we’ve noticed than many people have gone to the north and prospered; they come back to Mexico and build lovely houses,” said Armendares, who spoke as she repaired a daughter’s white dress with needle and thread and occasionally stroked the head of her sleeping 5-year-old, Jonathan Ulises.

“I’ve always dreamed about going to the north,” she continued as she sat on a bunk bed in the Tijuana shelter. “My dream is to arrive there and to send money to my parents, who are very poor and live on a small farm. . . . Life there will be better for the children. We hope all of our horizons are improved in the north.”